Pentagon Pushes Testing For Electronic Warfare Vulnerabilities

WASHINGTON: Top Pentagon officials, eager to improve threat analysis and operational testing, have ordered the creation of a database of jammers that can be used for testing and training. The goal: make it easier for development programs and operational units alike to evaluate how vulnerable their systems actually are to jamming — an area where the military suffers a glaring lack of knowledge today.

Since 2018, the Defense Department’s JCIDS process has mandated that weapons programs address what’s called Electronic Protection (EP): the ability for radios and radars to keep functioning in the face of deliberate jamming or inadvertent electromagnetic interference. But “it’s still in its infancy,” because of a dearth of testing and less enforcement, cautioned David Tremper, the director for electronic warfare in office of the undersecretary for acquisition.

Just this past Monday, Tremper spoke about this subject to the Electronic Warfare Executive Committee, a high-powered body including three undersecretaries, the Director of Operational Test & Evaluation, and the vice-chiefs and acquisition chiefs of the services. “One of the messages I delivered to the EXCOM was that we need to be better about testing EP, we need to be better about exercising EP,” he told the AOC CEMA conference this morning – but “we don’t have oversight.”

You see, Tremper’s office oversees electronic support – basically, sensors that collect data on electromagnetic emissions – and electronic attack – jamming – but not electronic protection. Why? Because EP isn’t a weapons system unto itself. It has to be a feature of every single sensor, communications device, and navigation system that uses the electromagnetic spectrum, from walkie-talkies to satellites. But because you don’t know how vulnerable you are until someone seriously tries to jam you, it’s all too easy to overlook electronic protection in peacetime – and to cut spending on it as soon as budgets get tight.

“EP’s the first thing to go,” Tremper said. “[It’s] an overlooked area.”

The electronic warfare community has no authority to order all the myriad programs across all the services to do a better job on electronic protection, Tremper said. Indeed, because Congress decentralized acquisition in recent years, the vast majority of those programs are run by the services with minimal oversight by anyone in the Office of the Secretary of Defense.

“We have very, very little inherent access to those programs,” Tremper said. “We rely on the services, we rely on the developers to come to us and say, this cut is happening and you should be aware of it, so that we can do the deep dive on the budget numbers… so that we can potentially throw the flag

So it’s hard to tell whether or not programs are really addressing electronic protection, and it’s harder still to make them fix it.

“We can’t go over and say… ‘fix this problem,’” Tremper said. “What we can do is offer EW assets to test against that problem.”

The first step? Making it easier to find out what electronic warfare assets exist and who to talk to about using them in a weapons program test or military training exercise. “So what we’re doing from the EXCOM is we’re creating databases of all the DoD EW assets,” Tremper said. “Here are all those EW assets, here’s all the capabilities associated with those assets, here’s the point of contacts with all those assets, so that we can provide that to the testing and training community.”