Kitten

New pictures offer the best look to date of an Air Force HC-130J Combat King II combat search and rescue aircraft (CSAR) carrying an Angry Kitten electronic warfare pod. Originally developed to simulate enemy electronic warfare attacks during training and testing, Angry Kitten has been evolving into a system that could help protect friendly aircraft from those threats during real combat missions. Pairing HC-130Js and the pods is now being eyed as part of the answer to an increasingly vexing question of how to provide adequate CSAR coverage for future operations in and around heavily contested airspace.

Fred Taleghani of FreddyB Aviation Photography caught the HC-130J Combat King II with the Angry Kitten pod flying around Point Mugu, California, back on September 11. The aircraft in question belongs to the California Air National Guard’s 129th Rescue Wing, which is based at Moffett Federal Airfield, situated some 275 miles to the northwest. HC-130Js can support CSAR missions in various ways, including by helping to deploy pararescuemen, refueling HH-60W Jolly Green IIs and other helicopters, as well as Osprey tilt-rotors, in mid-air, and acting as airborne command and control nodes.

The Angry Kitten pod is seen mounted via a Special Airborne Mission Installation and Response (SABIR) system installed in place of the HC-130J’s left rear paratrooper door. SABIR includes a pylon on an arm that can be extended below the aircraft’s fuselage while in flight, giving whatever is loaded onto it a more unobstructed field of view. The replacement paratrooper door also features an enlarged observer’s window. It can be fitted with a chute for launching sonobouys, smoke markers, and other similar tubular payloads, though it is not clear if that capability is installed on this Combat King II. The port for the chute is visible, but it may be blanked off. The U.S. military and foreign armed forces use SABIR as a relatively simple way to integrate other sensors and systems onto different C-130 variants, as you can read more about here.

The Angry Kitten-toting HC-130J is understood to have been in the Point Mugu area at the time to take part in the U.S. Navy-led Gray Flag 2025 test and evaluation exercise, which ran between September 5 and 19. It was staged out of Naval Base Ventura County and involved sorties over the expansive Point Mugu Sea Range. Gray Flags are regularly used to showcase new and improved munitions and other advanced capabilities, such as electronic warfare systems, including ones that are still in development. Units from across the U.S. military, as well as key American allies, routinely take part. Combat King IIs have participated in these exercises in the past.

As noted, Angry Kitten is not new. Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI) began development of the podded system in 2013, and it first started flying under the wings of F-16 Viper fighters in 2017. Angry Kitten is an outgrowth of the AN/ALQ-167 electronic warfare pod, variants of which have been in use for decades, primarily to mimic hostile electronic warfare threats for training and testing purposes. There are also documented examples of AN/ALQ-167s being used on aircraft during actual combat missions, at least on an ad hoc basis.

Unlike the older AN/ALQ-167s, Angry Kitten is designed to be more readily modifiable and updatable to more rapidly adapt in parallel with the threat ecosystem. This is enabled in part by advanced Digital Radio Frequency Memory (DRFM) technology, which allows radio frequency (RF) signals to be detected and ‘captured,’ as well as manipulated and retransmitted. Electronic warfare systems that use DRFM can project signals from hostile radars (and radar seekers on missiles) back at them to create false or otherwise confusing tracks. Data collected via DRFM can also be used to help improve and refine the system’s capabilities, as well as for other intelligence exploitation purposes.

In general, electronic warfare systems need to be able to accurately detect, categorize, and respond to waveforms based on information contained in their built-in threat libraries to work most effectively. This, in turn, requires specialists to routinely reprogram systems to keep them as up to date as possible. Automating and otherwise shortening that process at every step of the way by developing what are known as cognitive electronic warfare capabilities has become a major area of interest for the entire U.S. military. The absolute ‘holy grail’ of that concept is an electronic warfare system capable of adapting its programming autonomously in real-time, even in the middle of a mission, as you can read more about here.

With all this in mind, and given prior operational use of the AN/ALQ-167, it’s not hard to see how interest has grown in using Angry Kitten to help shield friendly aircraft from threats during real-world missions.

“We had a jammer called ‘Angry Kitten.’ It was built to be an adversary air jamming tool,” now-retired Air Force Gen. Mark Kelly, then commander of Air Combat Command (ACC), told TWZ and other outlets back in 2022. “And all of a sudden, the blue team said, ‘you know, hey, we kind of need that, can we have that for us?’ And so I see this iterating and testing our way into this.”

To date, in addition to F-16s and HC-130s, Angry Kitten is known to have flown on Air Force A-10 Warthog ground attack jets and MQ-9 Reaper drones, as well as Navy F/A-18s fighters. As of March, the Air National Guard Air Force Reserve Command Test Center (AATC) said there were plans to at least evaluate the pod on KC-135 and KC-46 aerial refueling tankers.

It’s also interesting to note the parallels here with the U.S. Marine Corps’ Intrepid Tiger II electronic warfare system, which has been fielded in different podded forms for the AV-8B Harrier jump jet and the UH-1Y Venom armed light utility helicopter. A roll-on/roll-off version for the MV-22 Osprey tilt-rotor is in development, and there are plans to integrate the capability in some form onto the KC-130J tanker/transport. Different variants of Intrepid Tiger also offer degrees of secondary intelligence-gathering capabilities.

