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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Rapid Raven 24-1, as the event was called, challenged the 350^th Spectrum Warfare Wing for the first time to simulate 24 hours of combat and test the ability to sense and respond to changes in the electromagnetic spectrum and rapidly reprogram mission data files in a wartime environment, focusing on command-and-control elements, according to a release from the 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.

In the cat-and-mouse game of EW and electromagnetic spectrum operations — where adversaries seek to deny access to the spectrum for communications or navigation through jamming — agility and speed are paramount. Once a signal is detected, forces must work to reprogram systems to counter it, which during the Cold War could take weeks to months as the signal had to be sent back to a lab, a fix devised, and then sent back to the field.

Modern forces are trying to use more digital means to reprogram systems in as near real-time as possible to stay ahead of threats.

“Rapid Raven was able to identify opportunities to go even faster in the future,” Dylan Duplechain, 350th Spectrum Warfare Wing chief engineer, said in the release. “With modern, hardened communication pathways to receive and push data, as well as AI/ML [artificial intelligence/machine learning] tools to assist with decision-making, we can further improve warfighting lethality within our current portfolio.”

The wing’s commander has sought a lofty goal: addressing priority threats is to be able to reprogram capabilities in three hours.

“In order for us to beat China, we have to be able to do our job in less than three hours. It’s an easy thing to say but a harder thing to do. When you start peeling back three hours, what does that actually mean? We addressed that question” during the recent exercise, Col. Josh Koslov, commander of the 350^th Spectrum Wing, said. “The Air Force can’t succeed in war if our wing can’t execute its mission essential tasks at the speed of relevance. Rapid Raven wasn’t just an exercise; it was a chance to attack our mission essential tasks as a whole and see what works and what doesn’t.”

The event sought to simulate a 24-hour period of operations that began with receiving an emergency operational change request for updated mission data files based on a new and complex emitter, that triggers the electronic warfare integrated reprogramming cycle across squadrons, according to the Air Force.

Mission data files are the on-board data systems of an aircraft compiling information from the surrounding environment. They’ve been described as “the brains of the airplane.”

Air Force officials have said reprogramming mission data files provides airmen the most up-to-date data — to include threat intelligence — and allows them to sense, identify, locate and counter threats to ultimately increase survivability and lethality.

“We purposely chose threats in multiple bands [frequency range] that should affect most of the systems, requiring reprogramming,” Maj. Joseph Ellis, 350th Spectrum Warfare Wing operations director, said. “It’s about stressing the wing in a combat-representative environment to the point where we’ll learn a lot about our skills to get better and faster.”

Rapid Raven will help inform future tactics, techniques and procedures for the wing and identify requirements needed in order to execute its mission in the rapid timeline officials have outlined to be able to combat top threats.

Given how new the wing is, it continues to utilize various exercises and training venues to game out its objectives, which also involve getting other more traditional units used to these capabilities.

The Air Force, along with the other military services, has sought to reinvigorate spectrum operations as they have grown in strategic importance. Adversaries are aware of the heavy reliance of U.S. and friendly nations’ on spectrum for communications, location information and precision weapons. Following a divestment and reprioritization of these capabilities after the Cold War and during the global war on terror, the U.S. military is forced to bring them back to prominence, meaning traditional forces must be cognizant as well.

“We came to the wing about a year and a half ago and we talked about operationalizing the war fighting mission and war fighting culture,” Koslov said. “It took us a year and a half to build up to what we did this week [at Rapid Raven], and it was awesome. Our Crows really embraced the warfighting culture that we need to beat our adversaries and China.”

In December, the wing participated in the Air Force Weapons School Integration (WSINT) capstone event for the first time, with several large missions involving planning and execution of all aspects of air, space and cyber operations — with joint components — serving as the culmination of what students learn at the school.

The wing is looking to expand Rapid Raven going forward, ramping up its intensity and scope as it looks test the force’s ability to provide electromagnetic spectrum operations capabilities faster and faster.

“Data is our weapon and key to defeating any adversary and that’s what Rapid Raven focused on,” Koslov said. “The ability to receive, manipulate and turn that data into a combat capability that the warfighter can take into battle at the speed of relevance is what will allow us to win.”

