After divesting of much of its EW tool set following the Cold War, the Army has sought to rebuild its arsenal and tactics within the spectrum. That includes the gamut of electromagnetic spectrum operations such as electronic attack, or jamming, electronic support, or sensing the environment for enemy signals, and electronic protect, or guarding friendly systems and units from enemy jamming.

Observations from Ukraine have solidified the importance of robust and redundant capabilities, particularly within the spectrum.

In addition to having jammers for offensive actions, U.S. forces must possess a raft of other tools to be able to protect themselves from enemy jammers, hide within the spectrum and deceive the enemy.

As evidenced in Ukraine, units can be located and targeted with munitions solely based on their emissions within the electromagnetic spectrum.

“Commanders must be able to see themselves to control their emissions and defeat the enemy’s ability to sense, identify, locate, and target them. This is critically important when observations from current conflicts around the world show there are eight minutes from identification in the EMS to artillery impacting on the detected location of said emission,” the Army’s Multidomain Operations Range Guide states.

As such, the Army’s budget request would place more investments in these key areas of understanding its signatures and protecting forces with a combination of new-start programs, repurposed portfolios and existing efforts.

The Modular Electro-Magnetic Spectrum System (MEMSS) is a new start this budget cycle, stemming out of a prior science-and-technology effort called Modular Electromagnetic Spectrum Deception Suite (MEDS). Officials have previewed the effort in years past, noting some prototyping had gone toward developing it.

The Army is requesting $9.1 million in 2026 for the effort in its research-and-development budget. Specifically, it would provide force protection and freedom of maneuver through “radio frequency technical effects,” a term the Army uses to describe classified capabilities.

MEMSS will look to prioritize iterative development with commercial-off-the-shelf capabilities, a top priority for the Army and its electronic warfare portfolio overall.

The budget documents note that the system will be given to units as part of the Army’s transforming-in-contact (TiC) initiative, which aims to speed up how the service buys technologies and designs its forces and concepts by injecting emerging capabilities into units and letting them experiment with them during exercises and deployments.

The documents note that these units will receive prototyped capability and, as part of the program, fiscal ’26 funding will support testing to ensure it performs as expected against realistic threats to include both lab testing and evaluation from soldiers from TiC 2.0 units, which now involves armored formations as well as Multi-Domain Task Force and Army special operations units.

Another new start within the Army’s budget request is a program called Counter Surveillance Reconnaissance (CSR). It’s envisioned as a family of systems to provide force protection at echelon — specifically ground-based capabilities for division, corps and theater commanders — through enhanced situational awareness, operational planning tools for effects coordination and electronic support capabilities.

This program, along with many others, is included in the Army’s new Electronic Warfare Agile Systems Development program.

For this budget request, the Army sought to secure agile funding for a limited pot of systems: electronic warfare, unmanned aerial systems and counter-UAS. This agile funding allows the Army to consolidate capabilities into a single portfolio to better move money around and be more responsive to real-world events, as opposed to having to ask Congress for reprogramming requests. The budget documents note this pilot effort provides enhanced capabilities through fostering innovation and the accelerated development of promising technology.

The Army is requesting $34.4 million in R&D funding for CSR in fiscal 2026. The program aims to use technologies that will hide units’ locations within the electromagnetic spectrum. So-called low-probability-of-detection/low-probability-of-attribution non-kinetic effects will establish “unobserved” positions and preserve combat power, the documents note.

The CSR program will provide three distinct lines of effort for counter-space surveillance that will be controlled by an overarching mission planner and common execution software to plan and employ non-kinetic effects to protect friendly forces.

The prototype development for all three lines of effort are scheduled to begin in second quarter of 2026. The first unit issued for the first line of effort is scheduled for third quarter 2029, with the second and third slated for fourth quarter 2030.

The Army’s budget request is also asking for $1.5 million in R&D funding for a program to develop an integrated multi-mission electronic warfare force protection system.

That program, Integrated Electronic Warfare Systems, shifted in funding and terminology compared with last year’s budget release. It has now been moved to the agile funding pilot.

Additionally, in the previous budget proposal, the Army sought mainly to fund Counter-Radio Controlled Improvised Explosive Device (RCIED) Electronic Warfare (CREW), a term that is a relic of the Global War on Terror when insurgents used radio devices to trigger roadside bombs.

The CREW technology, however, is still relevant today as it can be used for counter-UAS and counter-communications.  

Now, the program is aiming to prototype an integrated multi-mission electronic warfare force protection system that can respond to changing signals of interest employed by adversaries.

When a signal is discovered that isn’t in a unit’s library of known signals, a countermeasure must be devised, which historically could have taken months. That pace is unacceptable for the fast-paced warfare of the future. The Army and other services are looking at rapid reprogramming on the battlefield, in part, by leveraging artificial intelligence.

