Thursday, July 23, 2009

Northrop Grumman Contributes Expertise to Military Exercise Demonstrating Increased Sharing of Reconnaissance Information

Northrop Grumman Contributes Expertise to Military Exercise Demonstrating Increased Sharing of Reconnaissance Information
July 23, 2009

EL SEGUNDO, Calif. – July 23, 2009 – Northrop Grumman
Corporation (NYSE:NOC) is playing a major role in Empire Challenge 09
(EC 09), a joint military exercise to demonstrate how U.S. and
coalition forces can better work together to collect, analyze and share
reconnaissance information.

Northrop Grumman is contributing its expertise in ISR
(intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance) by increasing the
fidelity of its modeling, simulation and analysis to this year's Empire
Challenge exercise. The ability to share timely, relevant information
among aircraft will enhance warfighters' situational awareness and
increase their chances of success.

Northrop Grumman built the virtual, human-in-the-loop wargaming
environment used in Empire Challenge. That work was developed with
Northrop Grumman's Cyber Warfare Integration Network (CWIN), which can
generate operationally-based, virtual battlefield environments. Empire
Challenge 09 is being executed by the U.S. Joint Forces Command
(USJFCOM) under the sponsorship of the Under Secretary of Defense for
Intelligence.

Northrop Grumman aircraft represented in EC 09 include the Air
Force's RQ-4 Global Hawk unmanned aircraft reconnaissance system and
E-8C Joint Surveillance Target Attack Radar System (Joint STARS), and
the Navy's E-2C Hawkeye early warning and battle management aircraft
and MQ-8B Fire Scout vertical takeoff and landing unmanned system.

"Empire Challenge is an example of how Northrop Grumman works
closely with warfighters to gain a better understanding of their
current and future challenges," said Paul Meyer, vice president and
general manager of Advanced Programs and Technology for Northrop
Grumman's Aerospace Systems sector. "What we learn helps us apply
technologies and improved applications to develop better architecture
solutions that can meet those challenges."

Empire Challenge 09 is hosted by the Naval Air Warfare Center
Weapons Division. The exercise began July 6 and continues through July
31 at the Naval Air Weapons Station China Lake, Calif., with
distributed locations in the Joint Intelligence Lab in Suffolk, Va.,
the Combined Air Operations Center-Experimental at Langley Air Force
Base, Va., military service labs, coalition sites in Australia, Canada
and the United Kingdom, and the NATO Consultation, Command and Control
Agency in the Netherlands.

The virtual environment developed by Northrop Grumman is
located at the Suffolk Joint Intelligence Lab and operates on two
government networks connected to all of the locations in the exercise.

Lessons learned from the exercise will be used in ongoing work
under a three-year cooperative research agreement between USJFCOM and
Northrop Grumman. The goal of the agreement, signed in 2007, is to
identify ways to shorten the military commander's cycle of tasking
sensors to collect intelligence, analyzing the information and
disseminating it to warfighters.

The USJFCOM/Northrop Grumman research team will use data from
Empire Challenge 09 to develop new concepts of operation and tactics,
techniques and procedures to improve the use of ISR assets in irregular
warfare.

Northrop Grumman Corporation is a global defense and technology
company whose 120,000 employees provide innovative systems, products,
and solutions in information and services, electronics, aerospace and
shipbuilding to government and commercial customers worldwide.

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