Army is examining the best approach to combat electronic warfare in the echelon

The Army is still figuring out how best to conduct electronic warfare on different platforms.

A series of events will help officials determine what the departmental EW employment approach will be and what the record keeping programs will look like.

These events included a tabletop exercise at Fort Eisenhower, Georgia, on how electronic warfare should be conducted at divisions and above; an October Fire Symposium at Fort Sill, Oklahoma, examining how network, intelligence, cyber, and EW are integrated into fires; a capability-based assessment of electromagnetic warfare conducted by the Cyber ​​Capability Integration Directorate at the Cyber ​​Center of Excellence in Augusta, Georgia, to be completed over the next year; and a sensor-to-shooter event focused on challenges in the Indo-Pacific region and long-range precision fires at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas.

“We’re looking at it in depth right now,” Col. Leslie Gorman, Army capability manager for electronic warfare, said in a recent interview about how and what platforms the service is thinking about countering electronic warfare in squadrons. “I sat down with some people at the Pentagon yesterday. One of the things that came back was really: What is the employment approach in the department?”

She explained that the Cyber-CDID event helped determine exactly what the upcoming Terrestrial Layer System-Echelons Above Brigade (TLS-EAB) system will look like.

TLS-EAB was originally designed as an integrated EW and signals intelligence system primarily for divisions, corps and multi-domain task forces for longer range detection. Like its smaller brigade counterpart, the TLS Brigade Combat Team, the Army decided to split the SIGINT and electronic warfare functions after experimentation and lessons learned from Europe.

Because the EAB effort was less mature than the BCT variant at the time of the feature-sharing decision, officials have stated that EAB will be the primary component for defining and demonstrating an initial EW architecture and publishing requests for information on the architecture . This will eventually return it to the BCT version for integration.

“Some interesting information emerged from this [tabletop event]. We also have another CONEMP that we are looking at [the] C5ISR [Center] “I want to facilitate some discussions with them about the maneuvers at an upcoming tabletop exercise because I think that will be very important,” Gorman said, using an acronym that refers to command, control, communications, computers, cyber, intelligence, Surveillance and reconnaissance relates. “As we clarify the requirements at Echelon, we are not just talking about fires, but also about maneuvers. Because it ensures that we integrate our skills into a light infantry fight. Since we are a pioneer, what does it look like to implement an EW sensor in a “robotic fighting vehicle”?

Officials are also looking at other capabilities that were prototyped and deployed primarily at the brigade level to see if divisional applicability is possible, namely the Tactical Electronic Warfare System-Infantry Brigade Combat Team, or TEWS-I, which was originally a quick-fix solution was. The Response Capability, developed by General Dynamics, represents a smaller system for infantry vehicles. It was a prototype activity that served as a risk mitigation and requirements pathfinder for the Army’s program of record, the Terrestrial Layer System-Brigade Combat Team (TLS-BCT), and by Units of the XVIIIth Airborne Corps was deployed.

Gorman noted that the service plans to begin testing next year to not only make improvements to TEWS-I, but also how this capability could potentially become an asset to the department.

The Army is essentially still in the requirements phase when it comes to the electronic warfare portion of TLS-BCT, trying to figure out what makes the most sense moving forward.

Gorman noted that it could evolve to include more robust communications systems, deception capabilities or situational awareness tools. Additionally, the Army is currently fielding the TLS Manpack — the first official program in decades for a dismounted electronic attack capability that allows Soldiers to conduct direction and signal finding with limited interference while moving — for mobility, the service is considering potentially turning this into a Integrate vehicle mount with an amplifier for extended range, something that was originally conceived within the original TLS family.

The units’ constant feedback also helps educate future generations about manpack capability, Gorman said.

While the Army continues to work on the platform and capability side of the problem and flesh out how they will be deployed, the other important parallel effort is focused on EW-enabled capabilities to plan and manage across the spectrum.

“It’s also about making sure that we approach it as part of a systems-of-systems approach… It’s going to be important to make sure that with the capabilities that we’re putting in place, we’re able to communicate and those systems to C2-capable.” Also consider where the systems are located on the battlefield, and not just incorporate this into our EW action plan [the Electronic Warfare Planning and Management Tool]but then also think about the leverage [the Spectrum Situational Awareness System] for spectrum management [electromagnetic emission control]The [electronic protection] Capabilities to be able to bring that information into fires as well to enable more comprehensive, holistic, synchronized, non-lethal impact support to fire planning capabilities,” Gorman said.

EWPMT serves as a command and control planning capability that allows military personnel to visualize potential impacts within the invisible spectrum and plan courses of action to prevent their forces and systems from becoming jammed during operations. The Army is launching the EWPMT “Next” initiative, which includes moving to the Tactical Assault Kit framework where situational awareness data and geospatial data visualization applications can be built for better joint and coalition integration.

A new beginning in fiscal year 2025, the Spectrum Situational Awareness System (S2AS) is intended to be a commercial off-the-shelf solution that enables detection and visualization of the appearance of units in the spectrum, enabling commanders to detect and report in real time their command post signatures, electromagnetic jamming sources – either from coalition partners or the enemy – and threat emissions.

Officials have described EWPMT as the glue that holds the electronic warfare architecture together, because if forces cannot see, understand and plan for the spectrum, jamming and sensing capabilities will not be effective.

“We’re also talking about it like a lot of manpacks coming out. We need to be able to ensure that these systems are effectively C2 capable and that missions can be planned at the optimal level at the squadron level so that everyone understands what is happening in their battlefield. I think this helps reduce potential RF interference or interference from neighboring devices,” Gorman said. “It’s also about making sure that the signatures that we send out are also part of our planning efforts, and you have to do that with every single EW emitter or effector.”

The Army will begin linking its requirement personnel to experimental units to create a direct feedback loop to inform EWPMT software developers in the program office. This will assist the Program Office in prioritization as the Service is expected to plan tranches of 12 improvements per quarter going forward, in line with a holistic software modernization strategy for EWPMT Next.