"We have a lot of work to do before we get there," Vice Chair of Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. John Hyten says of the Pentagon's efforts to implement its new Electronic Spectrum Superiority Strategy.
"When you build an EW system, you're not building an airplane, or you're not building a submarine or you're not building a ground system, you're building a system that's capable of using the RF spectrum in particular way," says DoD's EW czar David Tremper.
Reducing cognitive overload on warfighters while improving “time to trust” for autonomous systems is a matter of design.
"All of the services are pursuing new long-range strike capabilities today, kind of like little kids chasing a soccer ball, and someone needs to ask which investments will maximize our nation’s long-range strike warfighting potential," said Mitchell Institute's Mark Gunzinger.
Military technology often lags so far behind Silicon Valley, one defense official says, that much of the Pentagon is “in the Fred Flintstone era,” while the cutting edge is, “past the Jetsons.”
The Electromagnetic Spectrum is the key to waging electronic warfare, and EW is key to waging modern war. An enemy who can jam communications or GPS, mislead you (spoofing is the term of art) and stop your weapons from functioning (cyber attacks using radio waves). The US largely abandoned EW after the Cold War ended. […]
The RFI is one of the first industry solicitations since the Air Force announced in April 2019 an overhaul of its EW operations to counter Russian and Chinese advances, and to enable multi-domain operations.
Standoff capability means warfighters stay connected and remain remotely located in a safer environment while making it harder for adversaries to target them.
Russian and Chinese jammers could cripple US radio, radar, and GPS. The Pentagon's still wrestling with who should fix that, let alone how.