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“We need decoy systems such that if … the enemy is looking at us through the electromagnetic spectrum, they can’t pinpoint us. They might be able to see us, but they can’t understand us … We need to be able to raise the noise floor of the signal to noise ratio, such that again, they might be able to see that we are in a generalized location, but the enemy won’t be able to pinpoint or target our capabilities,” Maj. Gen. Paul Stanton, commander of the Cyber Center of Excellence, said Friday during a virtual event hosted by Defense One. “In FY ’25, we believe that we’re seeing the very rapid maturation of these obfuscation and decoy capabilities. We will look at rapidly advancing that technology.”

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

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

Top Army leadership has been harping on the notion that in the future, forces will be under constant observation with nowhere to hide — unlike past conflicts. This is due to the technologies possessed by sophisticated actors to track forces through airborne or satellite systems or digital means of detecting forces based on emissions.

In order for troops to be able to employ decoys, obfuscation techniques or even jamming, they must first understand what they look like within the spectrum.

One program the Army is making investments toward is called the Spectrum Situational Awareness System, or S2AS. It 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 signature, sources of electromagnetic interference — either from coalition partners or the enemy — and what threat emissions look like.

Officials noted it will be critical to allowing units to understand their own electronic footprint.  

A new start in fiscal 2025, the Army requested $9.3 million in research-and-development funds for integration, testing, and technical and program management support of the program. The documents project an anticipated contract award in the third quarter of 2025, with first unit integrated and fielding to the Army beginning in the second quarter of 2026.

Stanton noted there are promising technologies the Army is experimenting with at Project Convergence, which took place from early February to mid-March, in the way of decoys and obfuscation.

He did not mention any specific systems by name.

One system that was tested at Project Convergence was called MAGPIE, which can replicate Army assets — such as company to division level radio frequency signatures — to confuse and deceive enemy signal collection.

At Camp Pendelton, California, during the first phase of Project Convergence, the system was explained to DefenseScoop as being able to collect the signals and signature profile of a command post — or anything that emits — and copy it to rebroadcast as a decoy. A couple 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.

The Army has also articulated its intention for a prototyping initiative dubbed the Modular Electromagnetic Spectrum System (MEMSS). This capability stemmed out of a prior science-and-technology effort called Modular Electromagnetic Spectrum Deception Suite (MEDS) and will be a new start in fiscal 2026, Army officials have said.

The effort is related to command post survivability and could employ techniques to confuse and deceive adversaries.

“It goes back to understanding how you look and are there ways to lower or raise noise levels to better hide in plain sight,” Brig. Gen. Wayne “Ed” Barker, program executive officer for intelligence, electronic warfare and sensors, told DefenseScoop in a December interview.

Officials explained that R&D for the effort is ongoing and there could be a range of options for what such a system could look like — from low-dollar disposable to an emulator to make it look like certain radio signals are emitting from a location to digitally replicate a command post. It could also be as small as a handheld device.

The program office is still making small investments to “hit the ground running in ’26,” Barker said. The funding lines are still a bit amorphous and officials believe these concepts could be achievable in the near term.

“It goes back to getting that kind of seed corn and being able to incubate ahead of that ’26 time frame for MEMSS,” Barker said.

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The 350^th Spectrum Warfare Wing was created in 2021 as a result of the Air Force’s landmark electromagnetic spectrum study to reinvigorate spectrum within the service. The unit has three primary missions: rapid reprogramming, target and waveform development, and assessment of the Air Force’s EW capabilities.

At Nellis Air Force Base, Nevada, in mid-December, the wing participated in the Weapons School Integration (WSINT) capstone event, which are several large missions involving planning and execution of all aspects of air, space and cyber operations — with joint components — serving as the culmination of what students learn at the school.

As the Air Force is looking to reinvigorate electronic warfare within its operations, exercising new capabilities and exposing the force to these capabilities will be important to ensure operators and planners understand EW tools and are comfortable using them in combat.

“Our objectives for the students were to demonstrate the SWW’s capability to help them solve the complex tactical problems presented by WSINT and to facilitate a realistic EW threat environment,” Maj. Matthew Adams, 16th Electronic Warfare Squadron division assistant director of operations, said. “Additionally, we helped ensure that the EW effects were incorporated into mission planning, execution and the debrief process.”

