The Athena team transitioned a classified version of Athena to AFLCMC/EZAD.
This marks a major transition for AFRL to AFLCMC.
The AFRL Sensors Directorate and the AFLCMC/EZAD Electronic Warfare Branch have the same workforce development challenges regarding Electronic Warfare (EW), particularly within the junior workforce. There is a loss of expertise due to workforce turnover and a steep learning curve to understand complex EW environments. The ATHENA Workforce Development Environment (WDE) provides resources needed to build and support this highly specialized expertise.
The ATHENA WDE offers multiple educational curriculums, calculators, radar exercises, gamified learning (including a competitive game that includes 168 EW/EMS-related questions), and modeling and simulation tools. The ATHENA WDE also offers unclassified and classified big picture podcasts. These real-world perspectives are told by EW experts and offer valuable EW experiences and insights.
The ATHENA project was originally designed to bring new employees up to speed on Electronic Warfare within the AFRL Sensors Directorate. AFLCMC has identified a need to expand this for use AF wide in training AF personnel in Electronic Warfare (EW) and Electromagnetic Spectrum (EMS). The ATHENA team transitioned a classified version to AFLCMC/EZAD (Electronic Warfare branch).
The ATHENA application quickly fills this need and they were excited to take delivery of what AFRL developed. AFLCMC also expressed interest in expanding ATHENA to a networked version that could be accessed from anywhere for the greater EW/EMS community.