Opportunity: Unified SAR for Dominance in Contested Environments: Fusing Multi-Scale Data and Countering Adversarial Attacks

To ensure information dominance in future conflicts, U.S. Air Force ISR capabilities must be able to operate effectively within highly contested and electronically hostile environments. This research program addresses two critical gaps preventing this dominance: (1) the inability to seamlessly fuse near-field (NF) and far-field (FF) Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) data for a complete multi-scale picture, and (2) the growing vulnerability of SAR systems to sophisticated electronic warfare and adversarial attacks. Current systems lack a unified framework to bridge these scales, while facing emerging threats that can corrupt raw sensor data to create deceptive “”ghost”” targets or conceal real ones. This research topic will develop a unified, resilient framework that integrates solutions to both challenges, enabling high-fidelity characterization and targeting even when facing active opposition.
A primary technical hurdle is reconciling the divergent physics of NF (spherical wavefront) and FF (planar wavefront) sensing, especially when data is degraded by active electronic attack such as barrage jamming or GPS-denial. This research will address this by developing a hybrid imaging chain with integrated logic to adapt to interference through robust beamforming and adaptive filtering. A further focus will be on the novel threat of waveform-domain adversarial attacks. The research will establish a taxonomy of practical, physics-based attacks and create a high-fidelity simulation testbed for generating and analyzing them. Based on this, new reconstruction algorithms using non-linear techniques, Bayesian inference, or deep unfolding will be designed to be inherently robust to these manipulations. These algorithms will be part of a larger effort to develop “”threat-aware”” sensor management, where the system can autonomously detect, flag, and even adjust its collection strategy to nullify detected adversarial injections.
Upon completion, this research will deliver a battle-ready, hardened multi-scale SAR architecture. The key outcomes will be a processing chain that is demonstrably resilient to both jamming and adversarial manipulation, an adversarial SAR testbed for red-teaming future systems, and a library of validated counter-adversarial algorithms. The ultimate impact will be a demonstrated leap in capability, providing commanders with reliable, trustworthy, and high-fidelity intelligence for targeting and decision-making, ensuring information superiority in the most challenging operational environments.