Winning the Airwaves: Sustaining America's Advantage in the Electromagnetic Spectrum

Bryan Clark, Mark Gunzinger

Security,

The comfort of a post–Cold War advantage has left America lagging.

The electromagnetic spectrum (EMS) is one of the most critical domains in modern warfare. While militaries have long used it to communicate, keep track of friendly forces and find and target enemies, emerging technological advances now promise to dramatically change how they will use the EMS in the future. In the same way that smartphones and the Internet are redefining how the world shares, shops, learns and works, new sensors and networking technologies will enable militaries to gain significant new advantages over competitors that fail to keep pace.

Unfortunately, “failed to keep pace” is an appropriate description of the Pentagon’s investments in EMS warfare capabilities over the last generation. In the absence of a peer rival following the end of the Cold War, DoD failed to pursue a new generation of capabilities needed to maintain its EMS superiority. This pause provided China, Russia and other rivals with an opportunity to field systems that target vulnerabilities in sensor and communication networks the U.S. military has come to depend on. As a result, America’s once significant military advantage in the EMS is eroding, and may in fact no longer exist. This does not have to remain the case. DoD has the opportunity to develop new operational concepts and technologies that will allow it to “leap ahead” of its competitors and create enduring advantages in EMS warfare.

A Long-Term Competition:

The ways in which militaries conducted EMS warfare have changed significantly over the last hundred-plus years. We can think of these changes as a series of major phases, each of which placed a different emphasis on the use of active or passive EMS capabilities and countermeasures. Within each phase, incremental improvements to existing EMS capabilities allowed militaries to gain temporary advantages over their competitors. These advantages dissipated as the other side developed the next generation of countermeasures. More enduring advantages were the product of new operational concepts and capabilities that enabled militaries to transition to a new phase of the EMS warfare competition before their rivals.