Over 700 Space Force personnel stationed at multiple military bases are participating in the exercise, where guardians will test and train on space-based capabilities to conduct orbital warfare, electromagnetic warfare, cyber warfare and more. During the event, the service will present threat-informed scenarios simulating a fight with an adversary and allowing for troops to use operational military satellites — as well as commercial assets — to counter them.

“As the scenario increases in challenges and complexity, this gives our blue forces a thinking adversary to spar against,” Lt. Col. Shawn Green, commander of the Space Force’s 527th Space Aggressor Squadron, said Tuesday during a briefing with reporters. “Our goal is to create a relevant, realistic, informed threat replication for blue to fight through so that we can increase the probability of success in war.”

Resolute Space 2025 is part of the Department of the Air Force’s massive exercise known as Resolute Force Pacific (REFORPAC), intended to demonstrate the ability of both the Air and Space Forces to rapidly deploy against adversaries in the Indo-Pacific. It is a central piece of the DAF’s new Department Level Exercise (DLE) series that includes other major Air Force training events, such as Mobility Guardian and Bamboo Eagle, happening concurrently.

The Space Force’s exercise began July 8, and will feature guardians stationed at Joint Base Pearl Harbor-Hickam in Hawaii, as well as Peterson, Buckley and Shriever Space Force Bases, according to the service. Other personnel stationed throughout the Indo-Pacific will also participate in Resolute Space 2025, which is slated to wrap up in early August.

To simulate enemy capabilities and attacks, Green said the Space Force created a mission planning cell that will synchronize fires across space-based orbital, cyber and electromagnetic warfare — presenting various moves and countermoves that guardians will have to fight through.

Resolute Space 2025 will also integrate with elements of the REFORPAC exercise, which aims to ensure the Space Force can effectively fight alongside the Air Force in the future.

“We are working to fuse our different mission areas with the time-phased scheme of maneuver as part of the larger scenario,” Green said. “We’re doing that by providing space electromagnetic warfare, orbital warfare [and] cyber warfare. And we’re using those types of activities to fuse into this large, globally integrated exercise for live, virtual, synthetic scenarios so that our training is realistic, relevant and challenging.”

Col. Jay Steingold, Resolute Space director, told reporters that the exercise also spans across other key mission areas — including space domain awareness; satellite communication; positioning, navigation and timing (PNT); intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR); missile warning; command and control; and military-commercial integration.

Personnel will be able to use on-orbit space assets designed for training guardians, as well as satellites owned by commercial partners during the exercise, Steingold added.

“We have satellites that we are able to utilize to provide training for our U.S. Space Force guardians, whether that be an understanding of how they quote-unquote fly, or in terms of payload capacities and capabilities and general training on orbit,” he said. “We’re certainly leveraging our commercial partners and their capabilities — not only from their developmental standpoint, but also what they bring to bear in terms of cost savings.”

While the Space Force has held exercises in the past, those events were largely focused on individual mission areas and not at the scale of Resolute Space. Steingold said that while large-scale exercises are costly and time-consuming to plan and execute, participating in Resolute Space 2025 is imperative to improving the service’s capabilities, training and overall integration with the joint force and international allies.

“This is the opportunity to really dig in and find out if we have any weaknesses whatsoever, so we can fill them,” he said. “Whether it’s capabilities that our [Operational Test and Training Infrastructure] partners can bring from a training environments perspective, to actual warfighting capabilities that we need to take us further into the future to ensure the safety and security of the space domain.”

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Previously known as the 915^th Cyber Warfare Battalion, the unit, which belongs to Army Cyber Command, provides tactical, on-the-ground cyber operations — mostly through radio-frequency effects — electronic warfare and information operations. The unit will help plan tactical operations for commanders and conduct missions in coordination with deployed forces. It consists of several expeditionary cyber and electromagnetic activities (CEMA) teams that are scalable and will maneuver with units and conduct operations on the ground for commanders.

The activation ceremony signifies the unit’s growth from its inception of table of distribution and allowances years to a modified table of organization and equipment organization. The former is a unit organized to perform a specific mission in which funds are discontinued as soon as the mission is accomplished while the latter refers to equipment a unit needs to accomplish its specific doctrinal mission.

The unit came out of a pilot effort years ago to test how the Army could integrate tactical cyber and electronic warfare effects for brigades on the ground without having to rely upon the remote, strategic resources of U.S. Cyber Command, which are not only in high demand but, at the time of the pilot, limited in authorities to conduct operations.

