Electronic Warfare Resilience: Defending the New Front Line

Military personnel in camouflage monitoring radar screens and global flight maps inside a high-tech command center.

The electromagnetic spectrum is the ultimate network enabler. It’s not limited to land, sea, air or space, military or commercial systems; it’s always-on, pervasive and contested. At a time when electronic warfare (EW) and electromagnetic spectrum operations (EMSO) are as consequential as kinetic effects, resilience is the watchword, not only for national security space systems, but for the commercial space assets that underlie modern critical infrastructure.

“This idea of generating EW effects, this is all-domain. It’s fundamental to national security and how we enable joint maneuver forces across all domains,” said Col. Angelo Fernandez, Commander of Space Delta 3 at the Air and Space Forces Association Warfare Symposium in Colorado. “The modern environment includes EW. It’s just fundamental. If that’s not our starting point, then we’re absolutely missing the mark.”

Whether it’s jamming and spoofing or electronic countermeasures, the effects of EW cross networks and domains. Much in the way the space industry is reckoning with cybersecurity, there is growing recognition that electronic warfare isn’t just a military problem, it’s everyone’s problem.

“Because everything is increasingly dual use, you end up at this place where everything ends up being more vulnerable,” said Paul Kruchoski, former director of the State Department Office of Policy, Planning and Resources for Public Diplomacy and a director at Guidehouse. “Given the range of motivations that state and non-state actors have, there’s a real need to close that gap between government and industry and make sure that space-based assets are well protected. We’re not there yet in being able to protect everything in the way we need to.”

Software-Defined and Resilient by Design

The role of space systems in networked warfare and everyday civilian life makes EW resilience essential. Power, though inherently limited, is one of the most common tools to break through interference. New high-throughput satellites can dynamically focus a narrow spot beam on a user to overpower a disruption—up to a certain point. Military systems have been jokingly described as powerful enough to “heat a cup of coffee on the moon.”

For most modern constellations, resilience is part of the design. Using a “redundant mesh capability,” operators can “steer around the threat of a localized disruption,” said retired Col. Chris Kennedy, former U.S. Space Force (USSF) Commander of Space Delta 6 and associate director of Guidehouse. “The mesh idea, in terms of global coverage, makes it hard to counter it everywhere.”

Kennedy cited the 31-plus satellite GPS constellation, which leverages proliferation, redundancy and crosslinks for secure in-orbit communication and accuracy. Future GPS IIIF satellites will be equipped with optical crosslinks for secure command and control, an optical space-to-ground demonstration for resilience, in addition to jam-resistant M-code.

Starlink’s Starshield, with more than 200 satellites currently in orbit, also employs resilience by design. Its highly integrated mesh network uses optical inter-satellite links for command and control and autonomous data routing.

Signal interference is a classic electromagnetic spectrum operation that can be completely benign and accidental or malicious. Spectrum analyzers, carrier ID and geolocation software are all critical tools in a commercial or military toolbox for identifying and characterizing the source of interference or EW threat. After identification, operators typically have a handful of options: eliminate the emitter (primarily in active combat zones), report and resolve the incident bilaterally or through regulatory agencies or use techniques to mitigate the interference.

“This is where AI comes in,” said Russ Matijevich, founder of Matijevich International and former deputy director of the Department of Defense Office of Space Policy. Improvements in on-chip processing power, AI, machine learning and the advancement of “software-defined everything” make it more feasible to train signal processing models to isolate malicious waveforms and counter them, he explained.

Operators can identify and negate waveforms using techniques like nulling, where electronically steered phased-array antennas can create dead zones around an interfering signal. Other techniques like frequency hopping and waveform virtualization also complicate an adversary’s ability to pin down a specific receiver or frequency.

“That’s where you get into the cat and mouse game, and you’ve automated trying to stay one step ahead of the jamming attacker,” said Matijevich. “That can all be done with software and happen at the speed of need.”

Ukraine: The Need for Speed

The softwarization of satellite networks has fundamentally compressed timelines for action and reaction. Development cycles can occur on the order of days and weeks instead of months and years for hardware systems.

