Digital Stiletto: Army Pursues Precision Electronic Warfare

WASHINGTON: After decades of neglect, the Army is urgently rebuilding its electronic warfare arm in a radically different form from the Cold War. The US isn’t trying to replicate the high-powered Russia arsenal that has scrambled GPS, radar, and radio from Scandinavia and Ukraine to Syria and Israel. Instead, the Army intends to combine EW with cyber, signals intelligence, and artificial intelligence to counter Russian power with a new kind of precision.

“When the Russians emit like that, they’re letting the entire world known where they are,” Col. Mark Dotson, the Army’s capabilities manager for EW, told reporters in June. That makes the Russian transmitters easier targets for the new long-range precision missiles that the US is developing.

By contrast, Dotson continued, “we’re looking for much more discrete ways of conducting electronic attack, using low power to affect the signal — and to affect it in such a way it may not even be detectable that you’re interfering.”

Dotson told me in a follow-up interview that the Army has fielded fairly small numbers of several systems. The names are an alphabet soup of acronyms: TEWS, TEWL, TSIG, and the future TLIS, which will be mass-produced and is scheduled to enter service around 2022-2023.

With each step, the Army comes closer to the combination it sees as critical for future conflicts with major powers like Russia and China. On that high-tech battlefield, the Army believes, cyberspace, the electromagnetic spectrum, and satellites in orbit will be as important as the traditional domains of land, air, and sea — a concept called Multi-Domain Operations.

“The goal is really the integrated signal intelligence, electronic warfare, and cyber operations capability to fight multi-domain operations in the future,” Dotson told me in a follow-up interview. “What happens in the spectrum now is a lot different than what happened in the spectrum in the ’90s.” Army photo

The Army disbanded its Combat Electronic Warfare Intelligence (CEWI) units, like the one shown here, after the Cold War.

How will the new digital battlefield be different? “We’re talking about subtle attacks, we’re talking about cyber operations, we’re talking about refined signals intelligence,” Dotson told me, “things that we can do now that we couldn’t do back then.”

Traditionally, signals intelligence and electronic warfare have often been at odds. Both need to detect and understand foreign transmissions, so their skill sets and equipment overlap, but SIGINT wants to listen in on enemy communications, while EW wants to shut them down.

Precision EW, however, raises the possibility of eavesdropping on the enemy network even as you disrupt it. Instead of old-school jamming that just drowns an enemy transmission in noise, making it unintelligible to friend and foe alike, you can interfere more subtly, using signals carefully tailored to deceive an enemy system or even download a virus onto it. You might disrupt a drone’s control link so it crashes, for example; or spoof a navigation signal so precision-guided missiles miss and ground troops get lost; or trick radar into seeing ghosts instead of your real planes — and all the time you’re listening to their communications to see how they react.

Best of all, these subtler effects aren’t immediately obvious to the enemy. Even when the target realizes something’s wrong, they may think it’s just a glitch in their system, an internal malfunction rather external interference.

“[A]dversaries could track the movements of U.S. and allied military equipment, detecting patterns of training and operations; hyperspectral imaging can identify chemical compositions; short-wavelength infrared imaging can see through clouds; and SAR sensors can image at night. When determining risks to national security, one can define it as the risk of being seen or detected.”

To use these new capabilities to the fullest, Dotson cautioned, “it will require more commander involvement.” In other words, Army commanders can’t delegate the electronic battle to their uniformed geek squad and forget it while they focus on guns and grunts. They and their staffs must learn to integrate electronic and cyber warfare into their battle plans alongside physical firepower and maneuver.

Sometimes the best way to neutralize an enemy might be to jam or hack them. Sometimes it might be to blow them up. Sometimes it might be a mix: for example, feint with your attack helicopters so the enemy anti-aircraft batteries turn on their radars and start talking to each other on radio, which you then jam.

“The commander really has a much wider range of options,” Dotson said. “It’s going to be a discussion, [and] initially, it’s not going to be a super clean process.” That will require a well-trained staff, he said, with specialists in different disciplines working closely together. For a start, Army headquarters at brigade level and above will now have a cyber/electronic warfare section.

But humans are not enough. The Army will probably need artificial intelligence as well. Modern radio-frequency transmitters — including EW jamming and spoofing tools as well as communication systems — are controlled by software that can change the frequency, wavelength, and other characteristics of their emissions in a matter of seconds. The radio waves themselves, of course, move at the speed of light. That’s radically faster than any physical weapon and a tremendous challenge for unaided human brains to keep up with.

“Even hypersonic weapons move incredibly slowly versus the electromagnetic spectrum,” Bill Conley, deputy director for electronic warfare under Pentagon R&D chief Mike Griffin, said at a conference this summer. “We have dramatically different schemes of maneuver and therefore dramatically different styles of C2 [command and control]. There will absolutely be automated decision-making.”

Now, how does the Army intend to actually build all this new tech? That’s the topic we’ll explore in the second part of this story, out tomorrow.

Hopefully commanders over the past 30 years have learned how to better utilize their EW.

I don’t know how many times we would exercise with a brigade and were just told to ‘stay out of the way’.

Ya, right. After I jam your ass and send your units all over hell and creation by infiltrating your nets.

In the mid-80s when the cold war was still on everyone's mind, the infantry units I belonged to always tried to train with the Electronic Warfare guys. It was a pain, slowed up communication, but it was worth it. Many times we had to operate like we did in WWII (runners), but you learned to keep radio traffic to a minimum, use signal flares and flags, etc... . After you got used to it, and we got pretty good at not talking on our radios.

Here is a good example of an effective technique. Situation reports were required after every significant task had been completed. Situation reports were multi-line reports. As an alternative, instead of giving a multiline report; which the EW guys would jam, we would just say "14" (which meant- completed task 14- no issues).

One of the more effective techniques the EW guys used were when they simulated a "hot microphone." When talking on a radio, you have to release the "send" button to let anyone else talk. To add to it, sometimes a microphone would malfunction and the guilty party would not know that his handset was malfunctioning; thus, having a "hot mike" was pretty common. So the EW guys would wait for critical pauses and then jam our nets in a manner that we thought someone had a "hot mike." So we would waste a lot of time trying to sort out who was the offending party, rather than realize that our net was compromised and adjust our communication plan.

A side benefit was that commanders could not micro-manage, because long conversations could not occur.

That kind of analog radio is virtually obsolete now, largely for that very reason. Instead, tactical comms are done via digital spread spectrum and usually with encryption so not only is the digital voice or data being transmitted in a wideband spectrum, even if you intercepted it you’d need the encryption keys to know what was being said.

Even SINGCARS radios, with over a half million in the field since the mid-80s, do frequency hopping at 111 times per second, and newer systems use secure VOIP which offers even better TRANSEC. You could tape the mic button down and not affect anyone elses radio any more than other peoples cell phones affect yours.

Thanks, it was an interesting read.

Much of it is stuff we were doing in the 60's, 70's, & 80's.

On a side note. I pissed off a lot of high ranking drones at Ft. Devens with my bumper sticker which read.

ASA LIVES, CEWI SUCKS

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