“Electromagnetic warfare (EW) capability gaps exist across several areas, including the need for development of more sophisticated countermeasures, and the integration of artificial intelligence (AI) and advanced analytics into EW operations. Specifically, the development of advanced countermeasures that can effectively disrupt or neutralize enemy EW capabilities is crucial, especially in the face of evolving technologies and tactics. Integrating AI and advanced analytics into EW operations will significantly enhance the ability to quickly identify and respond to threats,” the budget documents state. “VMEWS is intended to provide a suite of electromagnetic warfare capabilities to protect wheeled and tracked vehicles against a wide range of radio frequency-controlled threats.”

The Army expects a competitive commercial solutions offering that leads to an other transaction agreement for a tech demonstration of a vehicle mounted multi-mission electronic warfare force protection system to accelerate technology maturation and prototyping.

A new procurement effort for the Army in the budget request is the Spectrum Situational Awareness System (S2AS), which will provide sensing and visualization of what units look like in the spectrum and allow commanders to be able to sense and report in real-time their command post signatures, sources of electromagnetic interference — either from coalition partners or the enemy — and threat emissions.

The Army awarded 3dB Labs earlier this year an other transaction agreement to develop and demonstrate a prototype. S2AS had already undergone a prototyping effort prior to the award.

The fiscal 2026 budget request includes $17.6 million in procurement funding for S2AS as a new start in procurement and under the “Electronic Warfare” program, which is also new this year as part of the agile pilot. Those funds would enable procurement, delivery, training and initial sparing of S2AS, according to budget documents, which state the Army plans to buy 20 systems.

The budget also asks for $8.9 million in research-and-development funding for S2AS.

The Army will be using transforming-in-contact units to help inform how the program matures.

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At the end of the Cold War, many of the services divested of their capability within the electromagnetic spectrum. Now, these technologies are at a premium and in high demand for jamming enemy communications, navigation and missiles while protecting against the same. Adversaries have invested heavily in this area following U.S. divestment, forcing a sprint to reinvigorate American EW prowess.

“We’ve made some progress this year [but] here’s my concern: there’s a lot of studies and there’s a lot of paper, but paper doesn’t jam and paper doesn’t hit missiles,” Rep. Don Bacon, R-Neb., said Tuesday during an event hosted by the Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies. “We need to have more capability output, and I’m just not seeing enough of it right now.”

Bacon chairs the House Armed Services Subcommittee on Cyber, Innovative Technologies and Information Systems and is a retired one-star Air Force general who specialized in electronic warfare.

He observed that what’s been learned from military history is that when nations feel dominant, they walk away from electromagnetic spectrum capabilities — thinking they might not be necessary — as was seen at the end of the Cold War when the United States was the sole superpower.

“If you’re very dominant, EW is an unnecessary expense. But if you think you’re going to be in a very tough fight, electronic warfare is critical to saving lives,” he said, adding: “We walked away from [it] in the ’90s and we put very little emphasis” on it. As a result, those capabilities atrophied.

The electromagnetic spectrum should have the same importance placed on it as the other domains of warfare, he suggested, despite not being considered a domain itself.

“We need to talk like we do air power, sea power, the ground, cyber … Just like air, we want to control the air, deny [it] to the bad guys — we got to have that same mindset for the spectrum. That means you need attack capabilities. We got [to] also have the defensive measures,” he said, noting the U.S. dominated in the electromagnetic spectrum when he was a brand new EW officer.

As a one-star in the Pentagon, when he sought resourcing for electronic warfare, officials would tell him there wasn’t enough to go around because other assets, such as the F-35, KC-46 or new intercontinental ballistic missiles, were higher on the priority list, he recalled.

Similarly, the Air Force is slated to only have 12 EA-37B Compass Call aircraft, which boasts cutting-edge capabilities to degrade and disrupt adversary communications, information processing, navigation and radar systems.

Air Combat Command officials say they need 22 of those systems, Bacon said, while others have noted they’d like more platforms for their regions, which contributes to resource constraints in the EW environment.

The Army, for its part, has been on a decade-long journey to rebuild its arsenal. Amid fits and starts, it has sought to cancel or reapproach several programs after years of development, having delivered its first program-of-record jammer only last year, awarding a system tested by Special Operations Command. The service is now looking to move faster in the electronic warfare realm, seeking to utilize agile funds to stay ahead of threats and buy commercial as much as possible.

Bacon has also made it a priority during his years in Congress to drive the services and DOD to identify personnel in charge of EW for accountability.

“When I first came in [Congress] in 2017, I’d go [to] a service, I’d go, ‘who’s in charge of EW?’ say, for the Army or Navy or the Air Force. They would say ‘it’s the vice chief of staff.’ Well, he or she is in charge of a lot of things,” Bacon said at the Mitchell Institute event. “We need somebody at the one- or two-star level to have that accountability.”

He noted progress on that front with leadership at the joint level, both on the Joint Staff and with a new Joint Electromagnetic Spectrum Operations Center at Strategic Command, as well as joint electromagnetic spectrum operations cells resident within each combatant command to help plan and integrate EW into operations.

“I feel like we’ve made a lot of strides in giving people responsibility and knowing who exactly we hold accountable,” he said.