By integrating personnel from the wing, students from the Weapons School gained more realistic training scenarios through emulated war reserve modes through emitters — essentially the code, signals and waveforms for use only when a conflict breaks out so as enemies can’t develop remedies ahead of time. This allowed the students to find, track, engage and assess new threats to support combatant commander objectives.

Specifically, the wing sought to rapidly reprogram mission data files for priority combat platforms, acquire and analyze Crowd-Source Flight Data (CSFD), develop electronic warfare assessment and operation experience, and test the ability to download advanced mission applications in flight.

The wing’s commander has said the goal for addressing priority threats is to be able to reprogram capabilities in three hours.

In the cat-and-mouse game of EW and electromagnetic spectrum operations — where adversaries seek to deny access to the spectrum for communications or navigation through jamming — agility and speed are paramount. Once a signal is detected, forces must work to reprogram systems to counter it, which during the Cold War could take weeks to months as the signal had to be sent back to a lab, a fix devised, and then sent back to the field.

Modern forces are trying to use more digital means to reprogram systems in as near real-time as possible to stay ahead of threats.

“What we’re really doing is taking data from the edge, bringing it back to our engineers, creating new combat capability and pushing it back out to the edge as quickly as possible,” the wing’s commander, Col. Josh Koslov, said last year. “Our goal, our moonshot is three hours. What we think is that our ability to aggregate combat power against the pacing challenge will be kind of a pulsed way in three hours — seems like a good number for us to base what we’re trying to do on.”

According to the Air Force, the focus of electronic warfare at WSINT is in direct support to commander of Air Combat Command Gen. Mark Kelly’s priorities to incorporate electromagnetic spectrum operations into exercises so service members can train like they fight.

In fact, outside experts and members of Congress have recently stressed the importance of integrating electronic warfare into exercises more often and even doing more EW-specific training through ranges. In the past, many of these capabilities have just been injected through what is known as white carding, or simply telling exercise participants that their systems are jammed while not actually jamming them. This has led to concerns that warfighters haven’t actually seen the effects of these critical non-kinetic capabilities in training and might not be as combat ready as they should be.

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The document, published Dec. 14, outlines concepts, terminology, roles and responsibilities, authorities, operations and the importance of the spectrum to joint ops.

“The joint force requires an overmatching, offensive approach to electromagnetic spectrum operations (EMSO) to enhance competitive advantage and create multiple dilemmas for adversaries in all domains. Airmen should develop EMS awareness, engagement, and maneuver capabilities that span and connect all domains and enable successful friendly operations,” the foreword states. “Dominant EMS expertise and capabilities can render adversary sensors, situational awareness, command and control, networks, and decision processes ineffective, preventing adversaries from attaining their objectives.”

While doctrine is typically updated and revisited frequently — with the last update to EMSO doctrine in 2019 — this document marks a change in that it converts previous doctrine into newer concepts and lexicon.

“The continuing changing characteristics of war require us to ensure that our doctrine is current, in-line with joint doctrine, and that it reflects USAF considerations for force presentation and implementation,” according to an Air Force spokesperson. “The new version further clarifies needed authorities and support across the whole-of-government to make EMSO effective, responsive, and adaptable to a dynamically changing environment … This directive establishes the [Department of the Air Force] policy for electromagnetic spectrum (EMS) superiority governance, management, capability development, operations and sustainment, and capability divestment. This directive also designates USAF Major Command and [U.S. Space Force] Field Command roles and responsibilities for these capabilities in support of objectives and effects.”

The new document had been in the works since January 2022, with the Air Force’s doctrine center initiating the process to convert AFDP 3-51, Electromagnetic Warfare and Electromagnetic Spectrum Operations, to AFDP 3-85, Electromagnetic Spectrum Operations.

EMSO is a more all-inclusive term that the Pentagon has sought to use recently that takes into account the offensive, defensive and maneuver aspects of military activities associated with the electromagnetic spectrum.

