Daily Fight for Ukraine Spectrum Superiority Puts Electronic Warfare Front, Center

Daily Fight for Ukraine Spectrum Superiority Puts Electronic Warfare Front, Center

Kvertus photo

The hapless Russian soldier in a film clip shown at a recent industry trade show was — ironically perhaps — setting up a jammer when a Ukrainian soldier remotely operating a drone spied him from above.

The Russian apparently didn’t flip the switch on the device in time to block the drone’s signals. The Ukrainian soldier watching through a pair of goggles kilometers away dispatched a grenade, destroying the jammer and presumably taking the Russian permanently off the battlefield as another of that day’s casualties.

The traits of war are easy to spot in eastern Ukraine. Trenches protect troops squaring off with Russian forces. Long-range artillery is both seen and heard. Burned out fighting vehicles litter the landscape and several Russian ships are now at the bottom of the Black Sea.

What isn’t seen is the minute-by-minute battle over the electromagnetic spectrum. Russian-made Pole-21 and RP-377 jammers are intended to thwart Ukrainian small drone attacks. U.S. Air Force GPS satellites fly overhead as Russian forces attempt to block their signals.

Remote-controlled kamikaze drones connect back via radio waves to Ukrainian soldiers wearing goggles that help guide the loitering munitions to targets. The jammers attempt to stop them.

Battlefield control over the electromagnetic spectrum — also known as electronic warfare — is becoming more crucial as modern militaries observe what is happening in Ukraine.

Experts are now debating whether it should be elevated to a “warfighting domain” — on par with land, air, sea, space and cyberspace.

It’s a purely academic question for Ukrainian and Russian ground forces. They only know if they don’t dominate key bands of the spectrum, the last thing they hear on Earth will be the buzzing of a kamikaze drone.

Ukrainian Air Force Maj. Gen. Borys Kremenetskyi, defense attaché at Ukraine’s embassy in Washington, gave attendees at the Association of Old Crows annual conference a picture of what the daily fight to maintain superiority in the electromagnetic spectrum looks like.

It’s not new, he noted. Ukraine has been dealing with electronic warfare since Russia invaded Crimea in 2014.

“What they’re trying to do is break through our battlespace coverage by electronic warfare … in the full spectrum,” he said.

They use it to disrupt communications and jam GPS signals. Targeting by precision-guided munitions can be jammed or they can “spoof” the coordinates, sending the round to the wrong location.

“You need to be very smart to be able to shoot at the place where there’s no electronic signal,” he said.

The Russians can interfere with signals emitting from space-based systems or terrestrial radio stations preventing the government from communicating with its citizens.

While much attention has focused on the drone warfare taking place in the skies and Black Sea in Ukraine, it often goes unmentioned that neither side could remotely operate their robotic systems without mastering the electromagnetic spectrum.

Estimates have Russia devoting 18,000 to 20,000 troops to electronic warfare units, Kremenetskyi said.

“For this we need our own electronic warfare system, which can suppress Russian electronic warfare systems,” he said.

Necessity is the mother of invention, as the saying goes. For example, Ukrainian company Kvertus is fielding a backpackable jammer weighing 8 kilograms for individual soldiers intended to block signals in the 850-to-940-megahertz range, the most commonly used bands for first-person view, or FPV, small drones, according to the company’s website.

The U.S. Defense Department in a 2020 “Electromagnetic Spectrum Superiority Strategy” and its implementation plan approved the following year stated the United States must achieve spectrum dominance and integrate electronic warfare in all domains but stopped short of declaring it a domain unto itself.

Jeffrey Fischer, a retired Air Force colonel and now an author and journalist, said he wrote an opinion piece more than a decade ago arguing that the electromagnetic spectrum should be considered its own warfighting domain. The idea found a welcoming audience with the Association of Old Crows, an organization devoted to electronic warfare. It promoted Fischer’s article on the cover of its academic journal. But the idea has yet to take hold in the U.S. military.

“If it’s in the electronic spectrum, it can be intercepted and it can be jammed,” Fischer said. That includes GPS, which the U.S. military has come to rely upon.

“For decades … when we talked about war, we talked about precision strike, and we never really thought we would be talking about a war where we didn’t have precision. But lo and behold, the West became really, really dependent on precision by GPS — and now those are being jammed,” he said at the conference.

Meanwhile, the Pentagon is putting a great deal of its energy and resources into pursuing its Combined Joint All-Domain Command and Control concept, or CJADC2, which would link sensors and shooters in a combat cloud and use artificial intelligence to present options to decision makers faster than the speed of thought.

The last two words in the acronym are “command and control,” two actions that cannot be accomplished on modern battlefields without dominating radio waves. “Command” requires uninterrupted communication links, and “control” requires the same, along with precision navigation and timing that comes with GPS.

“Joint” means the six military branches must be able to communicate with each other and “combined” throws partners and allies into the mix with all their different communication and navigation systems.

Fischer said: “If you can stop the enemy’s ability to communicate, you really, really hinder them.”

