The Other Half of Affordable Mass

The Other Half of Affordable Mass
By Mark Hutnan, Vice President, Business Development, Spectrum Control

The affordable mass conversation has been running for about five years, and it has been almost entirely about munitions.

That is not a criticism of where it started. The Mitchell Institute's 2021 analysis was explicitly about the Air Force's precision-guided munition mix, and it did that job well. It said the inventory was unbalanced, that the gap sat in mid-range stand-in weapons, and that unit costs needed to come in under $300,000 if the service was going to buy at the scale a peer conflict — and potentially two geographically distinct theaters — requires.

Five years later, that argument is beginning to be funded. The Family of Affordable Mass Missiles (FAMM) program plans roughly 28,000 rounds over five years. The Low-Cost Containerization Munitions Program (LCCMP) is targeting more than 10,000 low-cost cruise missiles in three years beginning in 2027. Top OEMs and new private firms are entering the fray daily with lower-cost, high-quantity munitions that are "ready" for mass production. Framework agreements went to multiple vendors this summer. Production begins this fall, and unit costs are reported in the range of $200,000 to $500,000.

So the munitions half is moving. Here is the other half that needs just as much, if not more, focus.

You cannot strike what you have not found
Adaptive and integrated — real-time ISR, SIGINT and electronic warfare (EW) are key

Ultimately, before munitions are put on target, a system has to observe, detect, classify, precision locate, and track — all in a contested, overwhelmed and saturated electromagnetic spectrum. On the battlefield of today and tomorrow, he who maximizes the "5 D's" will have a decisive advantage: Deny, Degrade, Deceive, Disrupt, Destroy.

Those are ISR, SIGINT and electronic warfare functions. They are not munitions, and they are not covered by a munitions program.

If integrated precision-guided munitions become cheap and plentiful while the ISR, SIGINT and EW enablers stay expensive and scarce, the bottleneck has moved rather than gone away. You end up with lots of rounds and not enough eyes and ears.

The economics are the same problem
However, there is encouraging new technology available now

Reducing size, weight and power (SWaP) while achieving affordable cost and performance for this new family of attritable munitions is the same challenge that applies to the other half of the problem set — ISR, SIGINT and EW.

Do not ever overlook Electromagnetic Spectrum Operations (EMSO). New technology advancements leveraging advanced antennas, miniaturized RF front ends, surface mount manufacturing vice manual assembly, and digitally controlled RF analog interfaces are reaching acceptable price points. None of that is specific to a weapon. It is specific to getting advanced RF and sensing capability into a small package at a price point that permits volume.

A receiver, a jammer, a pod, a decoy and a seeker are integral to the kill chain.

That matters because the enemy order of battle and the Electronic Order of Battle are not really lists of targets. They are a roll-up of systems that include emitters, communications, radars and missile batteries — and every one of them is an RF problem before it is a kinetic one.

THE ASK

My background focuses on tactical aviation electronic attack and suppression — improving the strike team's lethality and survivability.

For the follow-on analysis to this thread, the question is not whether affordable mass is the right idea. It clearly is. It is whether the affordable mass framework should stop at the weapon. If it does, we will field a great many inexpensive munitions and cue them with a small number of expensive, exquisite sensors we cannot afford to lose. That is not the resilient posture the original argument was reaching for.

We are not going to match the adversary on numbers. Answering with technology we can afford to field in quantity has to include the technology that finds the target, not only the technology that services it.