The U.S. Navy has formally elevated electronic warfare and the underlying electromagnetic spectrum to the status of a “warfighting battle space” equivalent to its sea, air, land, space, and cyber operations.
The directive approved by Thomas Modly, undersecretary of the Navy, acknowledges the growing significance of what has also become known as “spectrum warfare,” defined as the merger of conventional tools like electronic warfare with cyber operations.
It also doubles down on Pentagon attempts to squeeze more efficiency from the crowded airwaves as more electronic systems hit the battlefield. That reality has prompted the services and the Pentagon’s top research agency to look for new ways to re-allocate spectrum for electronic warfare (EW) and cyber operations.
The Defense Department has over the past five years placed a premium on developing agile systems capable of sharing congested spectrum. The Navy’s new warfighting doctrine released in October is the latest reflection of that priority.
The directive instructs all Navy branches, including the Marine Corps, to adopt an “enterprise approach” to the service’s electromagnetic spectrum operations. That includes the procurement of electronic systems, subsystems, devices, and other gear that use spectrum.
Scarce spectrum is forcing the military services to develop common, electronic warfare systems based on modular designs that can be customized for air, land or sea operations. But the Air Force, Army, and Navy have often sparred over individual requirements that have stymied efforts to develop joint EW suites.
“There’s no such things as a silver bullet,” a Marine program manager noted during an earlier effort on this front.
DoD released its Electromagnetic Spectrum Strategy in February 2014 that stressed enhanced spectrum sharing as prime Pentagon airwaves were auctioned for emerging wireless applications. The strategy stressed agile military spectrum operations, starting with the acquisition process.
Indeed, procurement was a key focus of the Navy’s new spectrum warfare directive.
On the technical side, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is sponsoring a Spectrum Collaboration Challenge designed to use machine intelligence to help overcome spectrum scarcity.
“As the number of military and civilian wireless devices continues to grow exponentially, the need for full access to the increasingly crowded electromagnetic spectrum has never been greater,” DARPA noted in announcing the next phase of the competition in early November.
“To overcome the issues of spectrum scarcity, the [spectrum challenge] aims to redefine conventional, rigid spectrum management paradigms in favor of more efficient and fluid machine-driven approaches,” program officials added.
Given advances in machine intelligence, “there is plenty of spectrum, but it’s misallocated,” noted William Chappell, director of DARPA’s Microsystems Technology Office.
In one scenario, Chappell said teams must demonstrate how 15 software-defined radios can share the same frequency bands and “figure out how they are going to cooperate.”
The well-known modulation approach 16-QAM (quadrature amplitude modulation) was used to improve spectrum efficiency. Chappell highlighted the fact that two “naïve systems” learned to speak 16-QAM.
“They learned how to communicate using 16-QAM without being programmed, [doing so] in less than a minute,” Chappell said. “This means that systems that weren't coordinated have the ability to learn how to interact.
“The fact that they learned a particularly efficient method such as grey coded 16-QAM shows the efficiency in how they learn,” Chappell added.
— George Leopold is the former executive editor of EE Times and the author of Calculated Risk: The Supersonic Life and Times of Gus Grissom (Purdue University Press, Updated, 2018).
No comments:
Post a Comment