Whether it's in the theater or a civilian hub of activity, threats today can emerge from virtually anywhere and run the gamut in exploitation. That's meant changes for the military, where focus increasingly is turning toward smaller teams deployed to a multitude of missions around the globe. It's also meant changes for the defense industry providing the tools those teams use in the fight.

"We're back to looking at things from a threat-based environment…versus the operational environment," said Jeff Palombo, Northrop Grumman Mission Systems sector vice president. "The Army's done this before, moved to a threat-based discussion, but we're at a point in time where the world and the threats are evolving so rapidly that you've got to take a different approach. And the Army is taking a different approach in their mission and their acquisition strategy – in what they buy and why."

At the same time, industry also is moving rapidly to identify threats, particularly in the theater, and making changes to address emerging and amorphous threats. A key tenet in this change across the defense industrial base is the move toward open-architecture systems that work together – whether they're built by the same company or competitors.

"A common theme is the systems and the families of systems put in place that have open architecture. Historically you put something in the field and it has a single-point solution. No matter how complex that system is, it's fielded to do one thing," Palombo said Oct. 5 on the sidelines of the Association of the U.S. Army annual meeting in Washington. "And what we've seen over a period of time is that the technology now has to be multi-spectral and multi-mission. You can't just have a piece of kit that only does one mission."

Through open architecture, systems can be built to support changes to size, weight, power, cost and performance – rather than being locked down, systems can instead be upgraded and enhanced via software instead of starting over from scratch.

A prime example, Palombo said, is aircraft survivability. Today aircraft face myriad threats, whether that's radars or missiles guided by radio frequency, laser weapons or shoulder-fired, heat-seeking missiles.

The equipment and systems to protect against such threats "exist in a federated fashion on airplanes, but when a new threat evolves it's very difficult to get those updated in the field quickly," Palombo said.

Avionics also are evolving with open-architecture technologies that can be integrated into different platforms, resulting in a high-tech cockpit that supports a range of capabilities.

"With electronic warfare, self-protection systems, the different kinds of radio with the bandwidth required to get information on and off the airplane, weapons controls – all of these things are now hardware-defined, software-enabled, all controlled and part of the avionics, which is very different from how things were in the past," Palombo said. "The thing that creates the mission is all of the electronics…it's all of those things interconnected in the avionics. And the benefit is to get all of that talking together so that the sum of all of those parts and pieces is greater than each of them operating individually."

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