Following the end of the Cold War, the Department of Defense largely divested much of its high-end electronic warfare capabilities. Now, adversaries recognize the U.S. military’s dependence on the spectrum and its strategic importance. The joint force relies on the spectrum for communications and navigation — to include precision strike, GPS and data — and other nations have developed sophisticated systems to jam, spoof and confuse American systems.

The Air Force in recent years has acknowledged this gap and sought to aggressively address it through a myriad of studies, organizational approaches and new capabilities.

Service officials still recognize they are in catch-up mode to some degree and must act fast to keep pace with adversary advances.

“In order to align with the National Defense Strategy, the Air Force will need to embrace new concepts for EW and increased emphasis on the broader EMS,” the new doctrine says, quoting Gen. David Allvin, chief of staff of the Air Force.

The document also includes annexes addressing the integration of cyber and electromagnetic spectrum operations, electromagnetic warfare in space and the importance or reprogramming, for which the Air Force established an entire wing to perform.

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Electromagnetic Battle Management – Joint (EMBM-J) released its minimum viable capability release for the first iteration of the tool, called situational awareness, according to the Defense Information Systems Agency, the manager for the program.

While invisible to the naked eye, the spectrum has become an increasing strategic maneuver space in recent years, with adversaries seeking to block vital access that enables communications, precision weapons and navigation.

Officials have long been calling for a command-and-control tool within the spectrum to be able to visualize it and plan operations based upon areas of congestion and adversary jamming.

This cloud-based platform integrates various electromagnetic spectrum capabilities and functions into a single system that collects data into a single visual display, DISA said in a release. Without it, forces won’t be able to act faster than adversaries on the battlefield.

“What this does today that warfighters don’t have in their hand is that it provides the ability to bring a number of different information feeds, a number of different data sources together in one picture — and that more than anything else, allows the joint force to make sense and act much more quickly,” Kevin Laughlin, deputy director at program executive office spectrum within DISA, told reporters during a media call Friday. “In terms of risk, we’re mitigating essentially the timescales so we can make sense of the information and act more quickly and make decisions faster than our enemies.”

While other similar systems are used by the services, those exist at the very tactical level for them to execute operations. EMBM-J resides more at the operational and strategic level for commanders and joint task force headquarters joint electromagnetic spectrum operations cells to understand their non-visual terrain better.

“Effective use of the electromagnetic spectrum is essential for successful military operations,” Brig. Gen. Ann-Marie Anthony, Joint Electromagnetic Spectrum Operation Center director, said in a statement. “This system is crucial for the full integration and visualization of spectrum operations.”

Laughlin equated this system as part of the Combined Joint All-Domain Command and Control (CJADC2) effort, the Pentagon’s top initiative that envisions disparate networks and sensors from each of the services and international partners connected together to share data seamlessly and connect the dots faster than adversaries can.

This situational awareness tool is just the first of the planned capabilities for EMBM-J, Laughlin said. The next iteration will focus on decision support to allow forces to plan and direct operations within the spectrum, he noted.

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The Air Force uncased the colors in a ceremony at Robins Air Force Base, Georgia, for the activation of the 350th Spectrum Warfare Wing Detachment 1 and 87th Electronic Warfare Squadron Detachment 1, which will both be focused primarily on assessment. They fall beneath the 350^th Spectrum Warfare Wing, which was created in 2021 as a result of the Air Force’s landmark electromagnetic spectrum study to reinvigorate spectrum within the service. The 350th has three primary missions: rapid reprogramming, target and waveform development, and assessment of the Air Force’s EW capabilities.

The two new detachments will contribute to the creation of the 950^th Spectrum Warfare Group, which is aimed at enhancing the Air Force electronic warfare assessment programs.

“In my opinion, the group we’re building here today at Robins Air Force Base … has the potential to be the most important of our wing’s three missions,” Col. Joshua Koslov, commander of the 350^th, said during the activation ceremony. “The reason for that is that in order to fight this, the conflicts of the future, we’re going to have to know how well we can execute within the contested spectrum in the EW world. And the way we’re going to do that is rigorous assessment, which is a mission set that while we do today, it’s not on the level we need to in the 21st century.”

These assessments will focus on readiness and ensuring systems are capable of successfully engaging in future battles against high-end adversaries.

