ALQ-213 Electronic Warfare Management System

Terma’s ALQ-213 is an electronic warfare management system that sits at the centre of a fighter’s self-protection suite, fusing radar warning, missile warning, and laser warning sensor outputs into a single threat picture and automating the response. The Danish manufacturer first delivered the system in the mid-1990s for the F-16 fleets of the European Participating Air Forces — Denmark, the Netherlands, Norway, and Belgium — and it has since spread to a wider mix of fast jets, transports, and rotary platforms across NATO and allied operators.

The system’s job is to take the noise from disparate sensors and reduce it to something a crew under threat can act on. Inputs from the radar warning receiver, a missile approach warner such as the AN/AAR-60 MILDS, and a laser warning detector are processed against an onboard mission data file that ranks each emitter or launch detection by lethality. The ALQ-213 then commands the countermeasures dispenser — typically an AN/ALE-47 or Terma’s own Modular Countermeasures Pod — to release chaff and flare patterns matched to the threat, and where a self-protection jammer is fitted, it cues that as well. The pilot sees a consolidated threat display in the cockpit, and in fully automatic modes the response is dispensed before they have time to think about it. Mission data files are reprogrammable on the squadron flight line, which has made the system attractive to air forces that want to tune their library against changing emitter parameters without going back to the manufacturer.

Combat use has been extensive. EPAF F-16s carrying the ALQ-213 have flown over Kosovo, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Libya, with Royal Danish and Royal Norwegian Air Force jets relying on it during Operation Unified Protector in 2011. Beyond the F-16, Terma has integrated the controller on the C-130J Hercules, the AW101 / EH101 helicopter, the NH90, and U.S. special operations C-130 variants. Successive software builds have expanded the number of simultaneous threats the system can prioritise and added integration paths for newer missile warners and directed-infrared countermeasure turrets.

What the ALQ-213 represents, in the broader picture, is the move from cockpits where the pilot was expected to read a tone, identify the threat, select a countermeasure programme and pull a handle, to ones where that loop is closed by software in milliseconds. It competes with broadly similar systems from BAE Systems, L3Harris, and Elbit, but its position as the de facto European-built option has made it the standard self-protection brain on a generation of NATO F-16s and a recurring choice on European-built helicopters and transports.