US Military Improving Spectrum Capabilities, DOD Officials Say

DOD is making progress on electronic warfare (EW) and on spectrum systems survival on the battlefield, officials said during a Hudson Institute webinar Wednesday. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine sharpened U.S. focus on EW, but China has been an even bigger concern, said Bryan Clark, Hudson senior fellow. “China has been expanding and modernizing its electronic warfare capabilities for a decade now, plus,” he said.

“Superiority in the spectrum can no longer be taken for granted,” said Air Force Brig. Gen. AnnMarie Anthony, Strategic Command deputy director-joint electromagnetic spectrum operations. “There are definite challenges, and we know that we have vulnerabilities,” she said. “There’s only one spectrum so everybody is using the same spectrum,” she said.

DOD’s Electromagnetic Spectrum (EMS) Superiority Strategy, launched in 2020, is “how we will be able to maintain our military overmatch in the spectrum,” Anthony said. “It’s DOD-wide, it’s synchronized, and it will help us ensure that we can maintain that superiority over any adversary,” she said.

“A strategy is only worth the paper it’s printed on” and the resulting implementation plan is more important, Anthony said. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin signed that plan a year ago, she noted. “That is how we are going to realize EMS superiority,” she said.

DOD's bigger picture needs are being translated into service-specific requirements, said Dave Tremper, who oversees EW from the Office of the Secretary of Defense. “What we’re starting to see is there are gaps in certain areas … we need to pay special attention to,” he said. Some potential problems have emerged as a result of military exercises testing EMS survivability, he said.

“Our EW systems don’t attack their EW systems,” Tremper said. “The question we should be asking is how do our systems stand up to EW attack -- how do our radars perform, how do our comms [communications] perform,” he said. The war in Ukraine shows the importance of “assured comms,” he said.

“It takes a system to beat a system,” said Col. William Young, commander-Air Force 355th Spectrum Warfare Wing. “We are working together” across DOD and with industry “at a level that I have never seen across my 31-year career,” he said. “I see us talking less and doing more,” he said. DOD has the expertise to make its communications systems more resilient “but the challenge has been integration,” he said.

The direction from the top of the Air Force is that his unit is “the integrator and deliverer of EMS capability,” Young said. He said the service has a test next week integrating technology from industry, the Air Force and Navy. The test “does the equivalent of taking Android apps and running them on an iPhone,” he said. “We’re just scratching the surface” of what the military will be able to do in spectrum, he said.

The military faces challenges in how it buys communications systems, which will require a culture change, Tremper said. “If I’ve got a multifunction system that’s going to do comms and EW … and maybe even some low-power radar stuff, those historically all exist as separate acquisition programs,” he said: “They have separate contracts. They have separate pieces of hardware. They have separate requirements.”