Mark Pomerleau
AUGUSTA, Ga. — Electronic warfare is now getting more senior level recognition within the Army.
“The [chief of staff of the Army] in one of his recent briefs actually touched on the fact that electromagnetic warfare is a core competency,” Col. Leslie Gorman, Army capability manager for electromagnetic warfare, said during a presentation Tuesday at the TechNet Augusta conference. “The bottom line is EW is a cross-cutting function that we are observing actively every day, across every warfighting function.”
Other officials across the service have noted that the Army is placing more emphasis on the significance of electromagnetic warfare in modern conflict.
“I think it’s been pretty well known that the Army has, after facing 20 years of GWOT, or global war on terror, that we needed to retool our focus, as the chief has been doing with several of his initiatives, most recently, the Army Transformation Initiative,” Maj. Gen. Jake Kwon, director of the Department of the Army’s Management Office for Strategic Operations, said in an interview Aug. 14. “The direction that we were headed where we had these long lead-time programs of record, we had an electronic warfare enterprise that had been shaped by the global war on terror and the counterinsurgency, and that was incompatible for what we’re going to face in the future with large-scale combat operations.”
The service has been on a years-long journey to reinvigorate and reinvest in advanced EW capabilities, after having divested much of its arsenal after the Cold War. Adversaries, in that time, have recognized the importance of the spectrum and developed new capabilities, techniques and doctrine.
Russia’s incursion into Ukraine in 2014 served as a bit of a wakeup call for the Army as it observed the Russian military’s tactics. Since then, it has sought to invest in capabilities and elevate the discipline — to include jamming techniques and signature management of friendly forces — to the highest levels of the service given if units are discovered in the spectrum based on their emissions, they can be fired upon in minutes.
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