Jane Edwards
Tay Fitzgerald, vice president for strategic missile defense at Raytheon Technologies’ missiles and defense business, said she believes the Department of Defense should transform its entire infrastructure to counter emerging hypersonic and cruise missile threats and should take a revolutionary and an evolutionary approach to missile defense, Federal News Network reported Thursday.
“A great example of an evolutionary capability would be closing the fire control room around more of those sensors, more of those effectors today in a much more rapid manner,” Fitzgerald said.
“At the same time, we need to have an eye to the future much more revolutionary technologies and part of what we’re doing to enable that is to make sure that we do our designs today is a digital engineering, open systems architecture, modular design. That way we can readily upgrade the hardware that we’re building today, instead of taking the 10-15, or even 20 year cycles to field new weaponry,” she added.
Fitzgerald highlighted the need for global persistent sensing and an interoperable network of sensors. She also noted that Raytheon is making investments in high power microwave technologies to help counter future threats.
