MASS, a Cohort plc company, has consolidated its role as a leading supplier of EW services to NATO by extending its service support contract to the NATO Joint Electronic Warfare Core Staff (JEWCS) based at Royal Naval Air Station (RNAS) Yeovilton in Somerset.
MASS has provided support to JEWCS since 2014 and the latest extension is to the end of 2018, with options for a further two years. A total of 15 MASS employees work at JEWCS in technical, mission planning, logistic and administrative roles, with the value of the contract around £1m pa.
Support includes electronic, software and mechanical engineering as well as EW operations analysis. The technicians are responsible for the depth maintenance of the NATO JEWCS fleet of legacy EW training assets in the land, maritime and air domains. The operations analyst is responsible for generating the exercise libraries required to programme the EW training assets in support of 25-30 NATO/national EW exercises a year.
Notably, MASS’ support of JEWCS has contributed to fielding an app-based functionality for GPS jamming, digital HF/UHF/VHF communications, audio jamming and dynamic communications jamming.
JEWCS Technical Support Branch Head, Stuart Sweetlove (MASS), commented “MASS plays an important role ensuring the effectiveness of JEWCS and our commitment has grown over the past four years. The continuity of our work means that our personnel have built a deep knowledge and understanding of the JEWCS equipment, which is invaluable in the maintenance of the legacy EW training assets and has facilitated significant cost savings. We look forward to continuing to provide NATO with the tools that maintain this valuable electronic warfare training capability”.
NATO JEWCS formally left the NATO Command Structure in October 2013 and is now a stand-alone MoU entity of 12-member nations, where the UK is the host and Greece is the lead nation. The facility provides a range of EW services to the three NATO Strategic Commands and is a unique capability within NATO.
In addition to its NATO work, MASS provides international EW operational support across the air, land and sea domains, including data management, training, countermeasures, modelling and simulation. MASS will exhibit at EW Poland 16 – 18 January where it will present on ‘How countermeasures development helps us to develop defensive cyber operations.’
