By THERESA HITCHENS
WASHINGTON: As the Joint Staff develops a Joint Warfighting Concept to guide America’s new way of war, All Domain Operations, it’s becoming increasingly clear that control of the electromagnetic spectrum is key to its success, says Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. John Hyten. And that means setting spectrum requirements will be key to ADO.
“We have to be able to effectively fight and win the electromagnetic spectrum fight right from the beginning — that is, electronic warfare in every domain,” Hyten told the Association of Old Crows (AOC). Hyten chairs the Joint Staff’s Electromagnetic Spectrum Operations Cross Functional Team, and, in addition, is the “senior designated official for EMSO, electromagnetic spectrum operations, in the Department of Defense.”
“Information advantage,” as Breaking D readers know, is one of four subcomponents to the Joint Warfighting Concept, along with joint fires, all-domain command and control, and contested logistics. While JCS Chair Gen. Mark Milley tasked the Navy to flesh out the approach to joint fires; the Air Force, Joint All-Domain Command and Control (JADC2), and the Army, contested logistics, Hyten back in September said the Joint Staff itself is working to conceptualize “information advantage” because no service volunteered.
But, Hyten explained, controlling use of the spectrum — that is ensuring US forces have access for communications and at the same time jamming enemy access — is critical to establishing that information advantage. “Under information advantage is the ability to achieve spectrum superiority in all domains,” Hyten said. “We have to be able to do that. If you can’t do that, you will fail. You will fail in your mission,” he told the AOC yesterday.
The current plan, Hyten said, is for the Joint Requirements Oversight Council (JROC, which he chairs) to finalize the requirements for each of the Joint Warfighting Concept subcomponents “in late spring.” This will include setting requirements for the services to meet in building capabilities for what DoD now calls ElectroMagnetic Spectrum Operations (EMSO) within the information advantage subcomponent requirements set.
EMSO, one expert explained, is a relatively new DoD term of art that encompasses spectrum management to ensure secure communications for US commanders and troops in the field and electronic warfare (EW) against adversaries. In the past, the expert said, those two things were the purview of separate, stovepiped communities within the services and combatant commands, which let to problems — including blue-on-blue jamming.
“So, as we publish this information advantage, we’re going to talk about how do we deal with data; how do we deal with software; how do we deal with spectrum — all those kind of pieces,” Hyten elaborated. “We’re going to define the broad-based standards and structures that all the services have to fit in, so that when they build their capabilities — their unique service capabilities — and they come together in the joint fight, they’ll be able to effectively fight and win together.”
Meanwhile, the EMSO cross-functional team is working to figure out an implementation plan for DoD’s new Electromagnetic Spectrum Superiority Strategy published on Oct 29, with a deadline at the end of March.
In addition, Congress in the 2021 National Defense Authorization Act (Section 152a) gave DoD two years to transfer responsibility for governance of EMSO from Strategic Command to Hyten’s office. The mandate was spurred by the fact that Congress has for years been concerned that DoD has not exercised enough oversight of service spectrum operations, explained one congressional insider.
In the near term, Hyten explained, the focus will be on building STRATCOM’s capacities. “We’re going to fix STRATCOM at the beginning, and then we’ll adjust with recommendations, fully involving Congress all the way through, because they’ve rightly said, ‘you have a problem, and we’re going to be part of the solution’.”
“The first thing that we have to do is make STRATCOM whole … because they’re under-resourced, undermanned and not fully capable of performing the duties they’ve been given by the department,” he stressed. Congress, he added, is supportive of this approach.
(Hyten didn’t elaborate on whether Congress has agreed to more staffing or whether the budget will be increased, for STRATCOM EMSO efforts — something that would almost certainly require legislation.)
That said, Hyten said STRATCOM isn’t the only — and in some ways not necessarily the most critical — player in implementing the EMSO strategy. The services, he explained, also have crucial roles: developing capabilities and a testing infrastructure to go along with building new ones.
“It’s key that we make sure that we don’t forget number one, and that is to build out the capabilities that we have to have. Number two is to organize train and equip effectively. And those jobs are the jobs of the Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines and Space Force,” he stressed. “The services of the Department of Defense have to build that stuff. And if we don’t remember that, we will fail in the execution of that strategy.”
The “good news,” he added, is that the services are making progress on the capabilities front. The Air Force’s new 350th Spectrum Warfare Wing — announced by Air Combat Command back in November — is set to begin operations in March. In addition, he said, “the Space Force stood up its own Delta — the Space Force equivalent of a wing — to focus on space electronic warfare [Delta 3]. The Army kicked off the first phase of its program to deliver to their brigades integrated signals intelligence EW and cyber, known as the Terrestrial Layer System. The Navy is having success in developing and flight testing the new Next Generation Jammer pod.”
Still, Hyten summed up, “we have a lot of work to do before we get there.”
As I reported early last month, DoD Director of Electronic Warfare David Tremper says implementing the EMSO strategy will require overhauling how electronic warfare systems are developed and bought — with an eye to ensuring that EW systems are compatible with radios, radars and other spectrum-reliant devices being used on the battlefield. “Historically, we have not taken a holistic approach to how we manage spectrum-using systems tactically,” he explained to the Mitchell Institute in a Dec. 9 webinar.
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