{"id":24808,"date":"2017-05-22T18:43:04","date_gmt":"2017-05-22T18:43:04","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/one.sightlinemg.com\/c4isrnet\/uncategorized\/2017\/05\/22\/army-working-to-develop-departmentwide-ew-strategy\/"},"modified":"2026-08-08T18:17:31","modified_gmt":"2026-08-08T18:17:31","slug":"army-working-to-develop-departmentwide-ew-strategy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/one.sightlinemg.com\/c4isrnet\/c2-comms\/2017\/05\/22\/army-working-to-develop-departmentwide-ew-strategy\/","title":{"rendered":"Army working to develop departmentwide EW strategy"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

The Army is working toward developing a departmentwide electronic warfare strategy, which remains in flux at the draft stage.“We have been working with our counterparts across the department, [Army Training and Doctrine Command] and the acquisition community, to assess holistically and from a DOTMLPF perspective the department’s approach to EW and the application of that going forward,” the new chief of staff to the Army’s cyber directorate, Col. Sean Kennan, said during the C4ISRNET Conference in early May.\u00a0The perspective Kennan was referring to stands for doctrine, organization, training, materiel, leadership, personnel, facilities and policy.EW is beginning to play a greater role within the Army as Russian forces are alleged to have exercised advanced capabilities against U.S. partners in Europe.\u00a0Kennan acknowledged, however, that the Army has not had a strategy for EW for quite some time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n

The service recently released an updated field manual for cyber and electromagnetic activity<\/a>that governs such operations, providing “tactics and procedures for the coordination and integration of Army cyberspace and electronic warfare operations to support unified land operations and joint operations.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n

“We currently don\u2019t have EW formations, we probably don\u2019t have the right mix of EW soldiers in our bridge combat teams, and so we are taking a very close look at this across the spectrum from a man, train and equip, and operational employment relative to EW,” Kennan said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Army is looking to create a new career field and operational detachment specifically for electromagnetic operations.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“Effective Oct. 1, 2018, our electronic warfare force, which we call our 29-series career field, will now become 17s, meaning that is the career field that is the baseline of cyber,” Maj. Gen. Patricia Frost, who heads the cyber directorate, said<\/a>last December. “We will start training the 29 series this year with a foundation in cyber, signals intelligence and electronic warfare. And then we\u2019ll talk about kind of where the Army\u2019s going with reorganization and operational capability.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The new operational detachment, Frost said, is targeted to come online within the next year.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Others have also recognized how the Army took its eyes off operations in the electromagnetic spectrum during the counterinsurgency operations in Iraq and Afghanistan<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“For a while, the Army kind of got away from electromagnetic spectrum defense, attack, those kinds of activities,” Army Forces Command’s Deputy Chief of Staff Brig. Gen. Todd Isaacson\u00a0said.<\/p>\n\n\n

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Combat ready and globally responsive, the U.S. Army Forces Command is tasked with a full range of operation. Brig. Gen. Todd Isaacson, FORSCOM\u2019s deputy chief of staff, discusses how the Army is rethinking its approach to multi-domain warfare.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n

“We assume that we had [superiority] and therefore we took actions inside the Army to cut our field artillery, to do away with EW inside the Army as a capability, and now we\u2019re finding that those capabilities did not go away on our threat \u2014 enemy, adversaries \u2014 at the near-peer level,” said<\/a>Maj. Gen. Bo Dyess, acting director of the Army Capabilities Integration Center at TRADOC. “We\u2019ve just been focusing on a different thing the last 15 years, and appropriately so.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Isaacson said the Army is now putting cyber and electromagnetic spectrum operations together.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

During the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, U.S. forces used EW to jam low-tech devices that were used to detonate deadly improvised explosive devices.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

If the spectrum is not managed properly<\/a>, friendly systems can interfere with each other and backfire, jamming friendly communications. Despite the success of these EW IED countermeasures, they prevented friendly forces from communicating because they jammed everything as opposed to targeting a specific frequency within the spectrum.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And so the Department of Defense finalized a departmentwide EW strategy. “The base strategy document is very deliberately an unclassified document \u2026 and the reason for that is it allows us to share it broadly on the industry side, with our partners, with our allies, and say: ‘This, no kidding, (is) where we are going with our investments into electronic warfare,’ ” said<\/a>William Conley, deputy director of EW within the Pentagon\u2019s office of acquisition, technology and logistics during a December conference.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The document, however, is not available to the public, but rather for official use only. According to documents provided to C4ISRNET, the plan\u2019s vision describes agile, adaptive and integrated EW to offensively achieve electromagnetic spectrum, or EMS, superiority across the range of military operations, and it includes four-fold goals:<\/p>\n\n\n\n