After
, electronic warfare is — slowly — on the mend, the Pentagon’s Deputy Director for EW said yesterday. That includes a growing budget, a new (classified)
from the Office of the Secretary of Defense, increased interest from the leaders of
, and, most immediately, an ongoing joint study of future jamming aircraft.
“Give me about a month, maybe two,” and he’ll have a lot more clarity on what’s called the Analysis of Alternatives for Joint Airborne Electronic Attack,
told the Air Force Association’s
Some backstory on why this matters: Electronic warfare is the art and science of detecting, deceiving, and disrupting enemy radio-frequency (RF) transmissions — and since everything from wireless networks to radar relies on the RF spectrum, EW can make or break a
. After the Cold War, however, even though the
retained much of the old Soviet EW arsenal, the US Army and Air Force largely divested theirs. The Air Force in particular retired its last high- performance jamming aircraft, the
, in 1998 — a small number of
remain in service — and largely ceded EW to Navy squadrons. For its own investments, the Air Force bet on
, the F-22 and F-35, that it deemed so undetectable they
jamming enemy radar on their behalf, as one 4-star told Colin as recently as 2014.
As adversaries grow more electronically sophisticated, however, the Air Force has come round and started studying what it calls
. PEA might be a dedicated manned aircraft unto itself like the old EF-111, a specialized variant of the future fighter known as Penetrating Counter-Air, a
, or a complex mix of capabilities installed on different airframes. Much is classified, much is still to be determined.
One thing the Air Force has made clear, however, is they want
that can penetrate (hence the name) into heavily defended airspace. The alternative would be a stand-off jammer that does its mission from a (relatively) safe distance like the Navy
Growler.
Conley, however, thinks the division between stand-off and stand-in is easily overplayed. It can create rigid service stovepipes that don’t reflect the fluidity of real combat — or the ingenuity of US troops. “I would personally advocate that we actually move away from assigning ‘this is a stand-off and this is a stand-in,'” he said. Instead of pigeonholing, he said, we must understand different capabilities in detail, then allow tacticians and operators the flexibility to use them together in creative ways.
So rather than let each service do its own thing without regard to the others, the Pentagon has started a joint (interservice) Analysis of Alternatives for all Airborne Electronic Attack. Conley made clear this does
not mean there’ll be a single mega-program to build a single jamming aircraft for all services, the way the
is building fighters for all.
“The way it’s being executed is a joint AOA, so we’re answering the question holistically, but then it will turn into service-unique investment,” Conley told reporters after his public remarks. “So we’re not going to say that this is the Joint Program office for airborne electronic attack for every EW airborne electronic program in the future…. It’ll turn into service programs.”
In other words, while Conley didn’t say so explicitly, if the Air Force wants to build its own Penetrating Electronic Attack aircraft, it can. It just has to make sure it complements what the Navy, Marines, and Army are doing as part of a common all-service approach.
PEA probably won’t enter service until the
, but the very fact the Air Force is interested at all represents a major turnaround. Indeed, senior leaders in all the services have become keenly aware of the importance of electronic warfare, Conley said: “There is an appreciation of the dependency on our electronic warfare capabilities to make sure that the remainder of the force, all the platforms, is survivable.”
In other words: The brass realize that if you don’t have electronic warfare — both to protect your own
, sensors, and communications, and to disrupt the enemy’s — you’re probably dead.
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