Army Begins Terrestrial Layer System Program’s First Phase With Two Contract Awards

The U.S. Army awarded other transaction agreements to Boeing and Lockheed Martin in the last two months to begin the initial phase of prototyping for the Terrestrial Layer System program that seeks to deploy a ground-based platform to deliver cyber, electronic warfare and signals intelligence capabilities to brigades, C4ISRNET reported Thursday.

The service awarded a potential $7.6M OTA to Boeing’s Digital Receiver Technology subsidiary in April and a $6M contract to Lockheed in May to develop the TLS platform under the first phase.

Paul Turczynski, director of Boeing’s missions and payloads global sales and marketing, told the publication phase one will run for 16 months and include a preliminary design assessment in July and operational tests.

TLS is about “situational understanding, it’s about sigint and EW, about electronic attack, producing actionable intelligence and ultimately leading to force protection,” Turczynski said.

The Army plans to select one vendor to advance in the TLS development effort and expects to field the platform to the first units in fiscal 2022.