The current and future electromagnetic threatscape brings challenges to the Electronic Warfare (EW) industrial sector, says Daniela Pistoia, ELT Group’s corporate chief scientist.
“The world around us is continuously and rapidly changing. Information superiority is becoming a challenging task because of the density of data, the relatively easy access to communications infrastructures, the spread of digital technologies in non-military domains and the rise of new state and non-state actors.” This is occurring alongside the electromagnetic spectrum’s increasingly important role in the military world: “Nowadays, the spectrum represents the physical resource in which, from which and through which all military, military-supported and asymmetric actions and operations are performed.” As a result, the spectrum will only become more congested and contested, Ms. Pistoia asserts. “It is becoming the manoeuvre space where ‘silent’ battles will be conducted.”
These realities are having a downstream impact on the industrial sector which the NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organisation) and allied EW enterprise depends upon. “As enemy threats become more sophisticated, engineers need to create systems that can adapt and respond to changes in real time.” Agility at the systems level is vital given the speed and flexibility of today’s and tomorrow’s electromagnetic threats: “Such systems have to conform to unseen changes.” To do this, capabilities need to be adaptable with the bare minimum of modification. This more minimalist approach, compared to how EW systems engineering was performed in the past, requires the “minimal addition of components or subsystems to support many cycles of upgrading.” Ms. Pistoia emphasises that future EW capabilities must be “more spectrally efficient, flexible, adaptable, and agile in their ability to access the spectrum to increase the opportunities available to mission planners.”
Thinking about Cognitive
Ms. Pistoia recommends several approaches to ensuring that these future systems meet adaptability, agility, efficiency and flexibility demands like “increasing systems’ operating frequency range, increasing the ability to share spectrum with other systems and actors, amending rigid processes pertaining to spectrum use, increasing the speed of system adaptation and avoiding potential interference with commercial spectrum-dependent networks.” These attributes should be paired with “developing near-real-time spectrum operations that integrate spectrum management with network, EW, cyber and intelligence operations.”
Several emerging technologies are showing promise in this regard: “The development of cognitive radios, radars and networks has introduced wireless and network devices that can maintain a desired level of performance even in hostile spectrum conditions.” A by-product of these technologies has been the move towards cognitive EW which Ms. Pistoia defines as “the ability to interface and master the spectrum with devices that intelligently find and exploit vulnerabilities from the spectrum to the network to create highly specific effects, including cyber effects.” What will be the impact of these cognitive technologies on EW? “It is clear we are just beginning to scratch the surface of what cognitive technology will mean not only for electronic warfare, but also for all spectrum-dependent operations.”
A New Trinity
How should industry approach this need for agile, adaptable, efficient and flexible EW capabilities? “Government, University and Industry (GUI),” emphasises Ms. Pistoia. The GUI approach rests on developing strategic research partnerships involving these actors. Such partnerships help “integrated disparate pools of intellectual capital. Participants bring very different skills, abilities and organisational contexts to the table,” she continues. These alliances can evolve into “a shared community of innovation, where each participant retains the legacy of its origins, but joins a network of researchers that evolves its own common values, norms and vocabulary. The knowledge from each organisation can then be integrated within the new context of a community of innovation and applied by each participant toward its own learning goals.” She says that the transition towards a global, knowledge-based economy is making GUI partnerships indispensable: “They are a mechanism for facilitating revolutionary innovation through knowledge fusion.”
The GUI approach holds many potential benefits including the “sharing of risks and costs for long-term research; access to complementary capabilities, specialised skills, new suppliers and markets, and state-of-the-art facilities while creating new opportunities for technological learning.” However, Ms. Pistoia sounds a note of caution: “Sharing and use of intellectual property is a key factor. If not agreed in a ‘win-win’ spirit, it could heighten the risk of failure within GUI cooperation.”
Combining the GUI and accelerating the development time when fielding new EW capabilities are essential. Everyone in the EW enterprise needs to be aware “that explosive pace of dual-use technologies, such as those related to computer and telecommunications fields, have reduced the entry barrier to our adversaries, allowing state and non-state actors to play a significant and hazardous role in the electromagnetic battlespace.” For military and civilian spectrum threats alike, we need scientific and engineering approaches “that improve our ability to operate within complex spectrum environments and to target revolutionary spectrum capabilities.”
by Dr. Thomas Withington
