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A Post-Cold War Assumption That No Longer Holds
For three decades, the Alliance operated under a dangerous assumption: that the electromagnetic spectrum was a permissive sanctuary. Lulled into complacency by counter-terrorism campaigns that allowed precision strikes and networked command to go largely unchallenged, we forgot how to fight in the dark. The Russia-Ukraine war has violently corrected that amnesia. Today, electronic warfare is not an enabling function; it is the apex of modern combat power. If a force cannot survive in the spectrum, its sensors are blind, its networks collapse, and its kill chains are severed.
The Alliance stands at a critical inflection point. The time for incremental modernization has passed; this short piece is a call to arms to reclaim our operational advantage. The war in Ukraine has proven that the half-life of a technological advantage is measured in days, not decades. If we do not aggressively institutionalize agility across our warfighting commands, we risk entering the next conflict blind, deaf, and disconnected.
Russia’s Spectrum Offensive at Scale
Russia entered the war with a deep inventory of EW systems, rooted in Soviet-era investment and modernized over the past decade. From strategic GPS denial across Eastern Europe to tactical jamming of drones, radios, and artillery sensors, Russian forces use EW to degrade decision-making, disrupt fires, and blind ISR, continuously, at scale, across every echelon.
This is not a supplementary effort; it is a structural pillar of Russian combat operations. According to analyses by the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI), Russia achieved a staggering density of EW coverage, deploying a major electronic warfare system approximately every 10 kilometers along the front line during peak operations. This continuous, layered spectrum defense can be understood across two distinct operational tiers:
1. Strategic and Operational Denial
At the macro level, Russia has deployed high-powered, truck-mounted systems designed to blind NATO and Ukrainian airborne intelligence and disrupt satellite architectures.
- The Krasukha-4: Designed to protect high-value assets, this system emits powerful jamming signals targeting airborne early warning and control aircraft (AWACS), radar reconnaissance drones, and low-Earth orbit spy satellites. By targeting X-band and Ku-band radars, it degrades long-range aerial surveillance, forcing ISR platforms to operate at suboptimal standoff distances.
- Murmansk-BN: Operating at the strategic level, this system targets high-frequency (HF) military communications up to thousands of kilometers away, aiming to disrupt the operational coordination of enemy forces on a theater-wide scale.
2. Tactical Interdiction and the Defeat of Precision Munitions
At the tactical edge, Russian EW is integrated down to the battalion level to create local bubbles of spectrum denial. This has profoundly affected the effectiveness of Western-supplied precision-guided munitions (PGMs) and unmanned aerial systems (UAS).
- Neutralizing GPS-Guided Weapons: Systems like the R-330Zh Zhitel and Pole-21 have been explicitly used to create GPS-denied environments. Because GPS signals travelling from space are relatively weak by the time they reach Earth, localized jammers easily overpower them. RUSI has noted that this jamming significantly degraded the accuracy of key weapons, including Excalibur 155mm guided artillery shells, Joint Direct Attack Munitions (JDAMs), and GMLRS rockets fired by HIMARS. Without GPS, these munitions must rely on inertial navigation, which drastically reduces their hit probability.
- Drone Suppression and ISR Severance: In the early months of the war, Ukrainian Bayraktar TB2s operated with near impunity. As Russian forces entrenched, their EW architecture caught up. By blasting the 900 MHz and 2.4 GHz frequencies used by commercial and military drones, systems like the Borisoglebsk-2 sever the command links and video feeds between drones and their operators. This strips frontline units of their "eyes," returning artillery duels to grid-square estimations rather than precision strikes.
Ukraine’s Rapid Adaptation Under Fire
Ukraine’s response has been just as instructive. Forced to adapt under fire, its forces built a distributed EW ecosystem spanning national infrastructure to handheld infantry jammers, fielding and replacing thousands of systems in months, not years. EW operators are now embedded in maneuver, air defense, and fires units. The war has become a laboratory of spectrum conflict with drones jammed out of the sky, counter-battery radars blinded, munitions diverted, networks disrupted. EW is both shield and sword: protecting friendly systems while blinding the adversary.
While Russia relies heavily on legacy, mass-manufactured, centralized platforms, Ukraine’s survival has depended on democratizing the electromagnetic fight. By abandoning rigid peacetime acquisition processes, Ukraine has successfully pioneered a "DevOps" warfighting philosophy, prioritizing the rapid, iterative deployment of real-world software capabilities and commercial hardware modifications.
Ukraine has mastered the art of using the electromagnetic spectrum not just for defense, but to actively hunt Russian forces. By integrating EW operators directly into fires and maneuver units, the spectrum has become the primary hunting ground for target acquisition.
EW as a Mass Capability
The scale is the lesson. Both sides are fielding equipment and training operators at a pace NATO hasn’t matched since the Cold War. EW is no longer a boutique, specialized function; it’s a mass capability woven into daily battle rhythm and treated as a core determinant of survivability and lethality. In Ukraine, EW isn’t an adjunct to maneuver or fires. It’s inseparable from them.
For NATO and allied forces, Ukraine's experience demonstrates that surviving a high-intensity conflict requires transitioning from static, hardware-centric platforms to data-centric environments where software updates can be continuously deployed to the tactical edge under fire.
NATO’s Vulnerability Without EW Dominance
The implications for NATO are stark. Precision fires need assured spectrum access. Air defense needs resilient sensors and networks. ISR needs unjammed collection. Command and control needs protected communications. Without robust EW, all of it evaporates. This war shows EW is both the first layer of protection and the first layer of lethality, the foundation everything else rests on.
Rebuilding EW as a Core Competency
Reconstituting EW will take more than new hardware, it demands a cultural shift. Commanders must think in terms of spectrum maneuver, fires, and protection as naturally as kinetic operations. Exercises need realistic EW conditions, not sanitized ranges. Training pipelines must expand, and offensive and defensive EW forces must be rebuilt at every echelon, from squad to strategic level. Doctrine must treat EW as a decisive domain, not a supporting function.
The Essential Art Returns
The essential art of warfare in the twenty-first century has been violently reintroduced, and the electromagnetic spectrum is no longer an invisible enabler; it is the primary maneuver space where the first shots are fired, and the deepest vulnerabilities are exposed. NATO must reclaim this domain fully, urgently, and at scale.
For too long, the Alliance rested on the laurels of post-Cold War permissive environments, operating under the dangerous assumption that our networks would always connect, our drones would always fly, and our precision munitions would always find their mark. The battlefields of Ukraine have permanently shattered that assumption. We can no longer afford the luxury of rigid, decade-long peacetime acquisition cycles. Surviving the modern fight requires a fundamental paradigm shift: embracing a "DevOps" warfighting philosophy that prioritizes rapid, iterative deployment of software-defined capabilities directly to the tactical edge.
Lethality today is inextricably linked to digital survival. If we cannot protect our data lineage, secure our networks, and continuously update our countermeasures under fire, we will cede the kill chain to our adversaries. The next fight will be decided not just by who holds the physical terrain, but by who dominates the spectrum.
NATO must institutionalize this reality across every echelon. Electronic warfare is not an adjunct to maneuver; it is the very foundation of our combat credibility. We must transition our defense structures to data-centric environments, integrate our joint capabilities, and ensure that when the next conflict erupts, the Alliance dictates the spectrum and the adversary is left blind, disrupted, and defeated.
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