“We have come a long way from our initial CSC-B [pilot] engagements and Combat Training Center rotations. We educated Army leaders on what cyber can bring to the fight, but we also learned what the Army needs. We did not have all of the answers and every engagement has been crucial to our battalion’s growth and development. We can thank our leaders and soldiers for their contributions for the better part of a decade that have helped shape what the 11th Cyber Battalion has become,” 11^th Command Sgt. Maj. Marlene Harshman said.

The 915^th previously never received battalion colors or a distinctive unit insignia. With the activation of the 11^th, the unit now has both.

“The transition reflects Army Cyber’s recognition of the Expeditionary CEMA Team as a permanent part of Army forces and an essential part of future land operations — the need for CEMA Soldiers is increasing,” said Lt. Col. Benjamin Klimkowski, commander of the 11^th. “The most important thing to recognize about the transition is what is not changing; while parts of our structure are now more stable and doctrinally grounded, 11th Cyber Battalion will remain adaptive, innovative, and aggressive about supporting the needs of the warfighter.”

As the world and adversaries adapt, the Army is looking to change in kind.

“The Army will adapt with world requirements, this is one of those necessary changes. We owe the people of the United States a cyber force that will help answer the requirements for commanders at all echelons. We will be a force multiplier to Army Cyber Command and an asset to the Army Service Component Commands,” Harshman said.

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Blending electronic warfare tools may be required when old-school cyberattack methods can’t get the job done.

“Traditional cyber operations via hard-wired networks are increasingly challenged by adversaries using standalone networks that have an air gap between themselves and the broader internet, including mobile devices on private wireless networks,” Bryan Clark, senior fellow and director of the Center for Defense Concepts and Technology at the Hudson Institute, told DefenseScoop. “Gaining access to these networks may require physically connecting to them, but another way can be to use RF signals to enter via a radio antenna or wireless router. And against combat systems — such as on a ship, plane, or air defense site — a technique is to access it via a radar or jammer antenna and associated processing stack.”

While the services have been charting their own paths to converge such capabilities to meet their priorities, Congress is trying to push them harder, identifying gaps in their overall approach.

The Senate’s version of the fiscal 2023 National Defense Authorization Act directed the Pentagon to develop a strategy for converged cyber and electronic warfare conducted by deployed military and intelligence assets.

“Through detailed oversight of the committee, a gap was determined in the operational strategies for fielding emerging RF-enabled cyber capabilities,” Sen. James Inhofe, R-Okla., ranking member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, said in a statement. “This provision is intended to ensure that the leadership of the Department, Combatant Commands, and military services mature the strategy and capability development processes for these emerging capabilities.”

Clark articulated the need for an integrated plan between the military branches.

“The reason why alignment between services is important is the Air Force and Army are working on a viable future EW approach, but which may not support RF-enabled cyber,” he said. “The Navy has a strong capability for now to do RF-enabled cyber, but may not have a viable future plan. By bringing the services together, the proposed strategy could address the need for U.S. forces to do more RF-enabled cyber in the future.”

These RF operations are a way to inject cyber effects wirelessly, Clark said. With the proliferation of sensors and electronic warfare equipment, the military is looking to better combine them on the battlefield.

“We’re seeing a lot of synergy between the electromagnetic spectrum, EMS, EW, cyber and [information operations]. We believe in the future, the integration of that to achieve the outcomes of cyber operations forces is going to be necessary,” Michael Clark, director of J9, acquisition and technology directorate at U.S. Cyber Command, told reporters in July.

Despite Cybercom conducting more of the traditional, remote type of cyber operations against networks, it has been investing in these types of electronic warfare capabilities for some time. The combatant command requested $16.7 million in fiscal 2023 for tools to “adapt EW technology and cyber-peculiar capabilities to gain aces to targeted enemy forces,” according to budget documents.

The Senate bill language charges DOD with developing requirements for service-retained tactical cyber forces for offensive and defensive missions, though some of the services have already invested in these types of assets. As these capabilities mature, it is expected that these proximal forces could actually gain access to adversaries’ systems and pass that off to high-end Cybercom operators remotely to exploit.

The Army has built its own tactical force to conduct these types of proximal RF-enabled cyber operations in support of commanders’ mission objectives with the 915^th Cyber Warfare Battalion.

