5 Looking into the Future on JAS Gripen Spillovers
5.2 The Erieye Surveillance System, Electrically
Gripen designers that the aircraft be light and fuel efficient and be able to fly longer and faster. Such lightweight structures were needed both for the aircraft fuselage and the engine. Here, the use of composites came in importantly.
Thus, more recent energy and environmental concerns have opened up new agendas for innovative industrial development where the JAS 39 Gripen project has pioneered the use of new materials and lightweight structures and new stress calcu-lation methods in engineering products (see further Sect. 5.5).
We are talking about a broad range of industrial systems technologies that may turn out to be the savior of engineering industry, the back bone of the rich, high-wage industrial economies since the industrial revolution. This technology is so important that it deserves a separate section.
As systems are developed and their integration takes precedence over physical manufacturing, digital computing, and communications (C&C) technologies are becoming even more important. As Saab develops toward a “systems house” that focuses on concepts and development rather than on manufacturing, new opportu-nities open up for partners to pick up advanced subcontracting jobs.
The transition away from specific physical weapons platforms to integrated networked defense systems based on increasingly complex computing and com-munications technologies is already changing both the nature of military hardware development and of civilian spillovers. The JAS 39 Gripen, in fact, was designed as the backbone of the first, even though at the time primitive, networked defense system. I therefore begin with that.
5.2 The Erieye Surveillance System, Electrically Directed
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5.2.1 Erieye Surveillance Technology
In the early 1980s, and complementary to the development of the JAS 39 Gripen system, the Swedish military procurement agency (FMV) asked Ericsson to develop an airborne radar system for Swedish defense. Ericsson delivered the first prototype of Erieye in 1985, an effective, inexpensive, and in some ways more advanced version of the US airborne air surveillance system Awacs.5 When mounted on a Saab 340 Erieye became a cost-efficient and effective surveillance system for the Swedish defense. A clever electrically directed antenna technology developed for Ericsson’s space research program was modified for the Erieye that made it pos-sible to follow several moving objects through “multiple direction” of the antenna.
When high frequencies were used it was particularly important to be able to aim the antennae exactly. The quality of the transmission improved and the capacity increased. Both military radio communications and increasingly civilian radio communications benefited.6
Erieye was first planned to be operated through a land-based information command central, but there was an early international interest and Brazil, that acquired the system, wanted its central command on board. The radar system was therefore mounted on a larger Embraer jet. Since then the system has been purchased by Mexico, Greece, and Pakistan. Thailand acquired 12 Gripen and the Erieye in 2007 (Militaer Teknikk, 4–5/2007).
The STRIL 90 central command and military management system was devel-oped together with the JAS 39 Gripen as its core force. The system is a forerunner of the networked defense technology based on real-time communications between land, sea, and air-based moving units. A high capacity, secure, robust (jamming free), and reliable data communications link was needed for that, a technology that Swedish military developed and used very early.
Erieye is intense in its use of data communications and Erieye and weapons tech-nology have to be integrated. Individual aircraft can communicate with Erieye to get the coordinates for targets to attack. Even though advanced for its time the STRIL 90 system is, however, still too rigid to be called a network-based military command system. Communication is still mostly run by way of a land-based command central.
Even though data links were developed very early (in 1985) for communication between the aircraft in the air and between individual aircraft and the land-based com-mand central (see further Sect. 5.2.4 above) free and flexible communication between individuals or vehicles in battle is still difficult within the current network structure.
Military digital radio technology, however, came to be used early in civilian tele-phony and the development of complex central military command systems such as STRIL 90 pioneered the development of radio communications technology in the early 1990s. During that time, the merge of computing and communications (C&C) technologies took giant steps forward opening the doors for the Internet age. A number of civilian systems were soon launched in the market; for instance, Internet-based information access and payment systems, credit card control systems, the complicated logistics networks associated with distributed production, etc. that all required large
data communications capacity. These civilian systems of today may at times be as advanced and complex as the military systems and some current civilian telecom-munications technologies even lead the corresponding military developments. The need to develop robust, shock proof, and reliable systems is, however, still unique to aircraft industry, and military aircraft in particular, but is increasingly demanded of civilian systems applications. As both military and civilian electronics industry increasingly purchase the same, standard components “from the shelf” the two indus-tries are also supporting each other. Thus, for instance, the increasing cost share devoted to electronics and information and communications systems development in future developments of the JAS 39 Gripen aircraft on the original physical platform will also raise the spillover intensity of R&D investment in the Gripen aircraft. Using
“off-the-shelf” standard components has another important benefit in that it reduces the rate of obsolescence of the entire system. Custom-designed components are expensive to develop, manufacture, store, and update. Standard components or sys-tems used widely and with well-defined standard interfaces, on the other hand, are constantly upgraded and produced. The French policy of forcing products subjected to public procurement to use French-made components and subsystems therefore contributes to a more rapid rate of obsolescence of the entire product.
5.2.2 Antennae
Antenna technology early became a world specialty of Ericsson Microwave Systems that considered its microwave antenna technology the best in the world.