AATC has also explicitly highlighted the potential benefits of combining Angry Kitten with the HC-130J in the context of the CSAR mission.

“Angry Kitten pod is showing promising results in protecting larger radar cross-section (RCS) platforms that traditionally lack robust electronic warfare capabilities,” according to a release AATC put out in March. “This success is particularly significant for combat search and rescue platforms that often operate in contested environments without electronic warfare protection.”

“We had minimal hopes for what we could do for larger body aircraft, but it’s showing that we actually have good effects,” Chris Culver, an electronic warfare engineer involved in the work, had said.

For years now, TWZ has been highlighting growing concerns about the basic feasibility of traditional fixed-wing CSAR aircraft and helicopters performing their mission amid a threat ecosystem that is steadily expanding in scale and scope. Future high-end fights, such as one against China in the Pacific, will involve air operations in areas where even stealthy platforms are expected to be increasingly at risk. In 2022, the Air Force announced it was scaling back purchases of new HH-60W CSAR helicopters in light of this reality. Top service officials have talked in the past about having to approach this still critical mission set differently going forward.

“There are a lot of other assets around that, if somebody goes down at sea, for example, we could use to pick them up,” then-Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall said in 2023. “We’re going to do it [the CSAR mission] with existing assets, either our own or provided by other military departments.”

Many of these same general concerns apply to the Air Force’s existing non-stealthy KC-135 and KC-46 tanker fleets. Air Force officials regularly point to add-on defensive capabilities, which might include Angry Kitten, as one near-term option for increasing the survivability of its key aerial refueling assets.

Integrating Angry Kitten on larger aircraft could have other implications as another important stepping stone for new cognitive electronic warfare capabilities.

“The C-130 testing features innovative real-time updates to electronic warfare techniques,” according to the AATC release in March. “Unlike the F-16 tests, where pre-programmed mission data files were used, the C-130 testing includes development engineers aboard the aircraft who can modify jamming techniques mid-mission based on feedback from range control.”

“They are making changes [in] real-time to the techniques and pushing updates to the pod, seeing the change in real-time,” Culver, the electronic warfare engineer, had also said. “This approach allows for rapid optimization of jamming techniques against various threat systems.”

A follow-on Advanced Test and Training Capability (ATTACK) pod, also referred to unofficially as Angry Kitten Increment 2 Block 2, is also now in the works. The “next-generation system will feature a complete hardware refresh, transitioning from analog to digital receivers for improved sensitivity and frequency agility,” according to AATC.

Altogether, the HC-130J seen carrying the Angry Kitten pod around Point Mugu earlier this month is an important sign of things to come.

Contact the author: [email protected]

Long Beach resident Ashley Likins was pages away from finishing “Onyx Storm,” the third installment in Rebecca Yarros’ fantasy book series, when a long-haired black kitten hopped into her lap.

Given the foster name Soup Enhancements, the cat was one of the rescues boarding at Cool Cat Collective, a cat-themed boutique at the eastern end of Long Beach’s Fourth Street Corridor. The store, which offers all manner of cat-themed merchandise from kitty treats to cat-printed coasters, doubles as a shelter for cats rescued by TippedEars, a local trap-neuter-return, or TNR, nonprofit.

These resident kittens at Cool Cat Collective spend most of their time in a luxury “catio” in the back corner of the boutique, but twice a month, they are released to roam about during after-hours fundraising events. A popular silent reading party, co-hosted by reading club LB Bookworms, mimics a cat cafe, and according to the book club’s founder, Martha Esquivias, the event has sold out nearly every month since its debut last November.

Deb Escobar reads a book as foster kitten Poolboy creeps around her during a silent reading night at Cool Cat Collective.

It was during the silent reading event in early August that Likins sat, second-guessing the decision she’d made a few days prior to adopt Soup Enhancements. She adored the cat; still, she worried she’d been impulsive and wasn’t truly ready for the responsibility of pet ownership.

But as she watched the kitten nod off in her lap, she glimpsed the future in which the pair would do this routine a thousand times over with Likins devouring a book and the cat sleeping soundly below.

“I’m not just in a kitten craze,” Likins recalled thinking to herself. “This is my cat.”

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It’s that kind of moment Jena Carr, 39, had dreamed of when she and her husband, Matt, 40, opened Cool Cat Collective last year.

Former Washington, D.C., restaurateurs, the Carrs moved to Long Beach in 2022 to be closer to Jena Carr’s family. Once they settled in, Carr threw herself into kitten rescue, a longtime interest. She started as a foster owner and kitten rescue volunteer before assisting TippedEars with its work tracking and capturing cats in Compton.

“Once you start realizing the extent of the cat overpopulation problem, you quickly realize that we can’t foster or adopt our way out of it,” Carr said, calling TNR “the solution that gets to the root of the problem.”

One day during peak kitten season, Carr was out with TippedEars co-founder Renae Woith when she was struck by the number of sick and injured cats on the streets and the challenges of understaffed rescues working to home them.