The electromagnetic spectrum has grown in strategic importance in recent years. Nations such as China and Russia have observed how much the U.S. military depends on it for precision-guided munitions, navigation and communication, and they have sought capabilities to deny access to it.

Future battlefields are expected to be highly contested in the spectrum as each side will seek to jam and deny each other access.

“I want to emphasize the words of the commander of [Air Combat Command], Gen. Mark Kelly, who said if we don’t achieve security in the spectrum, that our forces are going to lose and we’re going to lose fast. The superiority is assured through assessment, which is the mission we’ll be doing here at Robins Air Force Base in Georgia,” Koslov said. “The world’s a dangerous place, we all know that, current events dictates that. While war is not inevitable, the best way to avoid war is to being able to overmatch our opponents with so much capability that they don’t even want to try. That is what the 950^th Spectrum Warfare Group is going to bring to us today.”

The wing and group will help establish deterrence of adversary activity, though not through traditional combat power.

“What we need to assess is what are our gaps and seams relative to our adversary and then fill those gaps and seams and then make sure our adversary understands that we filled them, we filled our weaknesses at a rate faster than they can find new ones,” he told reporters. “That’s really the game. The spectrum has never been about overwhelming dominance. The spectrum has always been about moving faster than your opponent, and that’s what the assessment mission is going to provide us the capability to do.”

The wing will continue to invest in its own intelligence personnel while also working with others in the intelligence community to develop capabilities and intelligence required for spectrum warfare to inform leaders on adversary capabilities.

In addition to assessing offensive and defensive EW systems for the Air Force, the group will design techniques and methodologies to assess force packaging and large exercises to allow the service to increase its lethality.

The incoming commander of the detachments noted he wants to help create problems for adversaries in the spectrum.

“The day without spectrum is a bad day, and that’s precisely what we intend on giving our enemies. But the only way we can make sure that it will work and that it’ll all work together when it really counts, is going to be through the hard work that the 950^th Spectrum Warfare Group is going to do as soon as it gets stood up here in a couple of months,” Lt. Col. Ryan Cox said during the ceremony.

Koslov told reporters after the ceremony that he has accelerated the timeline for the group to stand up.

“The 950th will complete its programmed growth that’s funded today in 2027. However, we’re accelerating the actual standup by almost three years … by fully standing up the group next summer,” he said.

Cox explained that the 350^th Spectrum Warfare Wing detachment 1 is the feeder entity for the 950^th and will deactivate the moment that the 950^th activates. The 87^th Electronic Warfare Squadron detachment 1 is the first initial squadron for the group that will conduct large force assessments.

“The wing detachment turns into the group, the squadron detachment turns into its own squadron — and that’s how we are going to be growing that from an organizational standpoint,” Cox said.

Koslov noted that the wing essentially touches the entirety of the Air Force as it provides combat capability to over 70 platforms.

“That’s basically every single aircraft in our inventory, our weapons system in our inventory — all of it touches the hands of the crows that stood up before you today. We’re not just one wing, we’re every wing in the United States Air Force,” he said.

However, in the future, he wants to see the service shift from a platform-centric model to a more enterprise-focused model.

“The number one need I really need is an integrated EW program executive office, PEO, because right now, today, I reprogram over — I work on over 70 platforms and that’s across more than 25 [system program offices],” he said. “If you’re thinking about the type of capability we’re developing, which is rapid and agile, that requires a level of interoperability and integration. That’s really hard to manage when there’s not one person who’s doing that on the acquisition side. While I do have a very strong relationship on the platform side, a platform-centric model is not the model that will beat China.”

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“In order to align with the National Defense Strategy, the Air Force will need to embrace new concepts for EW and increased emphasis on the broader Electromagnetic Spectrum (EMS),” Gen. David Allvin, the nominee to be the service’s next chief of staff, wrote in a questionnaire that accompanied his confirmation hearing last week.

Current chief of staff and nominee to be the next chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Charles “CQ” Brown, has observed that the joint force as well as the Air Force have fallen behind in the spectrum, even going so far as to say the Air Force has been “asleep at the wheel” for the last 25 to 30 years.

