Air Force asks industry to develop enabling technologies in missile electronics, guidance, and control

EGLIN AIR FORCE BASE, Fla. – U.S. Air Force aerial warfare experts are asking industry to develop air-dominance enabling technologies for modeling and simulation; aircraft integration; target tracking; missile guidance and control; and artificial intelligence (AI) for swarming unmanned aircraft.

Officials of the U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory's Munitions Directorate at Eglin Air Force Base, Fla., issued a broad agency announcement (FA8651-25-S-0001) on Thursday for the Air Dominance project.

This project has 12 research areas: modeling, simulation, and analysis; aircraft integration; find-fix-target-track and data links; engagement management; high-velocity fuzing; missile electronics; missile guidance and control; advanced warheads; advanced missile propulsion; control actuation; missile carriage and release; and missile test and evaluation.

Modeling, simulation, and analysis seeks to model and simulate one-on-one, few-on-few, many-on-many aerial weapons scenarios to analyze air superiority, and aircraft integration seeks to design physical, electrical, and logical interfaces.

Threats to aircraft

Find-fix-target-track and data links seeks to develop technologies to detect threats to aircraft, and small data link terminals suitable for air-to-air missiles, conformal data link antennas, alternative waveforms, and applications of data links to support air-to-air missile swarming.

Engagement management system technologies seeks to make the most of aircraft survivability in increasingly contested environments while mining false positives and engagement costs. High-velocity fuzing seeks to develop electronic safe and arm to initiate a warhead safely, and miniaturized fast-responding, and range, and location for fast-closing intercepts of slow- and fast-moving targets.

Missile electronics involves power conversion and distribution, advanced missile batteries and ultracapacitors, guidance electronics, and thermal management.

Missile guidance and control involves robust guidance algorithms against maneuvering targets, real time optimal energy management, integrated guidance and control, reduced latency between seeker and fin commands, seeker technologies and algorithms, third-party queuing, simultaneous learning and control, hybrid guidance, and advanced airframe control.

Missile warheads

Advanced warhead technologies involve miniature and micro warheads, multifunctional energetic materials and damage mechanisms, directional control and focused effects, selectable effects, and collateral damage control.

Advanced missile propulsion involves propellant formulations, grain structures, case technologies, ignition safety devices, nozzle technologies, and multi-pulse motor barriers.

Control actuation systems involves miniaturized actuators, high-speed actuation, low-cost control actuation, articulating missile radomes, folding fins for high-speed missiles, and advanced airframe control.

Missile carriage and release involves weapon racks able to carry and release several small missiles, and mixed loads of air-to-air missiles, aircraft with high data rates to weapon communications, pod architectures, and aircraft to weapon power conversion and distribution.

Test and evaluation

Missile test and evaluation involves miniaturizing existing technologies for testing future generations of small missiles, encrypted telemetry, autonomous flight termination, miniaturized high-power missile tracking beacons; miniaturized explosive initiation modules; and dual missile tracking.

This solicitation will be open until 31 Oct. 2029. Companies interested should email white papers, questions, and concerns to the Air Force's Terrance Dubreus at [email protected] and Sheli Plenge at [email protected]. More information is online at https://sam.gov/opp/0a147473ff25475d9edc9a86da582242/view.