“It kind of got her wheels working, like, ‘What can I do as a business?’” Woith said.

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1. Foster kittens Bisque, Poolboy and Chauffeur play together during a silent reading night. 2. Foster kitten Sesame walks around a display in the store.

Almost a year later, Cool Cat Collective was born.

It was still warm outside on an early September evening as the last of the daytime visitors left the cat boutique. Once they were gone, Carr made her final touches for the night’s silent reading party: laying cushions in store corners and scattering toy mice across the floor.

In the catio, Poolboy, a domestic shorthair, licked a Churu treat from a visiting reader’s hand. When he and his siblings — all named after blue-collar jobs — arrived in late July, they were timid. But at this silent reading party, they bounded about the room, crawling on attendees’ laps between wrestling matches.

“It makes me so happy when the shy ones become social,” Carr said.

A sign hanging outside the catio tallied good news: 93 adoptions since July 2024. TippedEars co-founder Vita Manzoli said that’s about double the numbers the rescue used to see before the boutique opened.

TippedEars’ partnership with Cool Cat Collective has been a boon for the nonprofit, which receives 100% of the proceeds from the cat boutique’s “First Thursday” silent reading parties and “Third Thursday” doodle nights, which both cost $15 to attend. But it’s not only the financial support that has made a difference for TippedEars cats.

“We’ve gotten volunteers from them — donors, adopters, obviously, but the byproduct of that is really just educating people about the cat overpopulation crisis, what TNR is and how they can help,” Woith said.

Placing rescues at Cool Cat Collective, where they are comfortable and their personalities are on full display, has also allowed TippedEars to give them a better chance at being adopted.

“The cat they may not have looked twice at online, they now are the one [adopters are] taking home, because they actually got to meet them,” Woith said.

“This is a beautiful marrying of my interests,” silent reading party attendee Regan Rudman said of the event. “It also provides a great third space that we’re really missing nowadays.”

Carr has a spreadsheet of potential resident kittens always on her mind, so she’s eager to facilitate adoptions. But everyone is welcome at Cool Cat Collective, whether they’re looking to adopt or not.

“You don’t even have to be shopping,” Carr said. “That was part of our goal: to create a space with a really low barrier to access for people who are cat-curious or just need a little moment of cat joy in their day.”

Regan Rudman, a recent Long Beach transplant, can’t have a cat of her own for health reasons. Still, she visits Cool Cat Collective every month. She tried for three months to snag a ticket to the store’s silent reading night before she secured a spot for the September event.

“Getting to actually interact with cats in an environment that they feel comfortable in just makes my heart so happy,” Rudman said.

Rudman, who works at a publishing company, made an effort to focus on her book during the silent reading hour, but she also hoped her ruffled leg warmers would entice a curious kitten to come over.

“I think everyone is a little distracted by the cats,” said silent reading party attendee Mathilde Hernandez, who befriended foster cat Gumball.

Other attendees, lounging on cushions throughout the boutique, gazed down at their e-readers but peeked as cats bounced around like pinballs in their periphery.

Poolboy and sibling Chauffer, who would find their forever home together that weekend, were particularly rowdy. On the other hand, Bisque — from a litter Carr called “the Soups” — hid in a cardboard house for an hour before she finally stretched a paw out, like a jazz hand through the “front door.”

“There’s always some antic happening,” Carr said. “People are reading, but they also have one eye on the cats as they’re reading. I’d be curious asking people, like, how far into their book they actually get.”

Attendee Lien Nguyen, whose love for the kittens overrode her cat allergy, admitted she’d drop her book the second a cat came into her vicinity. But no matter how hard they tried, scarcely an attendee could successfully attract a kitten. The cats chose their company, not the other way around.

“Part of our goal was to create a space with a really low barrier to access for people who are cat-curious or, you know, just need a little moment of cat joy in their day,” said Jena Carr, co-founder of Cool Cat Collective.

“It was like rejection therapy whenever they went away,” Nguyen said.

That’s why Likins was so touched when Soup Enhancements found her at the August silent reading party. She nearly burst into tears, she said.

Later that evening, she was moved even more when her boyfriend, Max Mineer, bonded with his feline soulmate, Handyman. Happily, Handyman happened to be the only cat Soup Enhancements tolerated.

Now, the two cats live together in Likins and Mineer’s Long Beach apartment. They sleep together, clean each other and, despite being from different litters, generally behave like siblings.

The day Likins brought the cats home, staffers at Cool Cat Collective and TippedEars gave her every resource imaginable, including a 20% off coupon for Chewy products and scratch post recommendations. And there was an easy out: If anything went wrong, the couple could bring the cats back, no questions asked.

“It really made me trust them more to know that they were thinking to the future about these cats,” Likins said. “It wasn’t just a process of making sure that a cat got a home. It was making sure that a cat got a life.”

Palestinian boy Ahmed Aaed takes care of stray cats in Gaza, which brings him comfort and purpose. He’s shared his grief over one kitten he was unable to save due to the Israeli-imposed shortage of food and medicine.