To counter Russia’s electronic warfare battalions, the Army wants to field a revolutionary EW weapon by 2023. But how do they get there?

The US Army can’t match Russia’s battalions of powerful radio jammers. Instead, it’s trying to build a nimble high-tech David to defeat the EW Goliath.

The elevation of the cybersecurity mission to “it’s own Directorate raises its stature in NSA to a prominence that is absolutely needed,” says one former NSA official.

AUSA: The Army is giving its electronic warfare force more troops, more training, and a more prominent role in combat headquarters, senior officers said here Thursday, pushing back on criticisms that the service neglects EW even as Russia and China pull ahead. The number of EW troops has increased from 813 (both officers and enlisted)… Keep reading →

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?”

The Air Force placed a $2.4 billion placeholder in the 2019 budget to buy Light Attack Aircraft over the next five years, Air Force Secretary Heather Wilson told reporters this morning.