Bacon also noted progress on getting the Pentagon to develop an EW strategy and implementation plan.

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1st Armored Brigade, 3rd Infantry Division is in Hohenfels, Germany, as part of Combined Resolve 25-02, a U.S., NATO and multi-partner exercise focusing on interoperability, that’s slated to take place from May to June. That unit has been designated as a so-called “transforming-in-contact” unit. That Army concept aims to speed up how the service buys technologies and designs its forces by injecting emerging capabilities into units and letting them experiment with them during exercises and deployments.

The unit has conducted four transforming-in-contact events to date — to include activities at home station and a rotation at the National Training Center at Fort Irwin, California, last year where they encounter a full force-on-force conflict against an opposing enemy.

During that event, 1st Brigade began testing out tactics and technologies for electromagnetic deception to trick the enemy into thinking its forces were in one place, even though they were actually in another location. They recorded what the electronic emissions of their command posts looked like and played those recordings back on the battlefield for the opposing force.

“Our first iteration with the deception command post out here at NTC we had great effects, where the OPFOR attacked it. At NTC, I did not have to move my brigade command post once because of enemy indirect fire, enemy contact,” Col. Jim Armstrong, 1st Armored Brigade Combat Team, 3rd Infantry Division commander, told reporters this week.

The unit placed those signatures in locations where personnel thought the enemy would look for a command post, played the signatures and put the real command posts somewhere else.

The opposing force attacked the fake command post, revealing its own position and making it vulnerable to attack.

One of the biggest lessons from Russia’s incursions into Ukraine — from 2014 to its latest invasion — is how units can be located and targeted with kinetic munitions solely based on their emissions within the electromagnetic spectrum.

In addition to pushing units to reduce their overall signatures, the Army is pursing technologies that will allow them to deceive the enemy and even hide in plain sight.

“Commanders must be able to see themselves to control their emissions and defeat the enemy’s ability to sense, identify, locate, and target them. This is critically important when observations from current conflicts around the world show there are eight minutes from identification in the EMS to artillery impacting on the detected location of said emission,” the Army’s Multidomain Operations Range Guide states.

That effort is a partnership between the Cyber Center of Excellence and Intelligence Center of Excellence to inform how units conduct electromagnetic spectrum training at combat training centers and home stations.

In many cases, it is back to the future for the Army in electromagnetic spectrum operations as a whole — having divested much of its gear and tactics following the Cold War — and decoys especially. The service is looking to regrow that tradecraft and expertise as adversaries view electronic warfare as an essential tool for gaining and maintaining information superiority.

“Our adversaries employ world-class EW forces that support denial and deception operations and allow identification, interception, disruption, and, in combination with traditional fires, destruction of adversary command, control, communications, and intelligence capabilities,” the Multidomain Operations Range Guide states. “Near peers have fielded a wide range of ground-based EW systems to counter GPS, tactical communications, satellite communications, and radars. Additionally, their EW fuse with cyber operations enables their forces to corrupt and disable computers and networked systems as well as disrupt use of the EMS. Our adversaries aspire to develop and field a full spectrum of EW capabilities to counter Western Command, Control, Communications, Computers Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance (C4ISR) and weapons guidance systems.”

The Army has tested other systems in the past capable of replicating the service’s assets — such as company to division level radio frequency signatures — to confuse and deceive enemy signals collection.

Those tools were able to collect the signals and signature profile of a command post — or anything that emits — and copy it to rebroadcast as a decoy. Some of the systems can be deployed to mimic a command post so the enemy doesn’t know exactly where the command post is or which one is the real command post.

Other units around the Army and as part of their transforming-in-contact rotations have sought to use electromagnetic deception, albeit in different ways depending on the enemy they faced or the terrain they were in.

2nd Brigade, 101st Airborne Division last year strapped $30 raspberry pi’s to small drones and used them as electronic decoys against its enemy, to great effect, according to after-action briefs.

However, that wasn’t necessarily a tactic that would work for 3rd Brigade, 10th Mountain Division, which conducted its rotation in January at Hohenfels as part of the last Combined Resolve event. The opposing force it faced would typically confirm electromagnetic detection with visual confirmation. That meant that in contrast to the setup for the 101st, where the enemy would simply detect the signal and fire upon it, if a signal of interest was discovered the opposing force would have to send a scout or a drone to validate that there were physical assets there.

Understanding that, 3rd Brigade paired inflatable M777 howitzers with its decoys, providing the physical evidence needed to deceive the enemy.

Following its National Training Center rotation, 1st Brigade, as well as 3rd Infantry Division as a whole, will be using its rotation in Hohenfels and Combined Resolve to build on operations using electronic deception designed to replicate EMS emissions, according to a spokesperson.

1st Brigade will be the first armored transforming-in-contact unit to participate in Combined Resolve.

The first iteration of transforming-in-contact, TiC 1.0, featured three light brigades. TiC 2.0 is focused on armored formations and divisions as a whole — to include enabling units such as artillery and air cavalry brigades as well as Multi-Domain Task Forces, some Army special operations units and National Guard units.

