The Office of Strategic Development Planning and Experimentation (SDPE), Air Force Materiel Command (AFMC), Wright Patterson Air Force Base (WPAFB), is conducting an experimentation campaign to assess the military utility of directed energy (DE) technology to counter unmanned aircraft systems (DE C-UAS). SDPE is issuing an invitation to participate (ITP) to assess industry’s capability, capacity, and interest in providing platforms that will be cost-effective assets (i.e., assets having low procurement, operating, and sustainment costs) in the future United States Air Force (USAF) force structure. The overarching objective is to experiment with off the shelf DE products integrated together to perform a C-UAS mission, and to enable Rapid Procurement process of such a system.
Due to the rapid timelines associated with these authorities, SDPE is conducting this experimentation campaign to assess whether any directed energy systems are available to meet these needs and within the aggressive timelines of these authorities. As such, the results of this experimentation campaign will enable rapid procurement of such a system.
SDPE anticipates inviting approximately four respondents to bring their systems to a Fall 2018 Experimentation Event at White Sands Missile Range (WSMR) to prototype their military utility. The event will last 2-3 weeks and 6-8 weeks prior to the event there will be a 2-3 day functional checkout at Kirtland AFB.
This ITP is the first step in a two-step process for obtaining information from industry with respect to its current and near-term abilities to support military needs. SDPE anticipates the two steps will be as follows:
- Step one: The ITP invites interested industry participants to submit capability statements.
- Step two: Based upon the evaluation in step one, SDPE intends to invite approximately four respondents to provide additional information in the second step of this process.
Reference number: FA8650-18-S-9319
Deadline: 1 May 2018
Issuing authority: Department of the Air Force