The whole CJADC2 concept quickly falls apart if an enemy can dominate or disrupt the electromagnetic spectrum.

“Interoperability from the get-go is incredibly important” for CJADC2 to succeed, Navy Rear Adm. Susan BryerJoyner, deputy director of command, control, communications and computer/cyber systems, J6 at the Joint Staff, said at the conference.

The Ukraine War and the battle for spectrum dominance is taking place in a warzone, but the Pentagon operates globally and within U.S. borders. It must share the spectrum with other sectors, most notably telecommunications companies that spend and earn billions maintaining networks that connect to smartphones.

The Defense Department must ensure it has adequate bandwidth to operate its radars and communication systems and can do so without interfering with civilian-controlled airwaves — both domestically and in the allied nations where it operates.

The U.S. military operates a host of electronic warfare systems including the Navy’s EA-18G Growler carrier-based aircraft and the Air Force’s EC-130H Compass Call, along with ground forces that have various jammers integrated onto their vehicles.

When the United States invaded Iraq in 2003, it soon found itself engaged in a battle for spectrum superiority similar to what Ukraine is experiencing today. But instead of small drones, it was dealing with insurgents who were using common devices such as garage door openers to detonate roadside bombs.

The U.S. Army — by its own admission at the time — had let its electronic warfare skills atrophy, and it was forced to scramble and quickly integrate Warlock jammers into its vehicles.

Almost 20 years later, in October 2021, when former Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Air Force Gen. John Hyten was doing his final meeting with the press before retirement, he said the armed forces were still struggling to master the electromagnetic spectrum.

“We used to be the best in the world at electronic warfare. Now we don’t train it. We don’t educate it. We don’t equip it. And so, it’s been recognized, and we have to fix it because spectrum was key to every domain — it’s key to every operation, key to every functional battle,” he said.

Meanwhile, the Biden administration in November released the latest “National Spectrum Strategy.”

Spectrum is a finite resource, and the Defense Department is only one of many players vying to occupy swaths of bands. The federal government auctions off these bans, making billions of dollars to put in its coffers.

BryerJoyner noted the Pentagon has to monitor upcoming auctions that will sell off unclaimed bands of spectrum.

“It’s very important for economic security, but there is friction with what DoD needs,” she said.

There’s a moonshot project highlighted in the “National Spectrum Strategy” that calls for the development and testing for large scale dynamic spectrum sharing across multiple types of equipment, she noted.

Such systems automatically switch from crowded bands to less crowded ones if they detect interference, natural or man-made.

“Because what we don’t see right now is well balanced industry versus DoD spectrum sharing. So how do we dynamically share spectrum? … There are absolutely military applications for that in contested environments overseas,” she added.

The strategy puts the National Telecommunications and Information Administration as the lead agency in charge of coordinating who uses the airwaves and for what purpose. The Defense Department is only one of the NTIA’s many constituents.

“This is going to be really important and a whole-of-nation effort to get after. How do we balance those competing demands not just domestically, but in a contested environment?” BryerJoyner asked.

There are parts of the strategy that could ultimately benefit the Defense Department. The NTIA has identified five bands — 3.1 to 3.45 GHz, 5.03 to 5.091 GHz, 7.125 to 8.4 GHz, 18.1 to 18.6 GHz and 37.0 to 37.6 GHz — that might be up for grabs and available for a range of uses, including wireless broadband, drones and satellite operations. NTIA will complete a study on what to do with the spectrum within two years.

The strategy has some goals that may ultimately help the Defense Department. It seeks to bolster the nation’s expertise in the technology and the science of spectrum management. It wants to highlight its importance to the public, create investment opportunities and increase research-and-development dollars going into improving spectrum management.

It will also seek to grow workforce expertise in the highly specialized field, which could also help the Defense Department and its industry partners.

One potential area for research and development is applying artificial intelligence to spectrum management.

Retired Air Force Lt. Gen. John Shanahan — who served as the inaugural director of the Defense Department’s Joint Artificial Intelligence Center — saw promise in AI to both deconflict military and civilian spectrum use in benign environments and when the military vies for electromagnetic spectrum dominance when at war.

“AI can optimize the use of electromagnetic spectrum, reducing interference and end-to-end communication reliability in contested environments. There’s also great potential for dynamic predictive analytics of spectrum use to anticipate and avoid contested and congested frequencies,” he said at the Old Crows conference.

“I also expect that AI algorithms can assist in managing the spectrum signature of assets that we have out there, reducing the risk of detection,” he said.

Meanwhile, “companies have worked really hard on this over the past few years. So, I fully expect we’re getting closer to seeing some solutions that are going to work. But I just don’t know how close those are,” he said.

To get there and return U.S. armed forces to what Hyten called “the best in the world,” senior U.S. military leaders should take a hard look at what is happening in Ukraine and acknowledge that the electromagnetic spectrum is a warfighting domain. ND

Topics: Global Defense Market