The division spokesperson declined to provide specific details regarding the deception capability for security reasons, but noted the decoy command post has both a physical and an electromagnetic spectrum component.

“There are 9 doctrinal forms of contact (visual, direct, indirect, non-hostile, obstacles, aircraft, [Chemical, Biological, Radiological, and Nuclear], and electronic) and the deception command post is designed to mimic as many of them as possible,” they said.

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At the end of the Cold War, the service divested much of its electronic warfare inventory. During counterinsurgency fights in the post-9/11 wars, the Army used blunt jamming tools to thwart improvised explosive devices, which, in turn, inadvertently jammed friendly systems.

But Russia’s first incursion into Ukraine in 2014 served as a wakeup call, and the Army has been on a years-long journey to modernize its EW prowess.

“I think this year will be the beginning of the combination of force structure, training circulars, range guides and field manuals now combined with manpackable gear that allows both the sensing and the activity in the space that heretofore … was different systems or different methods from different units. We’re going to make this a solution across our whole Army,” Maj. Gen. Ryan Janovic, commander of the Cyber Center of Excellence, said in an interview.

In 2017, the Army merged electronic warfare within its cyber branch, meaning soldiers that go to the cyber school at Fort Eisenhower in Georgia also learn to be electromagnetic spectrum professionals.

The Army, up until the last year or so, had no fielded program-of-record jammers — relying for years on quick-reaction capabilities developed to address capability gaps in Europe.

That system, the Terrestrial Layer System Manpack, is a manpackable system, which provides direction finding with limited jamming on-the-move as well, had a history of use by special operations units, allowing it to be awarded and fielded to the conventional force on a much faster timeline.

Through the Army’s transforming-in-contact initiative — which seeks to speed up how the service buys technologies and designs its forces by injecting emerging capabilities into units and letting them experiment with them during exercises and deployments — the service will begin providing units a variety of EW systems for sensing, understanding their footprint to manage it, and jamming.

“We’re excited that this is the year where we’re going to start to see in earnest the combination of equipment arriving into divisions and the formations of trained young men and women ready to take that equipment and demonstrate what it can do on behalf of those division commanders. That’s going to continue as we roll this out to all the divisions, as we continue to equip the force and train the force,” Janovic said. “That’s an area that will remain a priority and it’s one of our chief’s priorities, because we’re all looking at what we’re learning from the Russia-Ukraine conflict, and operations in the electromagnetic spectrum define the future of combat as we see it.”

The Army has been on a path to provide more electromagnetic spectrum forces to units in the way of EW platoons and companies. Janovic noted that just a few years ago, where the Army may only have trained 60 EW personnel, that number is up to 600 over three years.

“It’s just a magnification change as we start to man the formations that we built from platoons and companies all throughout the divisions and then the corps and the [Multi-Domain Task Forces]. We will end up training significantly more EW professionals,” he said.  

In fact, Fort Eisenhower, the home of the Cyber Center of Excellence, has sought to invest in training ranges for EW professionals to get out in the dirt with gear and test their classroom courseware given they are increasing the force structure.

“We’re putting them under gear and out in the wood line and really trying to create as tough and realistic training that we can to simulate the environment,” Janovic said. “We’ve got room to grow both in what we’re doing in the classrooms and what we’re doing in the field, but I think that’s the important balance that we have to find. How do you do it in tough, realistic conditions, but also teaching the fundamentals of the EMS and understanding it, the science of it? It’s a complete overhaul.”

The Cyber Center is also working to proliferate EW expertise across the entire Army and the other centers of excellence in an expansion of a partnership that began a couple of years ago.

Janovic noted that all units and formations must be aware of how the electromagnetic spectrum affects their operations and how they maneuver on the battlefield.

“We’re contributing to the body of knowledge and other centers of excellence. How do they put EW into their programs of instruction? How do we help all formations understand what they need to know at the basic level for survivability, if you will, in emissions control, if you’re being jammed, how not to be detected?” he said. “We’re going to have to do this in a very, very collaborative way, because all centers have some aspect of the EMS at work in the foundation of what they do. All formations will be operating in the EMS. When you think about it from a protection standpoint or from an intelligence standpoint, all of us at the centers of excellence agree that we’re going to have to do this somewhat differently.”

As part of that effort, the Cyber Center is improving doctrine and manuals, having recently collaborated with the Intelligence Center of Excellence to develop the Multidomain Operations Range Guide.

The aim is to improve home station training for units. The Army is also working on other training circulars, Janovic said, especially as more lessons are learned from Ukraine where a team led by an Army general officer was sent to loot at electronic warfare.

Those observations will be factored into training, courseware and even combat training centers where forces execute operations against a live opposing force.  

“We’ll continue to learn lessons as we fight at home station and fight at the CTCs, and learn lessons about what works and what doesn’t right,” Janovic said. “We’re excited about seeing where that takes us in the next year.”

