The 5 areas of emphasis in the Army’s new electronic warfare strategy

By: Mark Pomerleau  

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The Army has published its formal electronic warfare strategy document in response to broader strategy shifts in the Department of Defense.

The Pentagon released the National Defense Strategy in January 2018 to focus more on the so-called great power competition and countries such as China and Russia and focus less on the counterterrorism mission. The Department of Defense, a year earlier, released a new electronic warfare strategy, which led the Army to develop its own. The document was formally signed the Army G-3/5/7 on Aug. 23.

“The objective of the U.S. Army Electronic Warfare Strategy is to operationalize EW capabilities as a force multiplier supporting ground commanders,” reads a one-page document provided to C4ISRNET. “The strategy enables the paradigm shift to cyberspace electromagnetic activities by addressing EW capabilities and capacities that allow the Joint Force to compete, deter, and win in this environment.”

The Army strategy includes five areas of effort: building the workforce, operations, capability development, educating and training the force, and partnerships.

For years, the Army has been intensifying a years’ long campaign to not only integrate cyber and EW capability together at the tactical edge but also to restore EW capability at all echelons and levels of the battlefield all the way up to the strategic level in response to similar sophisticated capabilities exhibited by Russia.

The Army is maturing several concepts, capabilities and units to conduct tactical cyber, electronic warfare, intelligence and information operations to support brigade commanders.

The one page document points to how the National Defense Strategy identifies threats to ground commanders as increasingly transregional, multidomain and multifunctional. The strategy notes that EW must be integrated and synchronized across multiple domains and throughout the depth of the battlefield.

The Army is undergoing several force design updates to keep pace with adversaries.

“EW must adapt in order to keep up with a rapidly changing, multi-domain environment,” the document states. “Land, air, sea, space, and cyberspace superiority all depend on superiority in the electromagnetic spectrum. In order to maintain the Army’s battlefield superiority, it is critical for the U.S. Army to integrate new technologies into well-trained formations faster than our adversaries.”