Echodyne Enhances Oklahoma National Guard C-UAS Training
Echodyne delivered decision enhancing radar data to Air and Army National Guardsmen during the Thunderstruck C-UAS focused exercise hosted by the Oklahoma National Guard (OKNG) at Camp Gruber, Oklahoma. Hundreds of participants from across the U.S. and world traveled to Oklahoma to train on new C-UAS technologies and develop expertise needed for the future battleground.
The OKNG is leading C-UAS innovation and Force modernization efforts through its C-UAS School and its Launched Effects Alliance to enhance Soldier and Airman readiness and capability to respond to both domestic and military missions in an ever-changing battlefield. The OKNG C-UAS initiatives are highly collaborative efforts with state, industry, and academic partners to bolster defense efforts against the full spectrum of aerial threats and civil and combat operational missions encountered by the OKNG.
The Echodyne team supported multiple scenario-based training during Thunderstruck including an enemy Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance (ISR) airspace deconfliction and friendly maneuver scenario. During the lane training scenarios, the EchoShield, a long-range radar, provided highly precise airspace situational awareness and handed off target aerial threat tracks to the EchoGuard, a short-range, highly portable radar as the threat packages advanced and posed risk to the ground troops and base assets. The precision tracking data cued kinetic airspace deconfliction operations to neutralize the threats and the radar data enhanced the common operating picture for the friendly maneuver lane training. The radar data allowed leaders to more accurately track troop insertion from Chinook Aircrafts into the landing zone and make timely decisions on actions needed to protect the exposed troops.
The warfighters were able to view Echdoyne’s tracks and critical track information such as size, distance, speed in the tactical awareness kit (TAK) enabling persistent operational awareness and quicker operational decision-making.
Echodyne collaborates with critical partner, Strongwatch, at Thunderstruck.
The successful C-UAS training would not have been possible without collaboration from Echodyne’s critical partners including Strongwatch (vehicle mounted optics, C2, EchoShield), Persistent Systems (radios), and TrellisWare who provided the tactical network capability to enable smooth integration of the radar data into the tactical awareness kit (TAK). Eronia, one of Echodyne’s partners also participated in the exercise and integrated an EchoShield into their C-UAS solution to provide additional air space awareness coverage.
“We are proud to contribute to OKNG growing and active drone readiness program to enable NG Airman and Soldiers to effectively win in the future fight. Thank you to the OKNG and RXR for facilitating critical training on emerging technologies,” said Jeff Phillips, VP DOD/IC Sales.