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In December 2024, the DOD’s Office of the Chief Information Officer published a solicitation for the Advanced Dynamic Spectrum Sharing Demonstration, which called for industry technology that could allow the Pentagon and private sector to simultaneously use the same spectrum band. The department is currently evaluating proposals for source selection and intends to conduct the demonstration in November 2025, Tom Rondeau, principal director for the FutureG office, said Wednesday.

“We’re focused on the lower 3 GHz band. … It is a very difficult band for DOD. We have dozens of types of systems — hundreds of systems total — that operate in that lower 3 Ghz band,” Rondeau said during a panel at the Apex Defense Conference. “How do we share that? How can we do that with commercial success? Because that is important too, … but we can’t do it at the cost of national security.”

The demonstration comes following years of back-and-forth between the Defense Department and the commercial telecommunications industry over access to the 3.1-3.45 GHz S-band used by the Pentagon to operate different radars, weapons and other electronic systems. However, the telecom industry wants part of that spectrum to meet rising demand for commercial and civil 5G wireless technology.

While the debate over spectrum access has been going on for decades, lawmakers and Pentagon officials have recently expressed concerns that auctioning off parts of the spectrum to industry could hamper President Donald Trump’s homeland missile defense project known as Golden Dome.

After a congressionally mandated study determined that it’s possible for the Pentagon and industry to share the lower 3 GHz band of the spectrum, the Biden administration’s 2023 National Spectrum Strategy called for additional analysis into dynamic spectrum-sharing operations. 

According to the department’s RFP for this year’s demonstration, the results of the event will help inform the follow-on study requested by the National Spectrum Strategy.

“The goal of this effort is to show how advancements in one or more of the key spectrum-sharing enablers can achieve the overall objective of proving the viability of spectrum sharing in the 3100-3450 MHz band,” the RFP stated.

The experiment will be coordinated in partnership between the Pentagon and the National Spectrum Consortium, which represents hundreds of industry and academia organizations working on spectrum-related issues, as well as other federal agencies.

The department has conducted a number of experiments on dynamic spectrum-sharing operations in the past, but Rondeau noted that the November demonstration will be the first of its kind in terms of size and scale.

“The real gap that we’ve had in these past spectrum-sharing projects has been scale. They’ve been, frankly, under-resourced concepts on a table, maybe in a lab, maybe one or two outdoor experiments here and there. But nothing at this scale, which is a large-scale, multi-domain spectrum-sharing demonstration,” he said.

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Spectrum Situational Awareness System, or S2AS, is envisioned to be a commercial off-the-shelf solution that will provide sensing and visualization of what units look like in the spectrum and allow commanders to be able to sense and report in real-time their command post signatures, sources of electromagnetic interference — either from coalition partners or the enemy — and threat emissions. Army officials see this as an important capability for operations in a complex future environment where forces will have to adeptly maneuver within the invisible electromagnetic spectrum.

According to an Army spokesperson, the service has identified a mature commercial-off-the-shelf product to satisfy the requirements of the program.

Moreover, the Army intends for that system to participate in a unit exercise in the fourth quarter of fiscal 2025 as part of the service’s transforming-in-contact initiative, one of its top priorities to inform how it purchases and employs new capabilities that will also provide insights for force structure changes.

The first iteration of the concept just concluded with the last of the three light infantry brigades wrapping up their capstone exercises. The initiative is expected to now focus on Stryker and armor brigades as well as division headquarters.

Throughout the first three rotations, brigades noted the importance of being able to manage their signatures and sense the environment.

S2AS is envisioned to support all Army command post operations with the ability to sense, detect and report friendly electromagnetic spectrum signatures as well as sources of electromagnetic interference, according to the spokesperson.

The transforming-in-contact units have been prioritized for planned demonstrations and initial equipment delivery. So far, the Army has publicly announced that the 25th Infantry Division and 101st Airborne Division will be the two divisions with 2nd Cavalry Regiment and 1st Brigade, 3rd Infantry Division as two heavy brigades for the next iteration.   

The final procurement quantities and equipping distributions for S2AS will be informed by the planned demonstration and testing events. 

An operational demonstration test event is planned for the first quarter of fiscal 2026, which will support a potential rapid fielding decision in the second quarter of that fiscal year.

Efforts in fiscal 2025 for S2AS include initial delivery of prototype systems, vehicle and network integration, cybersecurity accreditation, testing and logistical support.

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The technical demonstration, slated to be conducted early next year, will be overseen by the Joint Counter-small Unmanned Aircraft Systems Office (JCO), according to a new sources-sought notice.

The event is being planned as concerns grow about the threats posed by enemy drones and electronic warfare arsenals. While the U.S. military has its own EW weapons and other tools to defeat adversaries’ uncrewed aerial platforms, it also recognizes that American defensive systems could also be jammed.

“The JCO is interested to understand industry’s C-sUAS capabilities that can operate in a contested electromagnetic environment,” per the RFI.

The next event in the office’s series of demos, dubbed Demonstration 6, will include systems that fall under two different capability sets: those that can detect, track, identify and defeat Group 3 drones within 2-kilometer slant range from the platform, and those that can help dismounted forces do battle against Group 1 and Group 2 UAS.

