Defense News
WASHINGTON — In a world where long-range guided missiles and sophisticated radars are the norm, analysts and lawmakers are urging the Pentagon to rethink the way it operates in the electromagnetic spectrum to gain new advantages over near-peer competitors, such as Russia and China.
Over the past few decades, competitors’ advancements in sensor and missile technology have forced the US military to operate farther and farther away from its intended targets, according to a report released this week by the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessment (CSBA). The Pentagon must shift toward using low-power countermeasures to defeat enemy sensors, as well as low-power sensors and communications.
During a Dec. 2 event on Capitol Hill to release the report, the report’s co-authors and CSBA senior fellows Mark Gunzinger and Bryan Clark said the military must invest in technology to avoid detection and confuse enemy air defenses — for instance stealth aircraft, electronic jammers and decoys. Cheap, expendable unmanned vehicles, in the air or undersea, are crucial to this approach, they said.
Much of this technology is already fielded, but the Pentagon is not using it to its full potential, Clark stressed. Advancements like electronically scanned array (AESA) radars, the Navy’s Next-Generation Jammer and the Surface Electronic Warfare Improvement Program — an upgrade of the SLQ-32 shipboard electronic warfare (EW) system — are a good start. But the military could do much more with these systems, Clark said.
“So these new systems are coming out with these new technologies, but they are not necessarily being used in a way that exploits those new technologies — they are going to be used in a way that simply mimics how the predecessor system was used,” Clark said. “New operational concepts are necessary to leverage the technologies we’re already fielding.”
The Pentagon must invest in improving networking between the individual systems, agility in frequency and power, multi-functionality and miniaturization, Clark said. For example, operators could take a sophisticated jammer, currently deployed on an existing aircraft, and install it on a low-cost, expendable UAV that could penetrate farther into enemy territory…
