Clara Le Gargasson and James Black
The war in Ukraine has exposed a critical front long neglected by Western militaries: electromagnetic warfare (EW). Control over this invisible battlespace, where communications are jammed, drones blinded, and precision weapons thrown off course, can decide the outcome of a conflict. Russia has understood this sooner than NATO, using EW to isolate Ukrainian units, disrupt command networks, and neutralize Western systems. Ukraine has adapted with ingenuity, but it is learning in combat what NATO should have learned in training. After decades focused on counterinsurgency, the Alliance now risks confronting its most capable adversary without mastery of a defining domain of modern warfare.
This is not to say that EW is a new phenomenon. The electromagnetic spectrum (EMS) has been an element of warfare since the early 1900s and the birth of signals intelligence (SIGINT), when the interception of naval radio transmissions helped Imperial Japan to defeat Tsarist Russia in 1905. The EMS was gradually instrumentalised in different ways: via radar and the interception and cracking of Enigma in World War 2, radio broadcast jamming in the Cold War, guidance systems jamming in the Yom Kippur War, and GPS jamming in the Gulf War. But despite periodic discoveries of new and varied ways to use EW, Western militaries deprioritised such technologies in the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, as part of a broader shift away from large-scale, state-on-state warfighting towards counterinsurgency.
No comments:
Post a Comment