For the former, the JCO “is specifically interested in small arms munitions at or below 40mm and kinetic interceptor effectors,” the document notes. For the latter, tools could include “handheld weapons, personal weapon affixable systems such as enhanced optics and warfighter wearable systems.”

Officials want to put these technologies through their paces in an environment where there’s interference or “adversary effects” across the electromagnetic spectrum — such as active jamming — within the frequency ranges of 30-20,000 megahertz.

“The sensor systems must effectively operate while being actively interfered with or targeted by adversary jamming systems or experiencing other electromagnetic interference. The sensor systems must then accurately cue effector systems that are impacted by the contested electromagnetic environment. Finally, the effector systems then must effectively defeat, deny, or degrade threat UAS within this contested environment,” the RFI states.

Some of the suggested methods to enable system resiliency and operational success include incorporating low probability of detect (LPD), low probability of intercept (LPI), adaptive beamforming, frequency hop, and other means to maneuver across the EMS.

“The C-sUAS platforms must have the ability to understand they are being impacted within the EMS and autonomously maneuver elsewhere within the EMS or enact other resiliency measures to enable functionality, continued operation, and successful mission performance,” according to the document.

Responses to the RFI, which will inform planning for the event, are due Aug. 6.

The JCO and the Rapid Capabilities and Critical Technologies Office in recent years have been holding a series of industry technical demos focused on finding potential solutions to some of the most pressing drone threats. The notice about Demonstration 6 was released just a few weeks after the completion of Demonstration 5, which took place last month at Yuma Proving Ground, Arizona.

“Adversary sUAS represent a rapidly proliferating, low cost, high-reward, and potentially damaging and lethal capability against U.S. personnel, critical assets, and interests. Examples of this growing threat are seen in Ukraine, Israel, and by our own forces at deployed locations overseas,” Defense Department officials wrote in a fact sheet about that event.

Eight companies — Clear Align, Trakka USA Defense, Ideas, Commitment, Results (ICR), ELTA North America, Teledyne FLIR, Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC), Advanced Technology Systems Corporation (ATSC) and Anduril Industries — brought a total of nine systems to Yuma to see how they fared against swarms of up to 50 small unmanned aerial systems, including a mix of fixed-wing and rotary-wing Group 1 UAS as well as “slow and fast” Group 3 fixed-wing drones, to include jet-powered platforms.

Industry’s counter-drone technologies included a variety of sensors and weapons, such as multi-mission radars, electro-optical/infrared cameras, radio frequency scanners, RF jammers, guided rockets, “kinetic interceptor drones” and small arms munitions, according to the fact sheet.

During a call with reporters this week, officials declined to disclose the results of the demo in terms of how well specific systems performed.

“It was a very successful demonstration informing U.S. and our allies about what capabilities exist out there,” said Col. Michael Parent, chief of the JCO’s acquisition and resources division. “The challenge of the profiles really meant that no one characteristic no one capability, whether kinetic or non-kinetic, in itself could really defeat this kind of a profile. So what we saw was that you really do need a full system-of-systems approach, a layered approach.”

He noted that the drone swarms that the systems were up against last month created a “very challenging” threat profile.

Demonstration 6 – which is expected to take place in or around March 2025 — will pose additional challenges for industry, with an increased focus on operating against EMS threats to their systems. The Pentagon has not yet selected the vendors for next year’s event.

Brandi Vincent contributed reporting for this story.

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Pentagon leadership on Monday issued the 2024 Arctic Strategy, which aims to guide the military’s path forward as it adapts to the unfolding and intensifying geopolitical and geophysical shifts in the security environment — particularly in and around U.S. territory in Alaska and allied hubs in the High North.

“To ensure the Arctic does not become a strategic blind spot, this strategy outlines a series of deliberate steps for DoD to improve its ability to monitor events in the Arctic and, when directed, execute a tailored response to national security threats alongside its interagency and international partners,” officials wrote in the document.

They point to major transformational events that are “driving the need” for the new strategy — including “Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the accession of Finland and Sweden to the NATO Alliance, increasing collaboration between the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and Russia, and the accelerating impacts of climate change.”

To confront these and other intensifying risks and boost integrated deterrence, the strategy directs a range of activities across three broad lines of effort: enhancing the Joint Force’s Arctic capabilities and domain awareness; engaging with allies, partners and key stakeholders; and exercising tailored presence in the region independently and with NATO and others.

The first line of effort encompasses a variety of technologies that the U.S. military says it must prioritize to innovate and expand its Arctic presence.

“DoD should pursue early warning capabilities; discrimination sensors; tracking sensors; Command, Control, Communications, Computers, Cyber, Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance (C5ISR) capabilities; improved understanding of the electromagnetic spectrum; and sensing and forecasting capabilities,” the document states.

In terms of all-domain awareness and missile-warning assets, the strategy calls on the Pentagon to evaluate options for “improving ground-based sensors to complement and enhance existing NORAD capabilities.” Officials are also directed to continue research into options for new space-based missile-warning and observational systems with greater polar coverage.

