Deft Jam: Electronic Warfare Is The Face Of Future Combat
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Among the five basic forces that shape our universe, electromagnetism is by far the most malleable in the hands of humans. In fact, civilization as we know it today would be impossible without the myriad uses of electricity that have appeared since Samuel Morse sent his first telegraph message in 1844. But history shows that humans will fight over anything that confers power, and electromagnetism is proving to be no exception. So the electromagnetic spectrum has become a warfighting domain, a place where invisible enemies maneuver for advantage.
Electronic warfare, as this cat-and-mouse game is called, isn’t something that military practitioners like to talk about in public. Almost everything about the subject is secret. Companies such as BAE Systems and Raytheon make billions of dollars every year equipping warfighters with the tools they need to dominate the spectrum, and yet seldom disclose details about what they’re doing. For instance, BAE developed the agile electronic warfare suite on the F-35 fighter, likely to be the most widely used tactical aircraft in the world through mid-century. Good luck getting hard information about how the company designed it, or what it can do.
Or consider Raytheon, which recently won a big contract to develop the Navy’s Next Generation Jammer. Its executives speak about dominating the spectrum “from direct current to visible light,” meaning across the vast majority of applications for which electricity is currently used in commerce and conflict. We know a prototype of the airborne jammer that will be a significant step in that direction performed very well in tests last year, but when it comes to the particulars of why it is so formidable, company execs aren’t talking.
I should mention that most of the big companies involved in this line of work give money to my think tank, and some of them are consulting clients. Not that it did me any good in writing this piece. When I ask them about electronic threats and countermeasures, their answers have about as much substance as the signals they manipulate. You really need to be an insider to have any inkling of what’s going on, and I have no clearances. Every once in a while, though, a government official will let on that something big is up — like last September, when the Pentagon’s research chief warned an audience at the National Press Club, “we have lost the electromagnetic spectrum.”
(Retrieved from Wikimedia)
He was exaggerating, but the point was taken: in a world where innovation is proceeding at an unprecedented pace and almost all the breakthroughs involve electromagnetism, America’s warfighters need to run as fast as they can just to stay where they are vis-a-vis enemies. Sydney J. Freedberg of BreakingDefense.com, who has done a better job than just about anybody in the fourth estate of keeping up with these trends, says the shift from analog electronics using components like vacuum tubes to the brave new world of “solid state” digital devices has transformed the race for electromagnetic supremacy.
It doesn’t help that the digital revolution was accompanied by the offshoring of America’s consumer electronics industry. Many of the new ideas today come on the commercial side rather than in government research labs, and those innovations then feed into the military arena. For instance, it is a snap to acquire the commercial technology to jam GPS signals. All you need is a transmitter strong enough to drown out the weak GPS signal — it’s coming from satellites over 12,000 miles away — in your area of interest. If the joint force’s “satellite-guided” weapons can’t receive that signal due to interference, they won’t work.
But that’s just the beginning of where the Navy’s shipboard jamming efforts could lead, because the digital technology supporting it is amazingly fungible. As Freedberg wrote in a March 20 story, the same “phased array” that is used to jam incoming missiles can also be used for communications, or for sensing. And it can be integrated with electronic systems on other warships, or aircraft overhead, to create a fleet-wide defense in which each vessel contributes to the protection of all the vessels. One for all and all for one, as it were.
Even if this stuff wasn’t so secret, it would still be arcane. Take that phased array. Basically, it’s an antenna that shifts direction and function by modifying its signal using software algorithms, rather than physically moving. It’s more reliable than old-fashioned, mechanically steered antennas, which can fail at the worst possible time due to all those moving parts. The need to migrate from a mechanically steered antenna to an electronically steered system was one reason why the Navy awarded Raytheon the contract for its Next Generation Jammer. The airborne system will be able to generate more jamming beams against a wider array of threats simultaneously than the analog system in use today.
The larger challenge dictating the need for a new airborne jammer, though, is the emergence of threats for which the joint force lacks adequate responses. Some operate in non-traditional bands, or utilize unconventional “waveforms,” or exploit novel techniques like frequency hopping to elude countermeasures. Electronic warfare has become the coin of the realm in modern combat, and every major military power exploits the spectrum in pursuit of what might be called the Five “Ds” — detection, deception, denial, disruption, and destruction. When the Pentagon official said America had lost the spectrum, what he meant was that there are so many threats popping up, it is becoming difficult to stay ahead of all of them.
The situation is so complicated that even the experts can’t agree on how to organize for what some of them call “spectrum warfare.” Should electronic warfare techniques like deception and jamming be grouped together with seemingly related skills like cybersecurity and signals intelligence, or should they be treated as different disciplines? The trend, it would appear, is towards convergence, with all of the overlapping technologies rolled into a single integrated architecture supported by agile software. For instance, the F-35 fighter can perform reconnaissance, offensive/defensive jamming, and cyber attacks all from a single combat platform, thanks to the ability of its core processor to integrate diverse functions. Perhaps this is a model, or at least a metaphor, for the future.
The logic of a more integrated approach to electronic warfare and related fields isn’t just functional or operational — it is also fiscal. With defense spending capped by Congress and budget projections indicating there is no time in the foreseeable future that Washington will not be borrowing over a billion dollars per day, warfighters have to find ways of keeping up that don’t require more money. Breaking down the traditional barriers between warfighting communities to accomplish novel effects may be the only way America can stay ahead of the explosion of challenges on the electromagnetic spectrum. Digital technology has the potential to deliver an answer, but right now what it is delivering is some mighty ominous threats.
Of course, there are other ways of making smart weapons, like equipping them with homing radar or infrared sensors that seek out heat sources (such as aircraft engines). But there are countermeasures for all of these approaches. And that’s a big part of what electronic warfare is about. Northrop Grumman won a contract earlier this year to upgrade jamming devices on the Navy’s surface warships so they can disrupt the targeting systems in anti-ship missiles. The Navy recognized that it would be a lot easier to confuse attacking missiles than try to actually shoot them down — especially when an enemy barrage might involve hundreds of missiles — so that is what Northrop will help the sea service do.
