Col. Josh Koslov, commander of the 350th Spectrum Warfare Wing, has set an ambitious goal of updating EW systems within three hours, instead of days.

In a webcast hosted by C4ISRNET, Koslov said that three-hour goal — which he once referred to as a “moonshot” — is now within reach.

“We’re very close to that, if not exceeding, in most of the systems that we cover in the spectrum warfare wing,” Koslov said. He went on to say that more than half of the 70 EW systems his organization touches across the Air Force are either at or below the three-hour mark for updating.

But many of those systems have unique elements, he said, and the Air Force’s EW systems need to make more use of interoperability and open architecture standards to simplify the process for rapid data updates.

And Koslov said his wing will need enough resources to develop these data production methods that will allow the military to process this data on a large enough scale to work in war, and then transport the data back to the field.

Koslov and Brig. Gen. Ed Barker, the Army’s program executive officer for intelligence, electronic warfare and sensors, said in the webcast that in a future war against an advanced adversary, conditions on the battlefield, threats and targets will likely change so quickly that rapid updates to EW systems will be critical.

‘Data is the weapon’

“We have to be able to continue to add pressure to the adversary in a war in order to seize the advantage and achieve our objectives,” Koslov said. “Data is the weapon that will allow this to happen, and data processing is the way to do that.”

This will include combining data from all sources in the joint force, such as Army units on land, naval ships in the Pacific, or airborne platforms, he said, and then combing through that information to find new threats. The military must then use that data to develop a way to counter that new threat, and then get that new capability back to the field.

To achieve these kind of rapid data updates, Koslov said, the Air Force has revamped its tactics, techniques and procedures to have more of a “warfighting” focus.

When asked whether data updates could be made to systems remotely, or whether they would require something to be physically plugged in, Koslov said that would depend on the EW system. He said information would be transported to Eglin Air Force Base in Florida, where the 350th is located, or other reprogramming centers where more people can process the data.

That will be especially useful during a major conflict against a nation such as China or North Korea, he said, in which joint forces would be spread out across the Pacific region.

“When you come out with a new capability, it’s not good if you just get it into one pocket,” Koslov said. “You have to be able to get it across the force. And so centralizing that is going to be the right way to do that as we move forward.”

The Air Force activated the 350th in 2021, and has since been building up its capabilities by adding more units. Earlier this year, the wing stood up two new electronic warfare squadrons — the 388th at Eglin and the 563rd at Joint Base San Antonio-Lackland in Texas.

The 563rd is focused on building new EW software for operational units to respond to the threats they encounter in the field. And the 388th is focused on studying adversaries such as China to find ways to breach and thwart their digital capabilities.

Koslov said his wing is next focused on building out the 950th Spectrum Warfare Group at Robins, which is expected to be fully activated in 2027. The 950th will be in charge of assessing the EW systems in Air Force’s combat aircraft and improving EW capabilities.

“Everything has to be assessed from a platform perspective — does the platform do what we’ve asked it to do?” Koslov said. “But also our [tactics, techniques and procedures] have to be assessed. … How good are we at fighting and training in the [EW] spectrum?”

“I think the biggest takeaway is that our near-peer adversaries, and then elements like Hamas, have formidable EW capabilities,” Brig. Gen. Ed Barker, the Army’s program executive officer for intelligence, electronic warfare and sensors, said during Wednesday’s virtual event. “It’s really about making sure that our systems, our soldiers and our commanders have that kind of freedom of maneuver within the EMS.”

The electromagnetic spectrum, or EMS, consists of the energy waves produced from radios, cellphones, radars and the like. The EMS environment has become highly contested, presenting a difficult battle space in which actors are vying for dominance.

Maintaining situational awareness is necessary for military commanders to communicate and guide weapons to their targets. EMS is becoming increasingly used by U.S. adversaries such as Russia in its war against Ukraine, the militant group Hamas in Gaza and the Yemen-based Houthi rebel group in its attack on ships in the Red Sea.

It comes down to a select few advanced capabilities facing off against “non-exquisite capabilities in mass,” Barker said. “And sometimes, you know, that mass can be quite overwhelming.”

“We’re realizing we have to build essentially an EW arsenal across the landscape to be able to go at these different types of threats,” he added.

At the same conference, Col. Josh Koslov, the head of the Air Force’s 350th Spectrum Warfare Wing, said interoperability among low-cost weapon systems will help hold the line in electronic warfare.

“They have to be able to talk to each other,” he said. “And so if we fight a near-peer tonight, we’re going to fight with the capabilities we have today. And so how do we make the systems that we have today more interoperable and able to share information, and then the systems that we’re bringing online?”

Koslov added that “super close” alignment between the warfighter and acquisition “is incredibly important as we move forward, and then making sure that we’re developing the requirements that drive interoperability from the beginning.” This means a reduced focus on major weapon systems, and more of a focus on the data that those weapon systems use, he noted.

He pointed to the use of low-cost tools that “create strategic and operational impacts” in Ukraine and the Gaza Strip, adding that the U.S. needs to develop a system capable of countering that approach.

In the early days of the Defense Department’s pursuit of Combined Joint All-Domain Command and Control, or CJADC2, the focus was on full interoperability among and within all of the military services. Bryan Clark, director of the Hudson Institute’s Center for Defense Concepts and Technology, said the vision, while well-intentioned, was too broad in its scope.