“Over the past few decades, the Joint Force has lost some muscle memory defending against electromagnetic attack by conducting operations within a permissive electromagnetic spectrum. Over the same period, operations within this spectrum have changed significantly while our most advanced adversaries have done their best to rapidly evolve,” he wrote in a questionnaire that accompanied his confirmation hearing.

Following the end of the Cold War, the DOD largely divested of much of its high-end electronic warfare capabilities. Now, adversaries recognize the U.S. military’s dependence on the spectrum and its strategic importance. The joint force relies on the spectrum for communications and navigation — to include precision strike, GPS and data — and other nations have developed sophisticated systems to jam, spoof and confuse U.S. systems.

About six years ago, the Air Force embarked on a landmark study known as the Enterprise Capability Collaboration Team, that sought to dive deeper into the electromagnetic spectrum and develop reforms.

“This spectrum warfare is really integrating with the other traditional parts of warfare and ensuring that we can have our air superiority, we can support our strike missions, all those by not just managing spectrum, but protecting our own vulnerabilities and exploiting those who are adversaries,” Allvin told senators. “I see this as an expanding mission, because it is going to be part and parcel to the future of warfare. If we’re going to try and prosecute that many targets at that amount of time, we have to be able to dominate spectrum.”

Allvin outlined his vision for what the service needs when it comes to new approaches and tactics.

“My vision includes an Air Force with distributed software-defined systems and capabilities that are agile and increasingly leverage [artificial intelligence and machine learning] to move to more robust cognitive EW. These capabilities should enable updates at tactical speeds vice acquisition timelines in order to maintain advantage over any adversary employing complex systems,” he wrote in his questionnaire.

“To achieve this vision, the Air Force will need to explore, develop, and produce new and innovative concepts and doctrine that expand on historic electronic warfare principles in favor of Electromagnetic Spectrum Operations (EMSO), the merger of traditional Electronic Warfare with Spectrum Management. The current Cross-cutting Operational Enabler team commissioned by the Secretary of the Air Force will be instrumental in capability development to achieve this vision,” he added.

The cross-cutting operational enabler team is an add last year to Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall’s seven operational imperatives, and it includes mobility, electronic warfare and munitions.

“That was the first time that we looked at the spectrum as part of that,” Col. Leslie Hauck III, director of electromagnetic spectrum superiority at Air Force headquarters, told DefenseScoop in an interview at AFA’s Air, Space and Cyber conference. “If you go through every part of the OIs … you go through the Air Force operating concept, and if you were to draw out all those lines of effort and you put a checkmark where the spectrum is needed, it’s about everywhere. Having that as a cross-cutting across all the OIs has been huge, I think, for us to gain situational awareness on really where we should put the resources for EMSO, for electromagnetic spectrum operations.”

Collaboration

Hauck explained an approach based on collaboration: platform to platform, service to service, and between U.S. and allies. In other words, no one aircraft, service or nation will be successful on its own.

“We have to not just be a single platform that’s going out there fighting on its own. We got to connect this, we got to synchronize it, we have to collaborate and then we have to integrate it, so that we win,” he said. “To say, like, you need to put all your eggs in this basket and you’ll win, I don’t think it’s possible. You’ve got to choose the right investments across the board, and that’s what the OIs are intending to do … A world where everybody could have everything [would] be pretty sweet, but that’s not reality.”

From the Air Force’s perspective, a variety of aircraft will be used in concert, depending on the mission, he said.

“Whether it be [collaborative combat aircraft], whether it be the next-generation air dominance family systems, whether it be B-21 family of systems, whether it be space, whether it be — I can keep going, right, you name a platform, the Rivet Joint, whether it be the E-7 coming online, they all have a place in this,” he said. “You take one away, you’re going to be hurting. But if you just put one out there on its own, you’re also going to be hurting.”

So-called collaborative combat aircraft (CCA) are drones that are part of the Air Force’s vision for robotic, uncrewed wingmen to accompany manned aircraft into battle. Though experimentation with the technology has been ongoing, the operating concept is still being fleshed out. As such, it’s unclear what role these systems could play in electronic warfare, though officials have hinted it’s very likely they’ll have a part at some point in the future.