The antenna of the JAS 39 Gripen radar was developed by Ericsson Radio Systems together with the Scottish firm Ferranti and included both a turning platform and electronics for digital signal analysis. This antenna technology could be further developed both for Ericsson’s space activity, the Erieye and for the MiniLink. The electrically directed (omnidirectional) antenna or aerials for Erieye could then be further developed to be used in Ericsson’s mobile base stations that were increas-ingly connected through MiniLinks. People from the Erieye group moved over to the civilian mobile business. As Ericsson experienced a rapid growth in its mobile business, it began to draw on its mobile radio people to support the expansion, first in Stockholm and then in Mölndal.
5.2.3 The MiniLink
Ericsson had accumulated a considerable knowledge in radio communications, most of it with a military orientation. Work was located both in Stockholm and in Gothenburg/Mölndal. During the 1970s, the Swedish defense asked Ericsson to develop a tactical digital radio link. This work took place in a secret facility in Stockholm. During the 1970s, Ericsson in Mölndal experienced a recession in order
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inflows and was looking for civilian applications for its extensive knowledge in military radio communications, radar, microwave, and antenna technologies and signal analysis. This is the way the civilian MiniLink came about, but the project had to be protected from Ericsson top management that was at the time preoccupied with concentrating all available resources to the failed business information systems project, EIS (See below). A skunk work was organized to cover up the activity. But marketing the product was slow and the product first had “to search hard for a market,” as one interviewed person expressed it. After a while, however, an unex-pected military demand presented itself and the market grew rapidly.
Even though the tactical radio link and the MiniLink were originally intended for analog radio traffic (mostly voice) they could be modified for digital radio communications.
The Minilink represented a new concept. With its electrically directed antenna brought in from Erieye and extensive miniaturization, a lower cost structure than for similar military systems could be achieved. A new CEO who did not come from the fixed line telecommunications activity understood the new business situation better than the earlier one. A breakthrough came when the telecom industry was deregulated in the 1980s and new operators were allowed into the market. Or it was rather the case that new C&C technology contributed to the breakdown of telecom regulation. The MiniLink suddenly became the useful device that allowed the new operators a convenient and inexpensive way to link up with existing networks.
A critical circumstance behind the rapid success of the MiniLink was an order from German Mannesmann that had decided to enter the mobile telecommunica-tions business. Deutsche Telecom, sensing competition, had offered an impossibly costly deal to Mannesmann to connect with its fixed line system, a link that in addition would not be available until one and a half year later, when Mannesmann’s license to operate had expired. Mannesmann management understood that a radio link would solve their problem and contacted Ericsson. This kick-started the civilian use of the MiniLink. Civilian demand from mobile operators for the MiniLink expanded dramatically and outgrew military demand during the 1990s.
Even though Ericsson top management was still skeptical about mobile telephony, the radio people at Ericsson Radio Systems (ERA) persisted. They saw that something was going on in the USA. The CEO of ERA, Åke Lundqvist who had vigorously protected and supported the clandestine venture into radio telephony went to the USA and found maverick entrepreneur Craig McCaw who was pioneering mobile telephony in the USA. McCaw adopted the Ericsson technology. McCaw soon expanded into one of the largest mobile telephone operators in the USA and was acquired by AT&T in 1994. AT&T had set its focus on integrating the Internet and mobile telephony with its complete USA network for long-distance communications (BW, March 7, 1994:30f).
So, even though mobile telephony systems and terminal developers and manufac-turers may today be capable of continuing successfully on their own, the origin of mobile success is to be found in military radio technology and later in military data communications within increasingly networked battle systems. It will therefore be interesting to study how Ericsson, which sold off most of its military radio activity to Saab in 2006, will manage mobile telephone development into the future.
5.2.4 A Networked Defense Enhances Spillover Intensity
The JAS 39 Gripen was defined from the beginning to be the backbone of a broader and integrated defense system in which the platform and its weapons capacity of course was central, but the combined effect of which was radically enhanced by operations decisions integrated within the world’s perhaps first, even though at the time primitive, “network-based” surveillance, information, and combat manage-ment system. But the groundwork for this at the time ambitious developmanage-ment project had been laid much earlier, and the Gripen system could not possibly have been engineered into the successful systems design that it became without its previous history of experimental development and learning.
The Saab Draken was the first combat aircraft in the world to be data-linked during the early 1960s to a land-based command central. A complementary “broad-band” data link was developed already during the first half of the 1960s that made the communication of radar pictures to land-based command centrals possible.
In 1982, the Saab 37 Viggen was equipped with a data link that connected aircraft to a land-based command central both ways in real time and Sweden was again first, in 1985, to introduce data communication between the aircraft. As one interviewed person expressed it, “In this technology we have been at least 15 years ahead of the Americans.”
In conjunction with this, new military tactics and battle methods, a “military art,” were developed that fully employed the new information capacities that the integrated and real-time-based aircraft system made possible. All that had, in fact, been foreseen by the military procurer FMV and worked into the Gripen specificatons in 1982.
As I have already observed, several econometric studies indicate that the more of electronics and software in product development the more intensive spillover flows.
This is quite well illustrated by Ericssons’s spectacular transformation from a land-based traditional telecom equipment producer to the world’s leading mobile telecom systems developer of today. It began with Ericsson’s development of military radio technology well before Gripen, but was carried through the 1980s and 1990s by Gripen systems-related digital microwave links and antennae technology.