Airmen assigned to 87th Electronic Warfare Squadron Combat Shield assess the defensive system readiness of a U.S Air Force F-16 Fighting Falcon at Misawa Air Base, Japan. (US Air Force photo by Staff Sgt. Ericka A. Woolever)
AOC 2023 — Be afraid; be moderately afraid. That’s the bottom-line assessment of where the US and its allies stand on electronic warfare compared to Russia and China, as distilled from a host of statements by current and former Air Force generals at the Association of Old Crows’ annual EW conference.
After decades of neglect, jamming enemy radars and communications — and defending against enemy jamming in turn — is back on the agenda for the US and its allies. But China has had its eye on this ball much longer, even creating a Strategic Support Force in 2015, focused on EW, cyberwar and space, as the institutional equal of the traditional Army, Navy and air services.
Meanwhile Russia, inheritor of a strong Soviet EW tradition, has been forced to learn fast in its war with Ukraine, with Russian jammers downing thousands of drones a month and sending NATO-provided HIMARS missiles and JDAMS smart bombs off target.
The US has grown used to “being the unquestionable technological leader [since] World War II,” said Maj. Gen. David Snoddy, deputy for cyber effects on the Air Force staff (section A2/6). “I wouldn’t say we’ve lost that — but if you look at history, we have been in active combat for my entire military career, [while] our pacing threat, the PRC, has not been in combat since the seventies, so they’ve had plenty of opportunity to study and analyze everything we’ve done.”
While the US was largely fighting low-tech foes with no radars to jam, China spent 44 years of peace studying US weaknesses and refining a strategy to exploit them with cyber, electronic and information attacks coordinated by the Strategic Support Force. The goal is to paralyze the American military’s digital nervous system, rather than trying to bludgeon its body in a war of attrition. It’s a concept often translated into English as “systems destruction warfare.”
“They are thinking the same way we need to be thinking, [making] the electromagnetic spectrum one of their top priorities,” Snoddy said. “Many would believe we still do hold a technological edge, but it’s a smaller edge than we used to have. … We’re now focused on, let’s bring that margin back.”
The US Air Force got serious about electronic warfare, after decades of post-Cold War neglect, in 2017, when then-Vice Chief of Staff Gen. Stephen Wilson launched a high-level study — formally called an Enterprise Capability Collaboration Team (ECCT) — of how to revive EW. Wilson (now retired) told the AOC conference Tuesday, “progress has been incredible, but we need to continue, [because] it’s not happening fast enough. …I still think we need a sense of urgency.”
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“We’re absolutely not where we want to be, but we have made significant progress,” agreed retired Maj. Gen. David Gaedecke, who ran the ECCT for Wilson.
“There were many who wanted the ECCT to provide a hardware solution,” Gaedecke told the AOC conference. As he and the other generals noted, the Air Force retired its last dedicated jamming jet, the EF-111 Raven, in 1998 and has retained only a handful of propeller-driven EC-130 Compass Calls. Those are now being replaced with the EA-37B, a modified business jet that, while faster and a smaller target, is still unable to penetrate enemy airspace.
But with Air Force shifting from dedicated jamming planes to more modern, miniaturized EW systems on multi-role jets, especially the stealthy F-35, the ECCT found the biggest hurdles were not technological but institutional.
That’s why the study drove the Air Force to assign a general officer to oversee and advocate for EW, a task previously delegated to a colonel, Gaedecke noted. Equally important, he said, the service also consolidated its once-scattered efforts to turn raw intelligence on enemy transmissions into updated threat profiles — such as the F-35’s vital Mission Data Files — by creating the 350th Spectrum Warfare Wing in 2021.
The current wing commander, Col. Joshua Koslov, aims to accelerate from updating EW countermeasures every three months to pushing out emergency updates within three hours of detecting a new threat. But Koslov has also publicly warned that “we’re behind” adversaries like China.
Asked point-blank about that assessment, the generals at AOC were guardedly optimistic. “There are certain areas where we’re ahead,” said retired Lt. Gen. Jack Shanahan, founder of the Pentagon’s Joint Artificial Intelligence Center. But when you’re planning and training for a conflict, he cautioned, “we have no choice but to assume we’re on a par or at a slight disadvantage.”
“We have to assume [we’ll face] an adversary with EMS [Electromagnetic Spectrum] and IO [Information Operations] capabilities that are as good as or better than the United States and its partners,” Shanahan said. “That is an uncomfortable assumption but we’re at the point where we have to treat that as, largely, an accurate statement.”
“It’s going to be a different fight, a difficult fight,” Shanahan said, “[but] what we do better than anybody in the world, with our allies and partners, is adapt on the fly.”
Gen. Wilson, likewise was guardedly optimistic. “The gap has shrunk,” he said. “We know how to fix that side of the problem — we have the world’s best technologists … [but] we’ve become too hard, too complex, too bureaucratic, too risk-averse to make things happen quickly.”
There’s “unbelievable” expertise in American industry, academia and armed services, Wilson said. The problem is not talent or technology, he argued, but organization: “how do we bring those together and get this whole of nation effort behind this?”
Snoddy, who’s currently on the Air Force headquarters staff, agreed. “Part of what is now our charge [is] to keep the focus within the bureaucracy of the Department, and keep us moving forward, and never lose sight of the fact of how central this is,” he said. “We need industry and academia to really bring those hard technical solutions.”
