The fastest arms race is happening in the electromagnetic spectrum

The Jerusalem Post | Merav Davidovits

Russia’s use of a Starlink-linked BM-35 strike drone over Kyiv in late January 2026 exposed how electromagnetic competition now extends beyond jamming into satellite-network access and software control. Ukraine’s defence minister, Mykhailo Fedorov, took the evidence to SpaceX, which built a whitelist of authorised Ukrainian terminals in about a day. By early February, unregistered terminals along the front had gone dark.

The episode reflects a wider dependency: drones, radars, tactical networks, satellite links, GPS-guided munitions and command-and-control systems all rely on the electromagnetic spectrum. In Ukraine, countermeasures now move within weeks, while fibre-optic drones accounted for 32% of strike drones by April 2026. AI-based navigation, including KrattWorks’ Ghost Dragon, is reducing reliance on GPS. Advantage is perishable. Israel’s 5114th Spectrum Warfare Battalion reportedly defeated about 25% of roughly 1,100 Iranian drones during the June 2025 war. The contest is shifting from programmed systems toward learning systems that can adapt during an engagement.

Comment

The decisive change is that spectrum advantage is becoming a software-update problem rather than a conventional procurement problem. Traditional electronic warfare depends on threat libraries: an emitter is catalogued, a countermeasure is engineered, and the result is loaded before deployment. That model assumes a measurable delay between observation and response. Ukraine’s front shows the assumption failing, with jamming-and-countermeasure cycles repeating within weeks.

The mechanism is compression of the detect-classify-decide-reconfigure loop. DARPA’s Behavioral Learning for Adaptive Electronic Warfare, or BLADE, programme demonstrated that adaptive systems could characterise and counter new wireless threats in minutes rather than months, according to the contractor reporting cited in the source. Once that loop operates during an encounter, the value of a fixed frequency plan, pre-loaded waveform or stable navigation dependency falls. Fibre-optic drones illustrate the same logic at the link layer: by removing a radio emission, they deny a jammer its usual point of attack, though cable range and terrain remain constraints.

The IDF’s 5114th Spectrum Warfare Battalion shows that the same architecture can serve defence and offence. During the June 2025 war with Iran, it was credited with defeating about 25% of roughly 1,100 Iranian drones. The unresolved issue is accountability: an AI system acting on a misclassified emitter in a deceptive spectrum could produce a dangerous decision faster than a human can intervene.

Strategic Question for Discussion

If systems such as DARPA’s BLADE begin countering unfamiliar emissions in minutes, what happens to human authority over an electronic attack against an ambiguous emitter?

The pattern suggests authority will shift from approving each response to setting boundaries, priorities and escalation conditions before an engagement. My assessment is that human judgement will remain decisive where classification is uncertain, but the practical decision point may move earlier into system design. The 5114th Spectrum Warfare Battalion’s dual defensive and offensive use shows why those boundaries cannot be treated as a purely technical setting.

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