Beyond maintaining investments in manned and uncrewed aerial systems to enable air and maritime intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) capabilities, the strategy also urges DOD to “conduct analysis of requirements for future unmanned platforms that can operate in the Arctic.”

In a press briefing Monday to unveil the department’s new strategy, Deputy Defense Secretary Kathleen Hicks noted that — as the Pentagon is moving quickly to deploy artificial intelligence and autonomous capabilities across its enterprise — the Arctic is a “perfect domain” to test out different applications. She said it also envelops “a clear area where we can apply some of what we’re doing in the department.”

“So that means a lot of research and development and testing — and that’s where we’re focused in this area — and looking at the possibilities of where uncrewed systems can bring value. But I think as Replicator is demonstrating [that], so we are ready to kind of catalyze where we can in the movement on the sorts of capabilities [where] really see the potential,” Hicks said.

“AI is ideal at helping us make sense of an environment pattern recognition, bringing in data and understanding the environment to make better decisions and faster decisions. And this is a space where I think bringing the two together or just in general being able to leverage AI can really advantage us,” she added.

The department is also encouraged to invest in satellite solutions to improve tactical and strategic communications — specifically above 65 degrees North latitude.

Officials are further directed to engage with allies and partners to improve data coverage and capacity for the more than 250 anticipated, advanced multi-role combat aircraft that NATO could deploy for Arctic operations by the 2030s.

The strategy also notes that the military’s weapon systems and equipment need to be outfitted or customized for Arctic specifications and conditions, where tasks must be performed at extremely cold temperatures routinely reaching -50 degrees Fahrenheit or below.

“The services should therefore ensure the adequacy of their Arctic equipment (accounting for both male and female personnel) in order to conduct relevant Arctic operations as directed, in accordance with their own Arctic strategies,” the document states. 

In the new guide, leadership also details refreshed strategic plans for how DOD components should approach engaging with military partners in the region moving forward. They also spotlight certain joint exercises in the pipeline that will help realize these efforts.

The plan “aligns and nests under” the U.S. national security and national defense strategies from 2022, and the National Strategy for the Arctic Region released that year. 

It’s also meant to build upon and implement prior directives from the Pentagon for components to adopt a “monitor-and-respond” approach to preserving stability in the region.

Expanding on the growing challenges there, the new strategy articulates DOD’s recognition that the area “may experience its first practically ice-free summer by 2030.” 

The “loss of sea ice will increase the viability of Arctic maritime transit routes and access to undersea resources. Increases in human activity will elevate the risk of accidents, miscalculation, and environmental degradation,” the strategy states.

Among other concerns, the document also warns that China is working to expand its influence and activities in the Arctic, such as through experiments testing uncrewed underwater vehicles and polar-capable fixed-wing aircraft. 

At the same time, Russia is posing “nuclear, conventional, and special operations threats,” and also “seeks to carry out lower-level destabilizing activities in the Arctic against the United States and our Allies, including through Global Positioning System jamming and military flights that are conducted in an unprofessional manner inconsistent with international law and custom,” officials wrote.

During the press briefing Monday following Hicks’s remarks, Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Arctic and Global Resilience Iris Ferguson noted that DOD has seen an “uptick” in China-Russia military collaboration around the Arctic over the last couple of years.

“We see them exercising diplomatic agreements, including between Chinese and Russian coast guards. Within the Arctic region, we also see [them conducting joint] military exercises for the first time,” Ferguson said.

Although it does not detail immediate next steps and is not accompanied by an associated implementation plan, the strategy notes that the undersecretary of defense for policy will develop DOD-wide policy that “builds enduring advantages in [the] Arctic.”

“I think that that phrase actually just meant to say that the Undersecretary of Policy will be responsible for implementing the strategy going forward,” Ferguson noted during the briefing.

In response to questions regarding concrete outcomes and next steps that are envisioned following the release of this new strategy, she told DefenseScoop: “I think we will have an implementation plan — it’s unclear if it will be public or not.”

But in her view, it’s all “about creating the roadmap for the capabilities that we need to protect our interests and to ensure that our troops have what they need to operate in the region,” Ferguson explained.

She went on to highlight some of the investments DOD is already making in boosting up its missions in the region. 

“We recognize that it’s an incredibly challenging place to live and to serve, and many of the locations in the Arctic are remote and austere. So we’ve been focusing heavily on quality-of-life improvements for many of our troops that are stationed there — and as of this summer, all service members that are stationed in Alaska will actually have access to cold weather incentive pay for when they’re there. They’re able to buy cold weather gear for living up there,” she said.

Her team has also been looking at what kind of infrastructure repairs might be needed for DOD’s Arctic assets due to rapidly changing weather conditions there.

Additional progress is being made by the services.

“The Space Force has also invested some $1.8 billion in the Enhanced Polar System Recapitalization Payload, which is a payload that is actually uniquely hosted on Norway satellites. It was actually meant to launch several weeks ago and it will hopefully launch in the next couple of weeks. That’s the first time that we will have a payload on an allied partner satellite,” Ferguson told DefenseScoop.

