Anduril Industries launches 'Pulsar' EW systems at SOF Week

Anduril Industries unveiled a new family of electronic warfare (EW) solutions on the first day of the SOF Week convention in Tampa, Florida.

Announced on 6 May, ‘Pulsar’ is being pitched as a ‘family of modular, multi-mission-capable EW systems’, which employ machine learning and artificial intelligence to ‘rapidly identify and defeat current and future threats across the electromagnetic spectrum, including small and medium-sized drones’, a company statement read.

Designed to be operated at the tactical edge, Pulsar is available in two configurations. These include the Pulsar-V for tactical ground vehicles and Pulsar-A for aircraft, both of which can support distributed EW operations across multiple domains.

Speaking to Shephard, a company official said Pulsar variants have been ‘operationally deployed across several continents’ since their initial development in 2020.

‘We have decided to publicly unveil Pulsar years after it entered operational use because of a growing realisation that we need to be talking more about the work that we’re doing in this domain,’ the official said.

‘We are not sharing information about specific customers or deployments due to operational security concerns,’ they added before confirming it was a technology readiness level (TRL) 9.

Specifically, Pulsar has been designed to perform a range of mission capabilities. These include electronic countermeasures (ECM), counter uncrewed systems, electronic support, electronic attack, direction finding, geolocation, and ‘other advanced’ EW capabilities, the company official confirmed.

Pulsar features a software-defined radio, graphics processing unit, and radio frequency machine learning algorithms, which enable the autonomous ‘interrogation’ of the electromagnetic spectrum for known and ‘anomalous’ events to enhance levels of situation awareness and compress decision-making processes.

‘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,’ according to a company statement.

‘Dominance of the electromagnetic spectrum is critical to operations on a modern battlefield of rapidly-evolving drone, counter-drone, and jamming technologies. 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.’

To date, Pulsar variants have been deployed as fixed-site variants and integrated on board a ‘variety of aircraft, ground, and maritime vehicles’, the official added.

Benefiting from an open architecture, Pulsar can be integrated into common and joint EW and command & control systems.

Anduril also offers a software development kit to ‘enable continuous development and integrations with third-party providers and rapid integration of best-of-breed capabilities in order to keep pace with new threats and missions’, the company official concluded.