The Army’s Cyber Center of Excellence (CCoE) along with Headquarters Army and Cybercom are collaborating on a cohesive strategy for tactical RF-enabled cyber operations, a CCoE spokesperson said.

Authorities to conduct cyber ops are notoriously onerous and held at the top levels of government, but these more proximal mission “effects” conducted through radio-frequency require fewer levels of approval. However, cyber operations should still be coordinated through Cybercom’s command-and-control mechanisms and capabilities, especially in the event Cybercom wants to use these proximal forces as an in to a network or vice versa.

“We acknowledge USCYBERCOM’s standing authorities to control and direct offensive cyber forces. Authorities and command/support relationships in future conflict will vary and be based on applicable higher echelon [execute orders],” the CCoE spokesperson said. “The Army will be ready to present and/or employ well-equipped and highly-trained expeditionary cyber forces and other multi-domain capable forces by 2030.”

The Marine Corps, from a ground perspective, has also invested in tactically focused cyber and electronic warfare capabilities, mainly through its Marine Expeditionary Force Information Groups, or MIGs, which support each MEF within the Corps by integrating electronic warfare with intelligence, communications, military information support operations, space, cyber and communication strategies to provide Marine Expeditionary Force commanders with an information advantage.

“There certainly is going to be a convergence of what we can do on the tactical edge with signals intelligence, with cyber-EW that’s going to be very enabling for the joint force and for the intel community,” Lt. Gen. Matthew Glavy, deputy commandant for information, said Tuesday during an event hosted by GovConWire.

Glavy noted that the forthcoming Marine Corps Information Command will essentially be the enabling function for converging these capabilities and navigating the authorities that exist between them.

“If you’re not sitting very close to where all these authorities reside and expertise and capabilities that we want to be able to push to the tactical edge, then you may get it wrong,” he said regarding what the new command — which will be stood up in fiscal 2023 — will do.

At the joint level, there are a lot of authorities that have to be coordinated, especially in the non-kinetic and digital realm as it pertains to intelligence collection — which is very heavily regulated under spying authorities known as Title 50 — and operations within cyberspace and the electromagnetic spectrum meant to disrupt adversaries’ operations, known as Title 10 or general warfighting authorities.

In many cases, the lines between these disciplines can be blurred given how closely related their actions are.

“Putting all those authorities together can get a little complicated. Some of its intelligence related, some of it’s more Title 10 warfighting focused, but the force that can bring them all together and can do it right, to do it in a responsible manner is going to be key,” Glavy said, noting the new command will act as that integrator.

The Navy, for its part, has organized all of its information warfare capabilities — which includes cyber and electronic warfare — under one organization, the deputy chief of naval operations for information warfare, or OPNAV N2N6.

Within that office, the Crypto-Electronic and Cyber Warfare Division works as the principal adviser to establish and validate requirements as well as direct overall planning and programming for cyber, cryptologic and electronic warfare tactical networks and capabilities, according to a spokesperson.

In the air domain, the military is looking to include advanced radar technologies that are not just passive, but can also inject capabilities into the environment.

For the Navy, it’s Next Generation Jammer system — its premier aerial electronic attack platform mounted aboard EA-18 Growler aircraft that will replace the ALQ-99 jamming pod — will provide some level of cyber capability.

“Now with the ability to do phased array, advanced jamming techniques, we really start to blur the lines, I think, between what we would consider traditional jamming with cyber warfare,” Rear Adm. John Meier, commander of Naval Air Force Atlantic, said last year. “I think that the capabilities inherent in the [Next Generation Jammer] jamming pod are going to open up a wide, wide array of not only jamming techniques, ranges, effective radiated power, but also taking us into other areas that we’ve never really had the ability to do before.”

Clark noted that the threats posed by advanced adversaries necessitate this push.

“As U.S. opponents become more sophisticated, U.S. cyber warfare needs to rely more on RF methods for access,” Clark said. “For the Navy and Air Force, this will mean building their next generation of EW systems in ways that allow them to inject cyber tools.”

Clark pointed to the Air Force’s Skyborg program and its envisioned Next-Generation Air Dominance platform, as well as the Army’s Air-Launched Effects — essentially small drones or payloads released in midair by larger aircraft — as unmanned examples of these types of capabilities. However, he questioned whether these systems will have the onboard processing and network capabilities to accommodate RF-enabled cyber tools like the much larger and more expensive EA-18G.

