Electronic Warfare (EW)

Electronic warfare, EW, is the struggle for control of the electromagnetic spectrum, the radio waves, radar, and signals that modern militaries depend on to see, communicate, navigate, and guide weapons. Because nearly everything a modern force does runs on the spectrum, controlling it, using it freely yourself while denying it to the enemy, has become a decisive form of combat, and a force that loses the electronic fight can find its radars blinded, its communications severed, its navigation scrambled, and its precision weapons rendered useless, all without a shot being fired at its physical hardware.

The three parts of the fight

Electronic warfare traditionally divides into three areas that work together. Electronic attack is the offensive side, jamming enemy radars and communications with overwhelming noise, deceiving them with false signals, and disrupting the links that drones, missiles, and networks rely on, and it is what people usually picture when they think of EW, the jammer that blinds a radar or severs a drone's control link. Electronic protection is the defensive side, hardening your own systems against the enemy's electronic attack, frequency-hopping radios that are hard to jam, radars that resist deception, navigation that survives GPS jamming, so your capabilities keep working when the enemy tries to shut them down. And electronic support is the sensing side, detecting, intercepting, and locating the enemy's electronic emissions, which both feeds intelligence and cues the attack, because you cannot jam what you cannot find, and a radar or radio that transmits reveals its presence and often its position to anyone listening. These three, attack, protection, and support, are the offense, defense, and reconnaissance of the electromagnetic battlefield, and they operate as an integrated whole.

Ukraine brought electronic warfare back to the center of military attention after decades in which it had faded from Western priorities. The war became an intense, continuous electronic fight, both sides jamming each other's drones, communications, and GPS on a massive scale, and the effects were decisive and visible: drones falling from the sky as their control links were jammed, precision weapons missing as their guidance was disrupted, communications failing under electronic attack. The pace of adaptation was startling, with jammers, jam-resistant drones, and counter-jammers iterating on timescales of weeks, far faster than the years typical of major programs, a compressed demonstration of how central and how dynamic the electronic fight has become. Western militaries, which had let EW capabilities atrophy while fighting enemies who could not contest the spectrum, are scrambling to rebuild them, having relearned that against a capable adversary, dominance of the electromagnetic spectrum is a precondition for everything else.

Why it is harder than ever and more important than ever

The modern battlefield is saturated with electronic systems as never before, drones, networks, precision weapons, sensors, all radiating and all dependent on the spectrum, which makes electronic warfare simultaneously more important, because there is so much more to attack and protect, and more difficult, because the spectrum is crowded, contested, and constantly changing. The rise of the cheap drone made EW central in a new way, since jamming a drone's control link or navigation is often the most effective and economical way to defeat it, far cheaper than shooting it down, which has made electronic attack a primary counter-drone tool and put EW capability into the hands of units that never had it before. The contest is also inseparable from cyber warfare, since both operate in the electronic and digital realm and increasingly overlap, and from the broader fight for the spectrum that includes navigation, communications, and sensing, all of which an adversary will try to deny. As militaries grow ever more dependent on electronic systems, the ability to fight and win in the electromagnetic spectrum has moved from a specialized supporting function to a central determinant of who can operate at all.

How is electronic warfare different from cyber warfare?

They overlap and increasingly blur, but the traditional distinction is the medium. Electronic warfare fights in the electromagnetic spectrum, the radio waves and radar signals traveling through the air, jamming, deceiving, and detecting the signals themselves, while cyber warfare operates within computer networks and systems, attacking the data and software rather than the transmission. In practice the line is dissolving, because attacking a networked drone might involve jamming its radio link, electronic warfare, or hacking its control software, cyber warfare, and the two are converging into a combined fight for the electromagnetic and digital environment that some militaries now treat as a single domain. The practical point is that both are about denying the enemy the electronic and digital systems it depends on while protecting your own, and as those systems become more numerous and more essential, the combined electronic and cyber fight becomes ever more central to determining who prevails.