“We have not achieved $2.3 billion in budget growth,” Pentagon EW acquisitions director Bill Conley told me. “We are continuing to add investment (and) we are addressing the most pressing gaps.”

The JSDR database won’t just keep American communications officers from mistakenly scrambling each others’ signals, either. By providing a comprehensive baseline of what friendly transmissions look like, the mega-database will make it easier for Signals Intelligence (SIGINT) and Electronic Warfare (EW) troops to hone in on enemy transmissions.

This internal budget battle in the Army could cede the actual battlefield to high-powered Russian and Chinese jammers, electronic warfare advocates fear, with the same lethal consequences for US troops that Ukrainian forces have suffered since 2014.

Over 17 years of fighting terrorists and insurgents, “our SIGINT forces mastered the art and science of identifying and tracking individual threats with pinpoint precision,” Lt. Gen. Berrier said. “We now face a significant challenge on a much larger scale.”

“Those will be debates we’ll have over the next couple of years, and those are some tough choices,” intelligence official Kevin Sherman told me. “Do we reduce some of those capabilities have been very helpful in the CT (counter-terrorism) fight, that a lot of our combatant commands have relied on, in order to buy more exquisite things?”

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