Threat Engineering

The Threat Engineering program assesses the current and future threat environment and works in coordination with the Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI) to develop, produce, and evolve digital threat engineering models in support of test and evaluation (T&E) requirements. NAVSEA requires comprehensive, validated threat modeling and simulation (M&S) products to dynamically and responsively interact with surface ship air defense systems and subsystems to allow for a performance evaluation in an operationally realistic environment. These threat M&S products, called Acquisition Threat Engineering Products (ATEP), must contain the details, features, and components necessary to react with the Blue air defense systems as the actual threats will with, deployed air defense systems to provide a comprehensive, high-confidence evaluation of Blue system capabilities. The successful and rigorous end-to-end evaluation of surface ship combat systems, to include the component systems, are required before capability and ship baselines can be delivered to the warfighter. ATEPs are valid T&E assets that satisfy Director of Operational Test and Evaluation (DOT&E) and Operational Test & Evaluation Force (OPTEVFOR) requirements in both Modeling and Simulation (M&S) testbed and at-sea configurations. ATEPs satisfy OPTEVFOR's threat model requirement for fidelity commensurate with the Blue-force system representations and contain intel-derived lethality/vulnerability data, physics-based six degrees-of-freedom models, reactive seekers and guidance, and other engineering data. ATEPs are necessary to evaluate mandatory ship Key Performance Parameters (KPP), including operational effectiveness and suitability. ATEPs reduce Navy operational testing (OT) costs by enabling portions of OT to be conducted via M&S, increasing requirements coverage and avoiding the costs of targets and weapons that would ordinarily be required to conduct OT solely via live fire events. As each threat system is unique, the ATEP representation of each must include the features of specific threats, such as electronic countermeasures (ECM), active countermeasures, communications links, electronic counter-countermeasures (ECCM).