“I’d love to have wingmen that didn’t have a body [in them] that I could send forward into a higher threat area to take care of whatever’s out there,” Hauck said. “Just like we’ve had [the Miniature Air Launched Decoy-Jammer] in the past to go out there and confuse the enemy and let them see tracks that may not be a real asset or whatever else, so that we can get the real attack in, those are all parts of what CCA is going to bring us.”

When it comes to long range or standoff jamming, Hauck acknowledged this was an area the Air Force took its attention away from during the post-9/11 counterterrorism wars.

“There’s not one easy answer either, and you have to still make choices along the way on how you might be able to do that standoff jamming most effectively,” he said. The EC-130 Compass Call “wasn’t out there [in Afghanistan] doing the stuff that we needed it to do in the future fight as we look to a peer competitor and the pacing challenge that’s out there.”

The Air Force will be exploring the potential of the B-52 bomber to take on long-range jamming in upcoming experiments, which Hauch described as one possible solution. They will be experimenting with the Navy’s ALQ-249 pod, the first of its so-called Next Generation Jammer program. Hauck noted that the Navy did not take its eye off the standoff EW fight over the years and has continued to invest in this mission.

He added that the EC-37B, the next-generation Compass Call, could be another capability in the arsenal. The first 10 of those aircraft were delivered to the force, contractors BAE and L3Harris announced last week.

Ultimately, these systems must come together in a joint fashion and be part of a joint force commander’s tool kit.

However, it’s not always that simple.

“I wish it was that easy. I wish we really just flip a switch and we could connect all that, because that is certainly where we need to be ultimately,” Hauck said. “I’d say we’re taking baby steps right now in figuring out how we can do electromagnetic battle management in the Air Force with our systems. But it ultimately it’s going to have to extend and get even bigger, as you talked about Air Battle Management System, the ABMS, and then even into [Joint All-Domain Command and Control] because you can’t have an EC-37 that’s out there, or space asset or whatever it is that’s throwing electrons out there and making all of our friendly signals not work because we’re trying to take down one part of the enemy network.”

The power of reprogramming

Aside from operational concepts and new platforms, the Air Force determined that to win in a future fight against an advanced adversary, it needed to establish a first-of-its-kind wing focused solely on reprogramming systems.

The 350^th Spectrum Warfare Wing was born in 2021 focused on three missions: rapid reprogramming, target and waveform development, and assessment of Air Force EW capabilities.

In the cat-and-mouse game of electronic warfare and electromagnetic spectrum operations — where adversaries seek to deny access to the spectrum for communications or navigation through jamming — agility and speed are paramount. Once a signal is detected, forces must work to reprogram systems to counter it, which during the Cold War, could take weeks to months as the signal had to be sent back to a lab, a fix devised, and then sent back to the field.

Modern forces are trying to use more digital means to reprogram systems in as near real-time as possible to stay ahead of threats.

“What we’re really doing is taking data from the edge, bringing it back to our engineers, creating new combat capability and pushing it back out to the edge as quickly as possible,” the wing’s commander Col. Josh Koslov told reporters at the AFA conference.

The 350^th has an ambitious goal for getting updates back out into the field once detected.

“Our goal, our moonshot is three hours. What we think is that our ability to aggregate combat power against the pacing challenge will be kind of a pulsed way in three hours, seems like a good number for us to base what we’re trying to do on,” Koslov said, adding that is against prioritized threats.

Critical in an advanced fight against a sophisticated adversary is the ability to be adaptive.

“As the war changes in the characteristics that you’re seeing change, we have to be able to adapt more rapidly than 24 hours prior, or even more than that planning to what we might have out there,” Hauck said.

Importantly, advanced platforms might have the best data possible when they take off to perform their missions, but adversaries might change their profile or reveal signals they have in reserve for wartime use that aren’t in the U.S. library, essentially negating the data pre-planned for those missions.

“The enemy gets a vote and they’re going to change modes, those kinds of things. We’re going to lose assets, like, that’s a fact,” he said. “We have to prioritize the ones that are the most important and we have to turn those out as quickly as possible. Otherwise, night two doesn’t go well for us. We’re just not going to get there and we have to be able to do that. It’s an imperative.”

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