This day included the availability of classified materials. The presentations were followed by discussion periods during which questions were posed and answered. At times during the discussion periods there were also exchanges of ideas among the participants. Again, summaries of these discussions sometimes do not follow their specific order of occurrence during the meeting, thus allowing like topics to be synthesized. The first two topics had three speakers. The last topic was a general wrap-up discussion moderated by a committee member.
Mark Schrote, senior consulting engineer, Northrop Grumman Electronic Systems, was the first speaker. He was followed by Luke Feldner, principal member of the technical staff, Sandia National Laboratories.
Schrote discussed technology trends in active electronically steered antennas (AESAs). He opened by describing the advantages of AESAs (e.g., more power output, higher sensitivity, much faster steering without gimbals) and their heritage from the 1970s. AESAs are used for air, ship, ground, and space applications, and new designs have been appearing about once per year. Trends are moving to more functionality, applications beyond radar (e.g., communications), open architectures, scalability, and digital beam-forming—overall, providing rapidly growing capability and lower cost. Better design tools, also discussed on Day 1, are very helpful as the future multi-mission applications for AESAs evolve and mature.
James Armitage, senior fellow, Potomac Institute for Policy Studies, was the principal speaker. Luke Feldner’s material, originally scheduled for this session, was covered in the session summarized above.
Committee member Kenneth Kress, senior scientist for KBK Consulting, Inc., and consultant for Booz Allen Hamilton, moderated the wrap-up discussion. Participants commented about the merits of this kind of workshop and offered statements about key issues. The statements are not necessarily consensus correlations of views expressed at the workshop, but rather were the comments of individuals.