Elettronica’s Electronic and Cyber Warfare Solutions
Italy’s Elettronica Group “works with the armed forces and governments of 28 countries around the world, providing advanced EW and cyber warfare solutions across land, air and sea. The firm’s products are regarded for their high sensitivity and accuracy, as well as by their dedicated functions for automatic surveillance and data processing for ELINT intelligence analysis.”
Elettronica is engaged in a number of important European Naval Cooperation programmes, including the Horizon- class and FREMM frigates, where it is present together with Thales Systemes Aeroportes within the SIGEN Consortium as a supplier of EWS systems. The active subsystem supplied by Elettronica is the Nettuno-4100, an advanced state-of-the-art radar ECM installation scalable according to on-board space limitations.
To meet the growing complexity of naval warfare demands, Elettronica, through its CY4Gate venture with Expert System, itself a global leader in semantic computing, provides intelligence, law enforcement and electronic warfare command levels with a range of solutions providing superior, fast and comprehensive structured analysis of non-uniform data streams from ELINT to Tactical/Strategic COMINT and Open Source (OSINT), virtual HUMINT, Meta Data Analysis, Data Mining and Fusion, all integrated within both defensive and offensive cyber applications.
The Company’s key programmes include Virgilius, an ESM/ECM system that exploits the latest digital signal processing techniques together with COTS components to perform emitter detection, classification and identification to counter a broad range of threat types: including radar- controlled Anti- Aircraft- Artillery (AAA), Surface to Air Missiles (SAMs) as well as Early Warning, search and modern Multifunctional Radar. A modular design approach makes it possible to tailor the solution to specific end-user needs.
The ELT/160 family of low cost Radar Warning Receivers ( RWRs) provides self- protection for utility and combat aircraft and helicopters during operations in insecure areas, anti-tank missions and ground vehicle escort. This family of RWRs – in all versions, from ‘light’ to ‘combat’ – detects, analyses and identifies intercepted electromagnetic emissions that can pose a threat to the platform, both with extreme speed and outside of the attack envelope of the weapons system. Like all of Elettronica’s passive defence systems, the ELT/ 160 RWR extractor performs perfectly in absence of pre- flight information. The system’s EW manager can coordinate LW, MW and C/F dispensers for a complete integrated suite.
Elettronica’s ELT/ 572 DIRCM (Directional Infrared Countermeasures) is designed to counter shoulder-launched MANPADS (Man Portable Air Defence Systems) missiles, one of the major modern threats to airborne platforms, especially in asymmetric conflict environments and in terrorist actions. The fibre laser technology of the ELT/572 improves performance, efficacy, reliability and efficiency in countering this evolving threat, as well as overcoming the weak points of older DIRCM suites by reducing installation constraints and the even more critical and complex set-up, alignment and maintenance operations.
The Naval Jamming Antenna and Source Subsystems (JASS) offer a scalable architecture applicable to ECM installations according to customer needs. These can be supplied according to on- board space limitations in two possible configurations, Split and Monomast. The Split configuration is composed of two separately installable (JASS) while the Monomast solution, as the name suggests, is applicable to single mast installations.
On the cyber side, the CY4Gate D-SINT is able to analyse structured and unstructured data through an integration of hardware and software tools that can handle different data formats coming from any kind of sources, but also possible to receive and manage information coming from private repository. The D-SINT helps operatives better manage the Intelligence Cycle (planning and direction, collection, analysis, production and dissemination), and decision makers take better decisions.
From an operational point of view, the platform is required to provide at least the following functionalities: creation and management of investigation tasks; real time ingestion of high-volume data, from different sources (structured, unstructured and multi-structured), semantic analysis of text acquired from the above different sources, extraction of hidden relations among entities, correlation among data and entities across different domains (e.g. time, space, etc), highlighting of weak signal from chaotic data, fusion and dissemination of intelligence results in an interactive graphical interface.