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By Frank Wolfe
The ALE-55 fiber optic towed decoy by Britain's BAE SYSTEMS for the company's Integrated Defensive Electronic Countermeasures (IDECM) suite is to represent an improvement over the Raytheon (RTN) ALE-50, a repeater system, a BAE official said yesterday.
Such a repeater system counters threat missiles by mimicking the signal of the decoy's host aircraft, while a fiber-optic towed decoy system could employ different techniques along the tow-line, including mimicry.
The ALE-55, which is to go on the Block 3 IDECM, "broadens the threats we're effective against," said John Nyilis, BAE's IDECM program manager for the system development and demonstration (SDD) phase. "The fiber optic technology lends itself to defeating certain threats which the ALE-50 is not effective against."
In addition, the ALE-55 "is designed to be used over a much broader flight envelope" at different altitudes, speeds and combat maneuvers, he said.
But Roy Azevedo, Raytheon's program manager for advanced decoy programs, told Defense Daily in a telephone interview yesterday that ALE-50 "has been effective against everything it's been tested against" and that Raytheon is working under Navy and Boeing (BA) risk reduction contracts to develop a fiber optic version of ALE- 50.
During Operation Allied Force in 1999, ALE-50 was successfully used to counter surface-to-air missile attacks.
"Fundamentally, I believe that there is...