Mark Pomerleau
The patch of the 350th Spectrum Warfare Wing is displayed in front of the wing's holiday greeting card display at Eglin Air Force Base, Fla., Dec. 2, 2022. (U.S. Air Force photo by 1st Lt. Benjamin Aronson)
AFA 2025 — As it supports operations around the globe, the Air Force’s electromagnetic spectrum reprogramming wing has sped up the cycle for testing and deploying different waveforms to stay ahead in the cat-and-mouse game of electronic warfare, according to a key service official.
“What we have learned [as] they’re stressing the system is we have to be able to operate in multiple AORs [areas of operation] and be able to push the information that the warfighter is going to need in all of those AORs to make sure that the warfighter is dialed into what that electromagnetic operating environment is put in,” Col. Larry Fenner, commander of the 350th Spectrum Warfare Wing, told Breaking Defense in an interview. “We have contributed to multiple operations, whether it’s in the Middle East, [Indo-Pacific Command], in Europe, we and we continue to do so, even to this day. It’s nonstop for us.”
The 350th Spectrum Warfare Wing was born in 2021 as a direct result of a landmark study over six years ago known as the Enterprise Capability Collaboration Team that sought to dive deeper into electromagnetic spectrum issues and develop institutional changes. The wing is focused on three missions: rapid reprogramming, target and waveform development, and assessment of Air Force electronic warfare capabilities.
In electronic warfare and electromagnetic spectrum operations — where adversaries seek to deny access to the spectrum for communications or navigation through jamming — agility and speed are paramount. Once a signal is detected, forces must work to reprogram systems to counter it. During the Cold War that could take weeks to months as the signal had to be sent back to a lab, a fix devised, and then sent back to the field. Today, it needs to happen in days or even hours.
Fenner, who spoke on the sidelines of the annual Air and Space Forces Association conference at National Harbor, Md., said that in the year he’s been in command of the wing, he pushed his airmen to “really move out aggressively on those waveforms and starting to introduce that extra capability into our treasure chest.” Early returns, he said, are promising, as the wing has halved the time for waveform reprogramming in some cases.
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