AUGUSTA, Ga. — The Army is planning for its long-range ground jammer, dubbed Terrestrial Layer System-Echelons Above Brigade (TLS-EAB), to go into production in fiscal 2027, according to service officials — years after initially awarding the concept and prototype contract.
“This is a program that was started over five years ago, and we went down a path where we were trying to get after very specific requirements and realized that the operational environment is changing rapidly and those requirements were no longer the requirements we needed,” Mark Saxon, deputy project manager for Electromagnetic Warfare & Collection, told attendees at the TechNet Augusta conference last week. “We shifted our whole mentality and went after commercial first. … [And] we’re going to be shifting to production next year.”
Army officials around 2020 initially planned TLS-EAB as a combined signals intelligence and electronic warfare capability that would be used for higher echelons such as division and corps, which operate at much longer distances and have different target sets than units at the brigade and lower level. But as early as 2023, the Army altered course, opting for a more tailored approach to the system for theater rather than a one-size-fits-all. Following that decision, it decided to split up the program into a signals intelligence variant and an EW variant. Both variants are slated for procurement next year.
