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| US Navy E/A-18G Growler Electronic Attack Aircraft |
By: Mark Pomerleau
Adversarial capabilities writ large have significantly improved vis-à-vis the United States (hence the necessity of the Defense Department’s so-called third offset strategy). One of these areas causing concern is that of the electromagnetic spectrum (EMS).
Operations in EMS have become significantly more complex as adversaries have begun to develop advanced jamming capabilities utilizing software-defined technologies significantly more advanced and reprogrammable than Cold War-era analog systems.
For example, both China and Iran have touted electronic warfare payloads that can create headaches for opposing ground forces below. The Chinese Xianglong Soar Dragon UAS includes large payloads enabling it to conduct electronic warfare (EW) missions. The long endurance of the system, and most large UAS platforms, make them ideal to jam radar below.
“In wartime, the Xianglong's high altitude jammers would seek to disrupt not only the radars of enemy fighters and missiles, but also jam and spoof communications between enemy bombers, airborne early warning and control aircraft, drones and even datalinks between satellites, ships, land based missile launchers and missiles,” Jeffery Lin and P.W. Singer wrote in Popular Science. “In such [a] role, the EW Xianglong would operate alongside a host of other Chinese EW aircraft, including Y-9 heavy transport jammers, J-16 and JH-7 strike aircraft, in both offensive and defensive operations.”
A September blog post for the American Enterprise Institute, a Washington-based think tank, indicates that Iran might have “augmented its UAV fleet with drones capable of jamming enemy communications and disrupting communications between an adversary’s drones and its controllers,” though the article expressed skepticism over the claim's accuracy — be it realized or aspirational — given that “the Iranian press often exaggerates.”
Several U.S. military officials from various service branches as well as the Pentagon have conceded that electronic warfare has been a neglected capability in the last 15 years given the intense focus on technologically inferior non-state actors in the Middle East and South Asia. This has led to an atrophy in capabilities on which the Pentagon wants to improve.
“The pace of change worldwide suggests that the U.S. needs agile, adaptive, and integrated EW capabilities,” a DoD spokesman told C4ISRNET in an email. “We develop capabilities in the electromagnetic spectrum (EMS) to counter an adversary's use of electronic attack (EA) with the electronic protection (EP) of U.S. systems and, when necessary, to degrade, neutralize, or destroy enemy combat capability.”
The way in which these capabilities have advanced overtime is the advancement of software capabilities enabling rapid reprogramming of signals. One of the defensive measures derived to counter these advancements is commonly termed cognitive EW. While coined as such, it's essentially applying machine learning to make systems smarter, according to Josh Niedzwiecki, director of sensor processing and exploitation at BAE Systems.
Read the full story at C4ISRnet