AI-Enabled Electromagnetic Warfare Systems Launched

Anduril Industries has launched Pulsar, a first-of-its-kind family of modular, multi-mission-capable electromagnetic warfare (EW) systems.

These EW systems utilize artificial intelligence at the tactical edge to rapidly identify and defeat current and future threats across the electromagnetic spectrum, including small and medium-size drones.

Dominance of the electromagnetic spectrum is critical to operations on a modern battlefield of rapidly-evolving drone, counter-drone, and jamming technologies. As the war in Ukraine has shown, EW tactics are evolving faster than ever — a cat and mouse game of sensing and dodging, disruption and adaptation, in the spectrum — with updates to EW and threat systems now happening over shorter timelines of weeks, days, or even hours. 

The next generation of EW systems must enable real-time understanding of the spectrum, and provide rapid delivery of effective countermeasures against known and new threats, across domains and modalities. That is precisely what Pulsar does.

Pulsar integrates a software-defined radio, graphics processing unit, and additional diverse compute into a compact and powerful capability that enables radio frequency machine learning (RFML) to rapidly identify and adapt to emerging threats at the edge. 

The system supports a range of capabilities as a multi-mission EW solution, including electronic countermeasures, counter-unmanned systems, electronic support, electronic attack, direction finding, geolocation, and other advanced EW capabilities. Pulsar’s modular form factor can also be adapted and integrated onto ground vehicles (Pulsar-V) or aircraft (Pulsar-A) to support distributed EW operations across multiple domains.

Pulsar is a system that is reportedly fundamentally unique in comparison to other tactical EW systems currently available. It provides the capability to intelligently and autonomously interrogate a wider range of the electromagnetic spectrum, both for known threats and anomalous events, while reducing the time to deploy new EW effects to a matter of hours and days.

Pulsar’s open architecture enables integrations into common and joint EW and command-and-control systems to create a unified network of EW capabilities, providing more comprehensive coverage and coordinated effects across distributed operations. It also provides a software development kit that enables continuous development and integrations with third-party providers and rapid integration of impressive capabilities in order to keep pace with new threats and missions.

Pulsar is an agile software-defined EW system that can swiftly adapt to changing threats and mission needs in all domains for dynamic operations of today and tomorrow.

Sam El-Akkad, General Manager of RF/EW Systems at Anduril, said; “We’ve been developing our Pulsar family of systems to support operational deployments worldwide, including to combat zones, since 2020. 

“Built to survive and win in highly-congested and contested electromagnetic environments, Pulsar enables warfighters to counter state and non-state actors employing EW capabilities integrated with other advanced technological systems operating across the electromagnetic spectrum and cyberspace domain.”