EW Needs $2B More A Year; ‘Major Deficiencies’ Found By Defense Science Board

WASHINGTON: A classified Defense Science Board study, now on the desk of Deputy Defense Secretary Robert Work, recommends that the Pentagon invest an additional $2 billion a year in electronic warfare and create a high-level executive committee to oversee the four services’ EW spending.

“We need to dig ourselves out of a big hole, because we have seen a significant erosion of our electronic warfare capability over the last two decades,” said Paul Kaminski. It was Kaminski who proposed the study — tentatively titled 21st Century Military Operations in a Complex Electromagnetic Environment — some 18 months ago when he was chairman of the Defense Science Board. A legend in the defense acquisition world, Kaminiski was the Pentagon’s top procurement officer in the 1990s. It’s the current holder of that post, Under Secretary for Acquisition, Logistics, and Technology Frank Kendall, who would co-chair the proposed executive committee alongside the Vice-Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Adm. James “Sandy” Winnefeld.

They’d have a big mess to clean up in electronic warfare, Kaminski made clear this morning at the annual conference of the EW group Association of Old Crows. (Click here for full coverage). In the DSB study, he said, “we found major deficiencies.”

The causes? The US took its eye off the EW ball after the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, especially after 9/11, when it focused on relatively low-tech threats in Afghanistan and Iraq. Outside the war effort, stealth aircraft like the F-22 Raptor and F-35 Joint Strike Fighter sucked up the lion’s share of investment. Meanwhile, our better-funded adversaries — Russia, China, Iran, and others — exploited rapidly advancing technology that can jam, deceive, or hack the sensors, networks, and GPS signals on which our military relied. The increasingly complex environment requires not only renewed investment in traditional EW equipment but the creation of battle management systems to coordinate operations in an increasingly complex electromagnetic environment, he said.

“It’s actually pretty clear what we need to do in many areas, but I’d say the scale of the EW problem today and the years of neglect make the remedy expensive,” Kaminski said. “We also need something else besides money: We need senior level attention to the problem.”

I chased down Kaminski after his public remarks to get more detail. First, he made clear that the DSB concluded the Pentagon needs to add $2 billion more on top of the current level of investment in EW, whatever it actually is. “It is really hard to get a figure of what’s being spent on EW now,” Kaminski told me. “Do you want to count the platform?” — e.g. the full cost of a Navy EA-18G Growler — “[or] do you want to count the payload [only]?”– just the jammers and EW sensors on the plane. Overall, he said, “What we’re talking about here is about a $2 billion a year increase over that base.”

Even with that added money, he said, “it’s going to be a tradeoff: Do you buy a couple fewer platforms and spend some more money or not?”

To direct these investments — and force the hard choices when the services want to spend money on something else — is going to take an executive committee of top officials: Kendall, Winnefeld, representatives from the services and appropriate agencies. “What you want an EXCOM to do here is to oversee it,” he said, “because much of those budget increases will be in service budgets,” as well as at DARPA and other agencies.

What about the role of Strategic Command, officially the “advocate” for EW across the services but, as STRATCOM’s own director of operations lamented yesterday, lacking authorities and funding to make things happen?

“There is room for an enlarged role by STRATCOM — and also PACOM,” Kaminski told me. He wasn’t thinking about a governance role, it became clear, but of exercises to sharpen the forces’ EW edge and try out new tactics and technology, for which he held up Pacific Command’s “Northern Edge” wargames as a model.

“This is an area where we need some additional progress in modeling and simulation, testing and exercises,” Kaminski told me. In his public remarks, he’d said bluntly that “we’re pretty weak at the modeling and simulation at the campaign level” — that is, looking at the chaotic interplay of the whole electromagnetic battle, rather than at one system as a time — and only exercises in the real, physical world can verify or correct such complex models.

Inadequate training has contributed to “a very limited ability of our key decision-makers to understand the potential impact of electronic warfare,” Kaminski told the conference. And what EW efforts exist remain largely stovepiped by service, despite lip service to jointness and interoperability. “Unfortunately I still hear more talk than action,” he said. The Air Force and Navy-led Air-Sea Battle initiative is promising, but overall, he said, “this is being driven probably more by our unified and specified regional commands,” particularly PACOM, rather than by the services.

The problem goes beyond the services, though, he said. Fundamentally, our whole acquisition system — from the identification of new threats to the fielding of new technology — is much too slow for a world in which Moore’s Law doubles computing power every 18 months and software-defined systems can change their entire electromagnetic profile in mid-mission.

“This migration to a digital software-driven world and the availability of high-end electronics has to change our whole paradigm,” Kaminski said. During the Cold War, the US would identify a new piece of Soviet hardware, study it, officially certify it as “a documented and approved threat,” and then embark on a program to develop, test, and field a countermeasure. “10 or 12 years later we were fielding a capability to deal with that threat,” he said. That doesn’t work today. [It] has no chance of working today.”