At the same time, the software revolution has introduced new vulnerabilities inherent to networked systems. Software updates and open architectures mean space platforms delivered today may have vastly different capabilities five years from now. While this helps achieve the goal of a networked battlespace, the shift is also upending traditional acquisitions processes and multi-year force structure planning.

Ukraine, which has been described as a “laboratory for 21st century warfare,” exemplifies this change. Tight feedback loops between frontline forces and responsive partners have resulted in near-real-time innovation. Near real-time innovation has been decisive in creating effects in the electromagnetic domain as impactful as kinetic weapons.

Anthony Nigara, vice president of strategy and business development at L3Harris, recently discussed how industry is supporting these rapid development cycles. Speaking at the AFA Warfare Symposium, Nigara noted that Ukrainian operators are providing “real-time feedback on the Russian EW threat environment” to engineering teams, who then “create new software waveforms [and] push them out to the front lines.”

However, even a compressed timeline of days and weeks is too slow, according to Nigara. “We must operate at the minute and the second timescale.”

The conflict has demonstrated that industry can deliver effects on an operationally relevant timeline; that the smallest unit of time in defense acquisitions is not 12 to 18 months. These kinds of real-world demonstrations are where defense and industry leaders see an opportunity to break from tradition to more agile, experimental acquisition cycles.

“The timelines must be condensed,” said Megan Moloney, associate director of Guidehouse, referring to industry development and Space Force acquisition. “What that means is that we can’t admire the problem. We will have to accept some new, trial solutions that maybe haven’t been vetted as extensively as they have in the past.”

The sentiment directly echoes Chief of Space Operations Gen. Chance Saltzman’s calls for institutional change, specifically, to accept calculated risk instead of clinging to the “status quo” of outdated acquisitions, requirements development and test and evaluation processes.

“There may be some risk in change, but it pales in comparison to the risk of accepting the status quo,” Saltzman told the AFA Warfare Symposium last February. “We will no longer have the luxury of pursuing perfection when a system that is good enough provides combat capability on a more operationally relevant timeline.”

The Space Force is already moving toward this with the recent success of a new testing framework that uses “continuous incremental delivery” and rapid systems upgrades to put EW capabilities into the hands of operators “months ahead of schedule,” according to Saltzman.

The Cyber-EW One-Two Punch

Networked electromagnetic and cyber operations are already reshaping the battlefield. Dual use technologies have expanded the attack surface and placed military and commercial assets on similar grounds.

The combination of cyberspace operations, electronic warfare and spectrum operations, often discussed under the umbrella of Cyber and Electromagnetic Activities (CEMA), further complicates a complex non-kinetic threat landscape. The 2022 Viasat attack, which featured a ground station cyberattack and the disablement of the user link, is a key example of how the lines are blurring between 0s and 1s and hertz and watts.

“EW and cyber are increasingly conjoined,” said Kruchoski, who recently supported multiple cross-functional teams in Project Gray Orbit, an unclassified tabletop exercise demonstrating how cyber, electromagnetic, and influence operations can threaten orbital systems and decision-making.

“In a lot of places, I think we’re going to be coming into a world where there are novel measures and countermeasures that are generated in close-to-real-time in a lot of these domains,” Kruchoski continued. “It’s really a question of: how do we equip ourselves to be able to detect and deal with them so that we don’t suffer multi-domain problems?”

Practitioners in military and commercial space continue to adapt to deter or mitigate persistent network threats. Though these threats occur on a near-daily basis, they are highly significant in the context of deterrence and escalation management. Electromagnetic spectrum operations, like those targeting space assets, extend beyond localized effects. They collapse physical distances into low-latency networks, inevitably creating strategic ambiguity.

Though short of the “red line” of physical destruction, there’s an active argument over how cyber-EW activities fit into traditional U.S. and NATO definitions of phased escalation, said Matijevich, specifically citing risks to critical infrastructure.

“For the first time since the War of 1812, [the U.S.] homeland is on the front line. And most people do not even know this has happened,” he said. In a contested cyber-EW environment, the invasion doesn’t have to be physical, Matijevich explained, but adversaries “are very much going to be operating on our shores.”