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The 563rd Electronic Warfare Squadron, based at Lackland Air Force Base, Texas, was activated on April 25th and will deliver modern software applications. The 388th Electronic Warfare Squadron, based at Eglin Air Force Base in Florida, will stand up on May 2 and be responsible for evaluating assessing adversaries’ capabilities and identifying vulnerabilities.

Both units will be beneath the 350th Spectrum Warfare Wing, established in 2021 as a result of the Air Force’s landmark electromagnetic spectrum study to reinvigorate spectrum within the service. The wing has three primary missions: rapid reprogramming, target and waveform development, and assessment of the Air Force’s electronic warfare capabilities.

The activation of these two squadrons follows the creation of two detachments last year that will help plant the seeds for building the 950th Spectrum Warfare Group, focused on enhancing the Air Force EW assessment programs.

The creation of these squadrons — there are anticipated to be a minimum of four additional units the future — is based off an assessment of the threat and a need to be able to achieve the three core missions of the wing, its commander, Col. Josh Koslov, told reporters Wednesday.

The 563^rd is described as becoming the first digitally native squadron in the Air Force, with a focus on developing software capabilities for electronic warfare, Koslov said.

“They’re the first folks that have focused specifically on software for EW, not either a weapon system or some sort of, in the electronic warfare field, waveform type of thing,” he told reporters.

One of the key areas that squadron will be taking on is building a capability for operational-level tools used to plan, integrate, synchronize and collaborate electronic warfare effects, which Koslov said are currently nonexistent.

Those coders will work to develop those technologies for the joint force to execute operations in a wartime scenario, and help the Air Force comb through the vast amounts of data about threats and go faster in the production of combat capability to attack the enemy.

The 388th will seek to improve the Air Force’s capabilities and drive waveform development.

“The combatant commands are expecting the Spectrum Warfare Wing to provide effective capabilities to achieve global objectives. That’s what the 388th is going to be doing,” Lt. Col. Timothy West, who will assume command of the 388th, told reporters. “Within the wing as we’re building capabilities, we’re making sure that we are extending the best capabilities downrange there and integrated capabilities, and that the combatant commands have the confidence that what we provide to them will achieve effects in the battlespace.”

The unit will be very tied in with the intelligence community to identify and detect threats, and connected to data transport layers to be able to pass that threat information and execute operations quickly.

Through exercises and other venues, the wing has worked to establish processes by which all the squadrons can work together to execute the wing’s missions, according to officials.

“Those three missions work together as gears in a machine in order to provide the Air Force and the joint force and the coalition force greater electromagnetic spectrum operations readiness,” Koslov said.

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The Electronic Warfare Planning and Management Tool (EWPMT) serves as a C2 planning capability that allows forces to visualize potential effects within the invisible spectrum and chart courses of action to prevent their forces and systems from being jammed during operations.

As DefenseScoop first reported, the Army canceled a task order for the next phase of the program that had been planned.

In an announcement Tuesday, the Army said it is shifting EWMPT’s electromagnetic warfare and spectrum management capabilities to the Tactical Assault Kit (TAK) framework, where applications for situational awareness data and geospatial visualizations can be created.

This information is displayed on Android-based devices mounted to soldiers’ chests, vehicles or operations center screens.

“Transition to the TAK framework is consistent with ongoing efforts to deliver capability at speed by leveraging common technologies across the Services with a similar user experience,” the Army said in a release. “The TAK user community collaborates across the EW user space and presents opportunities for technology advancement and integration across the U.S. Army, Marine Corps, Air Force, Special Operations Command, and the Joint Communities of Interest.”

The Army noted that while it will continue to prioritize its current service-specific fielding of EWPMT’s first increment, the program office will begin piloting this architecture with the Marine Corps.

“This strategic move aims to ensure that EWPMT is a relevant capability at the forefront of emerging operational requirements,” the Army said. “The results of the U.S. Army-USMC collaboration on the TAK-X foundation will provide for microservice-based, modular software architecture satisfying Joint and individual Service requirements. It will enable agile development, integration, and ability to rapidly adjust to evolving operational requirements.”

For years, there has been collaboration between the Army and Marines on EWPMT and other EW and EW visualization efforts from a ground service perspective. Furthermore, all the services are looking to converge on more joint solutions and standards in line with the Pentagon’s top priority of Combined Joint All-Domain Command and Control that aims to better connect systems and data streams for faster decision-making.

In the electronic warfare realm, the Defense Information Systems Agency is developing a joint solution for visualizing and planning operations within the spectrum dubbed Electromagnetic Battle Management–Joint. It awarded a $9.8 million other transaction agreement to Palantir to develop a prototype earlier this year.

The first releases of the modernized architecture, which the Army is calling EWPMT-X, will be piloted and demonstrated over the next year, the service said, in order to get operator feedback. If the pilot is successful, EWPMT-X will replace the current version of EWPMT in fiscal 2026, moving toward a joint electronic warfare and spectrum management set of capabilities.

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