Top lawmaker wants more progress on EW capabilities across services

There aren’t enough electronic warfare tools resident within the U.S. military services currently, according to a top lawmaker.

At the end of the Cold War, many of the services divested of their capability within the electromagnetic spectrum. Now, these technologies are at a premium and in high demand for jamming enemy communications, navigation and missiles while protecting against the same. Adversaries have invested heavily in this area following U.S. divestment, forcing a sprint to reinvigorate American EW prowess.

“We’ve made some progress this year [but] here’s my concern: there’s a lot of studies and there’s a lot of paper, but paper doesn’t jam and paper doesn’t hit missiles,” Rep. Don Bacon, R-Neb., said Tuesday during an event hosted by the Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies. “We need to have more capability output, and I’m just not seeing enough of it right now.”

Bacon chairs the House Armed Services Subcommittee on Cyber, Innovative Technologies and Information Systems and is a retired one-star Air Force general who specialized in electronic warfare.

He observed that what’s been learned from military history is that when nations feel dominant, they walk away from electromagnetic spectrum capabilities — thinking they might not be necessary — as was seen at the end of the Cold War when the United States was the sole superpower.

“If you’re very dominant, EW is an unnecessary expense. But if you think you’re going to be in a very tough fight, electronic warfare is critical to saving lives,” he said, adding: “We walked away from [it] in the ’90s and we put very little emphasis” on it. As a result, those capabilities atrophied.

The electromagnetic spectrum should have the same importance placed on it as the other domains of warfare, he suggested, despite not being considered a domain itself.

“We need to talk like we do air power, sea power, the ground, cyber … Just like air, we want to control the air, deny [it] to the bad guys — we got to have that same mindset for the spectrum. That means you need attack capabilities. We got [to] also have the defensive measures,” he said, noting the U.S. dominated in the electromagnetic spectrum when he was a brand new EW officer.

As a one-star in the Pentagon, when he sought resourcing for electronic warfare, officials would tell him there wasn’t enough to go around because other assets, such as the F-35, KC-46 or new intercontinental ballistic missiles, were higher on the priority list, he recalled.

Similarly, the Air Force is slated to only have 12 EA-37B Compass Call aircraft, which boasts cutting-edge capabilities to degrade and disrupt adversary communications, information processing, navigation and radar systems.

Air Combat Command officials say they need 22 of those systems, Bacon said, while others have noted they’d like more platforms for their regions, which contributes to resource constraints in the EW environment.

The Army, for its part, has been on a decade-long journey to rebuild its arsenal. Amid fits and starts, it has sought to cancel or reapproach several programs after years of development, having delivered its first program-of-record jammer only last year, awarding a system tested by Special Operations Command. The service is now looking to move faster in the electronic warfare realm, seeking to utilize agile funds to stay ahead of threats and buy commercial as much as possible.

Bacon has also made it a priority during his years in Congress to drive the services and DOD to identify personnel in charge of EW for accountability.

“When I first came in [Congress] in 2017, I’d go [to] a service, I’d go, ‘who’s in charge of EW?’ say, for the Army or Navy or the Air Force. They would say ‘it’s the vice chief of staff.’ Well, he or she is in charge of a lot of things,” Bacon said at the Mitchell Institute event. “We need somebody at the one- or two-star level to have that accountability.”

He noted progress on that front with leadership at the joint level, both on the Joint Staff and with a new Joint Electromagnetic Spectrum Operations Center at Strategic Command, as well as joint electromagnetic spectrum operations cells resident within each combatant command to help plan and integrate EW into operations.

“I feel like we’ve made a lot of strides in giving people responsibility and knowing who exactly we hold accountable,” he said.

Bacon also noted progress on getting the Pentagon to develop an EW strategy and implementation plan.