Military needs better technology to evade increasingly sophisticated enemy radar systems

The Pentagon's venture capital arm is rolling out a secretive program to identify and deflect increasingly sophisticated radar systems deployed by enemies, contract databases show.

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency will host a classified briefing on July 10 in Arlington, Va., to discuss a new research and development effort to help aircraft go incognito more effectively in hostile territory.

It has become more difficult for drones and aircraft to fly under the radar as the systems used to detect them have become more sensitive.

“Identifying radar systems is becoming increasingly challenging as radars evolve from fixed analog systems to digitally programmable variants with unknown behaviors and agile waveform characteristics,” according to a notice for the briefing.

The goal of the experimental project, called the Adaptive Radar Countermeasures program, is to develop ways for electronic warfare systems to “automatically generate effective countermeasures against new, unknown, or ambiguous radar signals in near real-time” or “as they are encountered during a mission,” according to the document.

DARPA wants ideas for developing techniques to characterize radio wave signals and generate countermeasures to muffle or deflect them. Attendance is limited to those with secret clearances.