- Electronic warfare has played a prominent role during the war in Ukraine.
- Ukraine and Russia are both using EW to interfere with each other's operations and aid their own.
After years of neglecting electronic warfare, the US Army is rushing to revitalize its jamming capabilities.
The catalyst is the Ukraine war, where cheap but plentiful drones are playing a vital — almost decisive — role, doing everything from spotting for artillery to destroying armored vehicles.
At the same time, jamming has emerged as perhaps the most effective counter-drone weapon: Ukraine may be losing 10,000 drones a month — many to Russian electronic-warfare systems — while it strives to boost its jamming capabilities. Rather than using scarce and expensive antiaircraft missiles and guns to shoot down a drone that may cost only a few hundred dollars, it's easier to disrupt the link between the drone and its operator, causing it to crash.
This has put fresh impetus behind the US Army's electronic-warfare upgrades. Douglas Bush, the assistant secretary of the Army for acquisition, logistics, and technology, told reporters during an August 7 roundtable discussion that the Army was "fundamentally reinvesting in rebuilding" its "tactical electronic-warfare capability after that largely left the force over the last 20 years."
The Army already has several programs underway, but Bush said what was being seen in Ukraine was "adding to that urgency to get those going."
The problem is that after fighting low-tech adversaries in the decades after the Cold War, the US military "has lost some muscle memory" in electronic warfare, Gen. Charles Brown Jr., the current Air Force chief of staff who is the incoming chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told Congress in July.
Concern about electronic warfare, or EW, isn't new, nor is the US deficient in all aspects of it. The Air Force and Navy, for example, have long devoted enormous resources to jamming enemy radars and antiaircraft weapons.
But for the Army's electronic-warfare capabilities, several challenges are converging. Even as Army EW has languished, Russia and China have invested heavily in capabilities, such as signals intelligence-gathering, to locate radio transmitters and thus pinpoint the location of enemy units, especially their headquarters and command posts.
Ukrainian forces have had great success in locating Russian command posts and then destroying them with long-range weapons such as HIMARS rockets. For its part, Russia has been able to use EW to send Ukraine's GPS-guided JDAM glide bombs and HIMARS rockets off course.
Ukraine's success has spurred some US Army commanders to warn about the vulnerability of their own command posts, which have an electronic footprint that they worry Chinese forces will easily be able to find.
Brown told lawmakers in July that because the US focus had been elsewhere and rivals had been investing in electronic-warfare capabilities, the US military "would likely face challenges protecting itself from electromagnetic attack" by its "most advanced adversaries."
Most armies — or at least the high-tech ones — are vulnerable to EW, but the US military is especially vulnerable because its way of war is so dependent on electronic communications. Operations by forces across land, sea, air, space, and cyber are supposed to be precisely coordinated via data networks.
Sensor-to-shooter kill chains such as the Joint All Domain Command and Control project aim to connect sensors and weapons so tightly that a target can be located and destroyed within minutes by an array of weapons, from GPS-guided missiles to swarms of small kamikaze drones.
However, the common denominator of all these systems is reliable and uninterrupted communications. That's why China formed its Strategic Support Force in 2015: to employ cyberwarfare and other methods to disrupt American command-and-control, leaving US forces blind and uncoordinated.
The US Army is trying to reply in kind. For example, the Army's Terrestrial Layer System – Brigade Combat Team program is developing an electronic-warfare suite mounted on Stryker armored vehicles to enable maneuver brigades to detect and disrupt enemy communications.
The Army said in September 2021 the goal of the TLS-BCT was to provide "the maneuver commander with electronic attack and offensive cyber warfare options to deny, degrade, disrupt, or manipulate enemy signals of interest and the targeted force."
Lockheed Martin was awarded a $59 million contract in 2022 to deliver prototypes this year. Other Army EW projects include mounting a jamming pod on an MQ-1C Gray Eagle drone.
Bush says the US Army's electronic-warfare weapons are still effective but that the service is "constantly having to update them to account for, in this case, enemy jamming capability, and that's ongoing," and they are "taking lessons" from Ukraine.
Observing events in Ukraine "reinforces the Army's commitment" to TLS-BCT and higher-echelon EW programs, Bush says. "They're on track. I feel good about them," he said.
Michael Peck is a defense writer whose work has appeared in Forbes, Defense News, Foreign Policy magazine, and other publications. He holds a master's in political science. Follow him on Twitter and LinkedIn.