Electronic Warfare – Denying Electromagnetic Advantage To Enemy

Electronic Warfare (EW) represents the ability to use the electromagnetic spectrum to sense, protect, and communicate. At the same time, it can be used to deny enemy the ability to either disrupt or use these signals.

- Lt General P.C. Katoch (Retd)

The importance of electronic Warfare (EW) has gained momentum with rapid advances in technologies in the modern era – both in warfare and the civil arena. EW exploits the electromagnetic spectrum (EMS) to control it for offensive and defensive actions. This ability to collect and make sense of signals in an environment when combined with radar provides capabilities to detect threats, take evasive action and also launch countermeasures against any attack and its source. Complexities of EW have increased with the telecommunications boom including networks of signals for billions of mobile phones and computers, creating massive congestion in the radiofrequency spectrum; it is more difficult to find ‘signals of interest’ in military terms especially with the arrival of 5G telecommunications and the Internet of Things (IoT). Technology is driving nation-states toward achieving political objectives by other means; such means also include technology in general and the role of EW in particular.

EW can be applied from air, sea, land or space by manned and unmanned systems; targeting humans, communications, radar or other assets, both military and civil. In present-day security scenario, it is imperative that forces spread over vast areas remain connected with one another in every possible way. The integration and conduct of EW to support military missions across all services is therefore critical. EW follows the basic step of signal processing from analogue to digital allowing sampling the signal environment digitally; the signals are analyzed utilizing Artificial Intelligence (AI) to ascertain their identity and the result is the separation of what is valuable from the worthless. The process undergoes three stages: