This article originally appeared on Government Technology Insider.
In my last article, I explored the advanced electronic warfare capabilities of America’s peer and near-peer adversaries, and how these capabilities could be leveraged to deny or degrade essential signals necessary for mission success. I also explained how – when used effectively – electronic warfare could leave a warfighter without the ability to navigate to move, disclose their position, leaving them vulnerable to attack, and even render their weapons and communications systems useless – ultimately leaving them unable to move, hide, communicate, or shoot.
With the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) increasingly focused on preparing for warfare against peer and near-peer threats, it’s paramount that the military be prepared to face sophisticated electronic warfare capabilities. That includes training warfighters on how to find, identify, and respond to electronic warfare.
Identifying and Responding to the Threat
As I alluded to in my last article, one of the most challenging parts of electronic warfare is that the attacks are invisible to the eye. This has led to many warfighters staring at their equipment and weapons, thinking they’re broken, and pondering how and where they can get them exchanged or repaired. They don’t even know an attack is happening; they assume it’s an equipment failure.
Understanding the challenge of electronic warfare for their warfighters, each of the services comprising the U.S. military has embraced its own electronic warfare training curriculum.
For example, the Navy has embraced onboard electronic warfare training capabilities for deployed sailors that train them on how to spot, understand, and respond to electronic warfare threats in a simulated environment. This simulated environment allows them to recreate electronic warfare scenarios for training and prepares them to be persistent and effective in fighting the electronic warfare threat.
The Marine Corps and the U.S. Army have taken similar, although different approaches – standing up their own dedicated electronic warfare branches that are tied to their cyber and space domain capabilities. These organizations have been tasked with building electronic warfare capabilities out on the edge that are able to identify, harden, and attack. These capabilities could also take electronic warfare data and push it back to the warfighter for use in operations.
These organizations have also developed simulated training capabilities for the warfighter. These simulations are from the warfighter’s perspective, and are capable of injecting electronic warfare activities into every training mission and simulation that the warfighter participates in. This is particularly effective since it is impossible to predict an operation or mission that the military will undertake that will be devoid or immune from electronic warfare.
These simulated training environments and emulators create particular threat environments that include dynamic and diverse electronic warfare capabilities. This illustrates to the warfighter exactly how their weapons and communications systems will operate in environments with heavy electronic warfare activities and tasks them with accomplishing their mission while under duress from signal interference or denial.
While all of these simulation and training environments are useful and effective, there is one challenge they all have – they’re all siloed, independent solutions owned by each individual service. And there will never be a mission in the future that is fought by one service or by one nation – the missions of the future will be fought by the joint force, most likely with the assistance of allied nations.
Bringing it Together
While individually training the disparate services to identify and overcome electronic warfare is effective, it’s not indicative of how the modern military will fight. In the future, each of the services will be fighting together across multiple domains and potentially with warfighters from other nations. Therefore, it’s essential that the military think more broadly and begin electronic warfare training and simulation at the COCOM level – not the individual service level.
By leveraging what the independent services have done, the COCOMS can work to create smarter, more capable training solutions that can be tailored to their particular mission set and requirements. For example, INDOPACOM may have unique requirements based on the multi-domain nature of that particular AOR and the incredibly sophisticated nature of the adversaries in that region.
Any training done using these simulated environments and training solutions at the COCOM level would also function to further the counter-electronic warfare capabilities of the individual services. The skills and abilities learned during COCOM training exercises would “trickle down” to the services involved.
But it’s not enough to simply design and deploy a training solution for each COCOM. That training solution needs the ability to generate its own valuable data that can be used to refine and improve training missions. And it needs the ability to be constantly updated and upgraded with new attacks and weapons systems since the adversary is constantly improving and evolving.
The electronic warfare capabilities that we’ve seen on display in Ukraine are proof that training our warfighters to identify and defeat these attacks will be essential for mission success in the future. To do so, comprehensive electronic warfare training is necessary. But that training can’t happen in silos. It needs to happen between the joint force at the COCOM level. And it needs to be constantly evolved, adapted and changed to ensure it reflects the constantly improving and increasingly sophisticated threat our warfighters will face.