“That was a little bit too ambitious for what the technology and our requirements and acquisition process can achieve,” he said June 5 at a virtual C4ISRNET Conference. “I think by building it from the bottom up to a larger aggregation, we’re going to see more success with JADC2 going forward.”

That bottom-up approach, Clark said, has meant that rather than try to connect everything, the department is addressing the most urgent operational problems through joint and service-level experimentation campaigns.

The military services each have their own versions of this. The Army calls its approach Project Convergence, the Navy Project Overmatch and the Air Force has the Advanced Battle Management System. The Chief Digital and AI Office also holds regular technology sprints through an event known as the Global Information Dominance Experiment, which bring together the services, combatant commands, Joint Staff and international partners to test out CJADC2 capabilities.

In February, Deputy Secretary of Defense Kathleen Hicks announced the Defense Department had delivered a baseline CJADC2 capability that was validated through a GIDE event held late last year. The department hasn’t revealed specifics on what was fielded but Hicks said it was improving information-sharing in the field.

Mark Kitz, the Army’s program executive officer for command, control, communications-tactical, said during the conference that experiments like GIDE and Project Convergence have helped highlight the sensor-to-shooter connections that are highest priority for the services.

They’ve also led to a heightened focus on interoperability, which has yielded some tangible results, he said.

For example, during the most recent Project Convergence event that wrapped up in March, known as Capstone 4, the Army and the Navy directly integrated their kit and were able to bring together their data environments.

“And so, Project Convergence offered sort of this real opportunity for us to bring these capabilities together in a real operational way and . . . get through sort of the challenges of data interoperability,” Kitz said.

During the same exercise, the Air Force’s Advanced Battle Management team, led by Brig. Gen. Luke Cropsey, brought a tool that allows the service to see how its air picture integrates with its sensing environment — a capability that could directly benefit the Army.

“The investments that Gen. Cropsey and his team were making were directly related to a gap in the Army’s architecture,” Kitz said.

As it so often does, the U.S. government is looking to the private sector for inspiration, and it’s seeing commercial partners leveraging these tools already, officials from the U.S. military and the Pentagon said at the 2024 C4ISRNET Conference on Wednesday. That’s in no small part due to the fact that many of these companies have the workforce on hand to use them and can recruit competitively on pay.

“We have seen Big Tech and large tech companies embracing some of these tools, and they’re moving out with it because they see the value in these methods,” said Benjamin Bishop, deputy director of transition in the Adaptive Capabilities Office of DARPA. “But a lot of those companies … can pay salaries for this talent that may not translate to other companies in the defense industrial base because their focus area is different.”

There’s also a need, he said, to make these capabilities accessible not just to certifying organizations and those with specialized training or expertise, but to the broader workforce to move U.S. military strategy forward holistically. And it needs to happen fast enough so that the latest technology is not mired in acquisition regulation and rendered obsolete.

“How do we navigate the the non-technical barriers to our transition?” said Bishop. “How do we get the tools into the hands of the warfighters in order to maximize their success?”

The proliferation of digital threats in recent years has forced cybersecurity to become the responsibility of every Pentagon office, civilian and military. Bishop noted that the cyber-contested environment is rapidly become a standard character of war, and the Biden Administration, too, has set top-down goals for every aspect of government to be equipped with security measures in place, whether they contribute directly to national defense or not.

“To me, that’s not necessarily a technology problem,” said Bishop. “How do we get the technology to be … understood by the systems that have to certify these products, but also understood by the workforce that’s across our defense industrial base and also in uniform?”

And while partnering with the private sector can and does work, the military itself must develop its own cyber expertise, he said.

On top of trying to meet general manpower goals, the services, too, are recruiting cyber experts to their ranks and contend with how to compensate them uniformly despite different pay scales, [Military Occupation Specialty] titles, and promotion processes, according to Bishop.

“One of the things that we hear from the warfighter is we’ll have a technology solution that is available, but getting it through that process to have the authority to operate and be able to get it through the approval process is very laborious,” Bishop said Wednesday said at the annual C4ISRNet conference. “I will add, for good reason, because in the past these DOD steps have shown improvement to generate a higher quality solution.”

While humans doing math can prove software works as it’s designed, there are tools that can look at file metadata, which contains proof that the software is secure, and automatically verify its safety, he explained at the virtual event.

DARPA’s program Automated Rapid Certification of Software, or ARCOS, is working on developing that capability, Bishop said. The goal of the program is to automate the evaluation of software assurance evidence to enable certifiers to determine rapidly that system risk is acceptable, according to the agency.

The capability is viable, he added, but “what I’m really interested in is not just that it’s technically viable, but we can we do it in a way that can be adopted across the DOD ecosystem?”

In order to do so, the DOD will need to provide incentive for commercial partners to use it, Bishop noted.

“We have seen big tech or large tech companies are embracing some of these tools and they’re moving out with it because they see the value in these methods,” according to Bishop.

Another element in developing such a capability is ensuring its user friendliness. “Are there ways that we can get these tools, not only to be able to be acceptable by the certifying organizations but can they be used by people that don’t have PhDs,” Bishop said, “to be able to navigate these tools.”