A project has concluded in the United Kingdom (UK) evaluating methods by which the networking of radars can help improve air and maritime situational awareness, and command and control.
Project SIREN (System for Integrated Radar Early Response Networking), as the initiative was dubbed, commenced in April 2024 and concluded in 2025, according to a spokesperson from the UK’s Defence Science and Technology Laboratory (DSTL). DSTL was one of the participants in the initiative. Other participants included the Royal Navy. The project was commissioned by the Defence Science and Technology department of the UK’s Ministry of Defence, the spokesperson continued.
SIREN Defined
According to reports, SIREN worked to network radars equipping air and maritime platforms. The goal of the initiative was to take the radar imagery produced by each platform and to fuse this imagery together. Combining these radar pictures will give a detailed, common recognised maritime and air picture. Users of this imagery will improve their situational awareness of the tactical and operational environment. Threats can be determined, located and engaged by several assets using a common radar picture. The work pioneered by SIREN will also help improve command and control.
Reports continued that SIREN included an airborne demonstration of associated technologies during flight trials held off the east coast of Scotland in May 2025. SIREN used cloud computing to receive imagery from disparate radars and to combine this into a common recognised air and maritime picture. The work undertaken by SIREN is seen as integral to the United Kingdom’s Digital Targeting Web.
DSTL declined to state which communications protocols, systems or networks were employed as part of the SIREN effort due to security and classification concerns. Radar data is typically shared using protocols like ASTERIX (All Purpose Structured Eurocontrol Surveillance Information Exchange). ASTERIX allows different radar types to share their imagery with comparative ease.
The DSTL spokesperson noted that Project SIREN was commissioned to deliver several Key Driving Outcomes (KDO). The primary KDO was the integration demonstration and trial event which occurred in May 2025 discussed above. Other KDOs included detailed insight into the relative maturing of the SIREN innovations. These outcomes will be integral to developing technology roadmaps which can be used to drive the full realisation of the technologies and concepts Project SIREN analysed.
The SIREN undertaking formed one part of the Royal Navy’s Fleet Air Arm Maritime Aviation Transformation Strategy, also known as MATX. The British government provided additional information on the MATX initiative during questions in the House of Commons, the UK’s lower house of parliament, in October 2025. In response to a question from Ben Obese-Jecty, member of parliament for Huntingdon, eastern England, Al Carns, parliamentary undersecretary of state for the armed forces, defined MATX as “the Royal Navy’s strategy to shift towards a digitally led crewed-uncrewed operating model”.
Future efforts
Where do SIREN’s achievements go from here? The integration of the capabilities trialled during SIREN were not assessed overall as a system-of-systems. This makes it difficult to talk about SIREN from a technology readiness level standpoint. Instead, the SIREN effort documented system and subsystem performance in a test environment and matched these results against analytical predictions. The DSTL spokesperson told Armada that the scoping of future work is currently in progress. The release of the UK’s Defence Investment Plan could provide additional details on how the innovations pioneered in SIREN could move forward. The plan will detail how the capabilities and requirements outlined in the UK’s 2025 Strategic Defence Review will be financed.
Overall, the adoption of the technologies trialled as part of SIREN should help provide low cost, flexible and readily deployable capabilities to the UK defence community, the spokesperson emphasised. These capabilities will help increase combat mass, supplement and/or replace crewed capabilities while increasing operational effectiveness. These aspirations also give some important clues into some of the goals of the much-anticipated Defence Investment Plan, expected to be published by April.
by Dr. Thomas Withington
