“The TLS BCT Manpack system will be a tailorable, modular, terrestrial capability that allows the integration of Signals Intelligence and Electromagnetic Warfare collection, processing, exploitation, reporting, and effects capabilities for SIGINT Collection Team and Electromagnetic Warfare Team elements,” the US Army said last year. Put more simply, Mastodon Design had a $1.5 million contract to shrink a vehicle-mounted electronic warfare (EW) station into a backpack.
After successful testing at Fort Huachuca, Arizona in November, the Army accepted the design. It all happened remarkably fast for a modern weapon program. I am curious about energy density, which is surely classified, and batteries add weight to a soldier’s load. Soft factors matter even more when a number of innovative technologies are turning the individual infantry soldier into an electromagnetic warrior.
Software-defined radios (SDRs) have made scanning and search functions easier. They offer lots of information display. Too much information for a soldier to track, in fact. AI programs, such as the Advanced Dynamic Spectrum Reconnaissance (ADSR) package that senses enemy jamming and adjusts friendly wireless communications networks accordingly, are already helping to ease the demands on operator attention. According to industry sources I follow, the EW industry is at last getting serious about the challenge of meeting future data transmission demands by expanding the available bandwith of existing networks. Constructing this future on 5G makes it possible to outpace the enemy software developer, or so goes the logic.
Soldiering has not quite become an IT job yet, though. So far, the Army has ordered just 52 of these systems for the entire force. The numbers of TLS BCT systems being produced now are supposed to be enough for the Army’s requirements in the Pacific, where terrain is not suited to vehicle-borne systems. Historical experience suggests that in the event of a high intensity land conflict, the Army would want that many of these systems in every division. Wearing that antenna makes the soldier into a target.
Whereas the US electronic engineering industry is capable of inventing something like the Terrestrial Layer System, then downsizing it from a truck or armored vehicle mount to a soldier’s backpack, in the space of two years, American manufacturing is not as capable of rapid increases of production scale. Americans will at some point need to have a national conversation about their defense industrial base and EW must be part of that conversation.
Underlining this point, reports from Kharkiv indicate that the invading Russian force forgot to bring any GPS jammers with them. Perhaps the long front in eastern and southern Ukraine has consumed too many GPS jamming systems. As a result, the GPS-guided ground-launched small diameter bombs (GLSDBs) which had failed in the contested spectrum environment of Chasiv Yar have been working as designed around Vovchans’k. No wonder Russia’s northern offensive is sputtering.
The art of electronic warfare is recognizing or creating gaps in enemy spectrum command and exploiting them before the enemy adapts. (The enemy always adapts.) Drones, especially tactical drones, are ubiquitous in current conflicts and it is difficulr to discern where the drone war ends and the electronic war begins. In Ukraine, observation drones make it impossible for either side to advance without being seen and attacked. Future soldiers will need counter-unmanned aerial systems (C-UAS) technologies to be just as ubiquitous as drones.
TLS is already equipped for the drone challenge. However, operators will contest a spectrum environment that constantly changes — because the enemy always adapts.
“C-UAS remains a critical priority for the Army. Electronic Warfare and radio frequency defeat capabilities are a critical component of a wholistic, layered defeat and protection approach. Although not primarily designed for C-UAS, all Army EW systems have direct and derived requirements to contribute to the overall C-UAS fight,” the Army’s program executive office for intelligence, electronic warfare and sensors, said in response to questions from DefenseScoop.
“What we’re starting to see though, is adversaries who understand how those technologies work, are adjusting the way those UAVs work in a way that they can get through that jam. Again, that’s what you see in Ukraine on a regular basis,” Grant said. “We see that where some of the jammers have limitations where you start to create some vulnerabilities, because people will understand what your counter can do and then they’ll adjust the UAV. It’s a cat-and-mouse game is really what we’re seeing in Ukraine and other places.”
Aircraft went through rapid evolution in the First World War, with months-long periods in which either side had an advantage over the Western Front due to a momentarily-superior plane. Spectrum battle accelerates this technological pendulum of wartime development in drones. At the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, Mark Schweikert notes that electromagnetic advantages vanish quickly in all current conflicts. “Countermeasures are appearing, but counter-countermeasures often follow within weeks.” Software can be updated faster than hardware.
A few years ago along the Turkish border, Syria-based terrorists were sending kamikaze drones into border towns to kill Turkish officials. The Turks countered by jamming the satellite navigation signals that the drones relied on, but three weeks later the terrorists had worked around the jamming and the drones were again hitting targets.
Zoom out to low orbit and the pattern is the same at scale, for example in the Black Sea region. As a geographic matter, anything which flies from Ukraine to southern Russia must pass over Crimea or the Sea of Azov. First, the shootdown of two A-50U Beriev airborne early warning radar planes in recent months reduced Russia’s radar visibility over the peninsula. Then last week, Ukraine punched a corridor through Russian radar defenses and sent an armada of drones through the breach.
Ukrainians started in the early morning of 13 May by hitting this radar complex on Bedene-Kyr, a mountain in southern Crimea. The commander of the unit manning the radar station was killed in the ATACMS strike, which reportedly followed a series of decoy drones. Suddenly, Russians had no early warning radar coverage whatsoever of the peninsula or the small, shallow Azov. For Russian air defense, which has not covered itself in glory since 2022, things were about to get downright embarrassing.
Drones seemed to be hitting everywhere. A series of ATACMS strikes on Belbek arifield in Crimea began two days later. Ammunition depots, an S-400 surface-to-air missile battery, and about 10 aircraft were all struck during the early morning of the 16th. Then on Friday the 17th, Ukraine launched a massive barrage of missiles and drones at targets in the naval cities of Sevastopol and Novorossiysk, Missile strikes destroyed a minesweeper, the Kurovets, as well as a class missile corvette. the Tskilon, reportedly the last cruise missile carrier Russia has in Crimea, Together, they were just about the last vessels in the harbor.
Among other oil infrastructure targets, a stream of scores of drones targeted a refinery facility in Tuapse, Russia. Videos of the slow, ungainly UAVs dive-bombing the target, one after another, were immediately posted on Russian social media. “Air defense is working” is a common way Russians report that local air defense crews are at least aware that an attack is underway and trying to respond. Russian air defense was clearly not working last week, however.
Despite the length of the attack, the long stream of attack drones was never effectively engaged by Russian surface-to-air missiles. Not only was the Russian air defense deprived of early warning, Ukrainians have been using EW drones (“decoys”) to confound the Russian target acquisition radar operators. I suspect that the Rosneft facility in Tuapse was in fact among the first targets Ukraine ever hit this way in February 2023, likely using a Tu-141 Strizh.
Overnight on the evening of the 18th, another salvo of drones struck the oil refinery at Slavyansk-on-Kuban. The Krasnodar Krai region seemed defenseless. Russia does have mobile early warning radar systems they can deploy in response to the emergency. Ukrainians can then target those systems for destruction, and the battle for spectrum dominance shall continue. The point is that it will be attritional. Every drone sent aloft in a tactical environment can be presumed destroyed, especially if it is a munition. Antennas become targets.
Mobile Ukrainan radar operators are responsible for their nation’s unexpected resilience against Russian air superiority. Having seen Ukrainians carve out an electromagnetic air corridor to Krasnodar Krai, one wonders what they might accomplish with F-16s loaded out with jamming pods, HARMs, and cruise missiles. If Ukraine does reclaim Crimea, spectrum dominance will be fundamental to the victory.