Similar to the Navy, from an operational standpoint, the Air Force created 16^th Air Force, the service’s first information warfare command housing cyber and electronic warfare forces, among others, under one commander.

“As you start to mix the capabilities together, you’ll find one segment of it that needs to grow. One of those areas is how we converge electronic warfare and cyberspace operations,” the outgoing commander of 16^th Air Force, Lt. Gen. Timothy Haugh, told reporters in July just before his departure to become the deputy commander of Cyber Command. “That is an area where our service is talking about it. It’s an area Congress is interested in. And now we think we can inform some of that based off of the expertise we have within our various wings. That’s one that’s now a discussion.”

Haugh indicated that 16^th Air Force created a combined detachment between the 55^th Wing, which does a lot of reconnaissance and ISR work, and the 67^th Cyberspace Wing. The 55^th Wing has expertise in the electromagnetic spectrum from a reconnaissance perspective while the 67^th is thinking about systems through an interconnected lens, he said.

“We have established a combined detachment between the two wings to allow them to bring that expertise together,” he said. “Our first step in doing that was we wanted to have an opportunity where they could come together under one roof and allow that synergy to begin.”

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The Terrestrial Layer System-Brigade Combat Team (TLS-BCT), the Army’s first brigade-organic integrated EW, signals intelligence and cyber platform, will be mounted on a Stryker. First unit issued is slated for the end of fiscal 2023.

To date, the Army doesn’t have any program-of-record jamming capabilities and has historically relied upon quick reaction capabilities that fill a gap identified by a commander. These have consisted of the dismounted Versatile Radio Observation and Direction (VROD) and VROD Modular Adaptive Transmission system (VMAX) — the former surveys the field from an electromagnetic perspective, and the latter provides a limited electronic attack capability.

When it comes to developing programs of record, the Army is prioritizing filling immediate gaps.

“First thing is we have to solve the immediate gap. We have to get a capability in the hands of the infantry light, dismounted BCT (brigade combat team). That comes with a manpack version of TLS,” Col. Gary Brock, director and Army capability manager for electronic warfare, said during a presentation Aug. 17 at the TechNet Augusta conference.

However, a requirements document is “making its way through” the Army, Mark Kitz, program executive officer for intelligence, electronic warfare and sensors, told FedScoop in an interview at TechNet Augusta regarding the potential for forthcoming dismounted capabilities.

“We’ve done a lot of investment in VROD/VMAX … in the past, and then as part of TLS-BCT is a requirement for a dismount capability,” he said.

He explained that the ultimate solution envisioned will have a man-packable dismount capability that can be detached from the Stryker, but officials are still working with the Army’s EW requirements generators on a final requirement to accelerate that capability.

This capability is different from what the 915^th Cyber Warfare Battalion, which will conduct tactical cyber and electronic warfare operations, will use.

While they’ll be able to plug into these brigade-organic EW and cyber systems, using them to conduct more sophisticated radio frequency-type operations, the TLS-BCT dismount capability will focus on delivering more spectrum capability but underpinned by a tailorable, software-defined baseline to be able to operate in multiple theaters.

Army officials have said they are also looking at other concepts for electronic warfare, especially in the Pacific — the priority region for the Department of Defense — given Strykers will be difficult to maneuver on the terrain there, which consists of a number of islands and mountains.

“It’s a physics problem we got to think through,” Brock said.

The Army is looking at what it calls ground-launched effects, which could be a system launched from an unmanned platform or a ground tube that soldiers carry and travels tens to hundreds of kilometers. The Army is still examining specifics such as if that system should hover — and for how long — and what types of capabilities it should have such as electronic attack, electronic support or electronic protection.

But in order to make these systems successful in hostile environments, Brock said the Army must get to a truly transport-agnostic network.

“Data centric Army, data fight. How do we secure the data? How do we not care what platform or what transport the data goes across because we’re confident in the security of the data? That’s how we’re thinking about the Pacific fight right now — with dismounts,” he said.

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A provision in the committee’s version of the fiscal 2023 National Defense Authorization Act is requiring the Department of Defense to develop a strategy for “converged cyber and electronic warfare conducted by and through deployed military and intelligence assets operating in the radiofrequency domain to provide strategic, operational and tactical effects in support of combatant commanders.”

The committee passed its version of the bill June 16 but did not release the text until July 18.

There are significant similarities between cyberspace effects and electronic warfare, especially in the tactical sphere of battle. Some services, namely the Army, but the Marine Corps as well, have developed tactically focused forces to exploit these capabilities and similarities, primarily through what are known as radio-frequency effects.

