The Navy is planning to take control of electromagnetic warfare with a new strategy called ‘electromagnetic maneuver warfare.’ Electromagnetic maneuver warfare is the concept of creating an “electromagnetic battle management system, where all individual platforms, such as the EA-6B Prowler and the EA-18G Growler, will collect data on enemy signals to inform the network while dialing up and down their own emissions to deceive or jam the adversary.”
The main issue with electromagnetic warfare is that today in both military and civilian networks, everyone is always connected and are constantly transmitting electromagnetic signals through cell phones, tablets and other devices – even if they are not being used. This is why electronic devices need to be turned off during flights; if devices are turned off they emit as little interference as possible.
“That’s the kind of mindset that surface and air combatants must now apply to electromagnetic emissions. Even though I’m in an airplane and I may be able to transmit all day long, I’m not gonna. Aircraft and ships need to take maximum advantage of passive sensors, ‘listening’ to the emissions in their environment like a submariner. Even when they must go active — to transmit vital information to the rest of the force, to scan a target with radar, to jam an enemy signal — they need to do it in deliberately unpredictable ways. I may not transmit in the same frequency, the same power level; I may not use the same modulation. I may jump out of the RF [radio frequency] spectrum and go into EO [electro-optical, e.g. visible light],” Captain Rob Gamberg, a lead author of the Navy’s implementation strategy for Electronic Maneuver Warfare, said.
Experimentation with electromagnetic maneuver warfare will continue with the Navy’s new EA-18G Growler during sea trials and with the EA-6B Prowler and MH-60R helicopter.
Gamberg knows the Navy has a long road ahead “to create a single electronic warfare network linking everything from subs to drones. The challenge is bringing all that together, understanding it, controlling it, so you can actually use it. That’s a lot of work left to be done,” Gamberg said.
