EMS warfare poses serious threat to armed forces

The U.S. military used to enjoy dominance over the airwaves, but it’s fallen behind in the race for the latest technology, making it a potential EMS warfare target.

Bryan Clark, author of a new study on electromagnetic spectrum warfare, told the Federal Drive with Tom Temin, that cheaper and more efficient technology has enabled the rise of new threats.

“There’s a lot of things we do in the EM spectrum that we of sort take for granted,” like mobile Internet on smartphones, Clark said. “We forget about the fact that wasn’t the case 20 years ago, where we didn’t have this level of connectivity.”

Clark, a senior fellow at the  Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, said EMS disruptions threaten the military’s communication capabilities.

“The electromagnetic spectrum has become probably the most dominant or most important domain for future warfare,” he said.

The threat of EMS warfare, much like cyber warfare, poses real challenges on the battlefield, Clark said.

Soldiers in the field use EM signals to relay information back to central command, or can jam an adversary’s signals to conceal themselves. Warfighting planes are also equipped with this technology.

“An airplane can be just for strike, dropping bombs on somebody, and then you can have an airplane that just does radar sensing of targets. And those two airplanes can be connected to one another using the EM spectrum, so that they can together provide that capability to find and attack the enemy,” Clark said.

The U.S. military’s dominance in EMS fell apart around the Cold War, Clark said, thanks in part to the rise of stealth technology.

“Our approach that we pioneered, of using very high-power sensors like radars, and then high-powered jammers … to fight the Soviets was not sustainable,” Clark said. “They were building better radars and jammers of their own. So we went to stealth and said, instead of trying to jam our way through the sensors that the enemy has, I’m going to hide from the sensors. We started to do that and then the Cold War ended, and then we never really made that full transition into this new way of fighting by hiding.”

Meanwhile, adversaries like Russia, China and Iran have been investing in new sensor and jamming capabilities, the likes of which could disrupt systems on U.S. warships and airplanes.

“Now we find ourselves back at this situation where we’re not going to be able to go and conduct operations in places where somebody wants to deny us access,” Clark said.

Cheaper technology also allows terrorist groups to pose a threat on the EMS battlefield. Clark said sophisticated GPS jammers these days sell on retail sites like Alibaba.

“Those are things that Iran and ISIS and other terrorist groups are buying to go and put around their locations they’re trying to protect,” he said.

Clark said the U.S. military needs to bring itself up to speed on the latest EMS technologies.

“They’re not taking advantage of that same technology. So I’m buying a separate radio, a separate radar sensor, a separate jammer for every one of my platforms instead of making them multi-function, which Moore’s Law has allowed us to do,” Clark said. “But our adversaries are doing that.”

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