This is essentially cyber effects that exploit Wi-Fi or other wireless electronic systems using proximal or close access forces. Contrast that with what U.S. Cyber Command does primarily, which is Internet-Protocol based cyber operations, conducted remotely.

While authorities to conduct cyber operations are notoriously onerous and held at the top levels of government, these more proximal effects conducted through radio-frequency require fewer levels of approval.

In fact, in a report accompanying the SASC’s bill language, the committee noted these “service retained” forces, a distinction from the cyber mission force, which each service presents to and is owned by Cyber Command.

“The committee believes it is essential for the Department to determine its requirements and roles for what are referred to as ‘service-retained’ cyber forces for both defensive and offensive support to combatant commands,” the report said. “The committee expects that these service-retained forces would become part of the personnel rotation through elements of the Cyberspace Operations Forces for career progression. These forces would also fulfill critical roles in protecting deployed and often disconnected weapons systems and platforms and supporting offensive cyber operations executed by military units and systems.”

The bill wants the DOD to develop recommendations regarding command and control, deconfliction and coordination relationships and processes between combatant commanders and the Cyber Command regarding tactical cyber operations and converged cyber and electronic warfare operations conducted prior to and during armed conflict.

Additionally, it charges DOD with developing requirements for service-retained tactical cyber forces for offensive and defensive missions.

As these capabilities and forces mature, it is expected that these proximal forces could actually gain accesses and pass that off to high end Cyber Command operators remotely to exploit. In fact, Cyber Command has budgeted for electronic warfare capabilities, requesting $16.7 million for tools to “adapt EW technology and cyber-peculiar capabilities to gain aces to targeted enemy forces,” according to budget documents.

The Army has created the 915^th Cyber Warfare Battalion, which will ultimately encompass a total of 12 expeditionary cyber and electromagnetic activities teams, or ECT, by 2026 that will help plan tactical cyber operations for commanders and conduct missions in coordination with deployed forces.

The Marine Corps, for its part, has also developed tactical cyber forces within its Marine Expeditionary Force Information Groups (MIGs), which integrate electronic warfare with intelligence, communications, military information support operations, space, cyber and communication strategy to provide MEF commanders with an information advantage.

Optimizing Cyber Command

The bill also revisits questions from a previous NDAA regarding how elements under Cyber Command are organized, citing dissatisfaction that the DOD did not address several of the elements required.

Specifically, the committee wants a study to determine the optimal strategy for structuring and manning elements of the various Joint Force Headquarters-Cyber (JFHQ-C), Joint Mission Operations Centers, Cyber Operations-Integrated Planning Elements and Joint Cyber Centers.

The services do not own offensive teams. Instead, these teams work through several organizations, each formally known as Joint Force Headquarters-Cyber, which in turn provide planning, targeting, intelligence and cyber capabilities to the combatant commands to which they’re assigned. The heads of the four service cyber components also lead their respective JFHQ-C. These organizations oversee combat mission teams and combat support teams.

The Joint Mission Operations Centers are actually where the JFHQ-C commands and controls and executes cyber operations.

The Cyber Operations-Integrated Planning Element were created as a means of better integrating cyber operations into the overall planning process. Cyber planners, not actual operators, are physically embedded within various staff sections at the combatant commands to provide expertise on how cyber can be incorporated into their operations.

The Joint Cyber Centers are where combatant commands oversee all aspects of cyberspace operations.

The study must include:

• operational effects on the services if each of the entities listed above are restructured from organizations that are service component organizations to joint organizations;
• organizational effects on the services if the billets associated with the entities above are transferred to Cyber Command and designated as joint billets;
• operational and organizational effects on the services, Cyber Command, other combatant commands and the Joint Staff if the above entities are realigned, restructured, or consolidated, and;
• clarification of the relationship and differentiation between cyber operations–integrated planning elements and joint cyber centers of the combatant commands, among others.

The fiscal 2020 NDAA included a nearly identical provision.

However, Congress doesn’t appear satisfied with the information it was provided.

“The committee is frustrated that the previous report on this topic, as required by section 1656 of the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2020 (Public Law 116-92), did not address many of the required elements,” the committee notes in the report accompanying the bill. “The committee encourages the Department to fully address all of the elements required by this study and to provide robust recommendations on an optimal strategy for providing cyber support to the geographic combatant commands.”

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