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New Development to Keep Post Location Secret

Feb 18, 2021

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Over the last several years, the US Army has worked to build up its electronic warfare capabilities, pursuing a broad campaign of development, and fielding more advanced tools to operate and dominate in the spectrum.

Now the Army is working on a new tool to provide a much needed visual of the signals that command posts and units leak into the electromagnetic spectrum, possibly giving away their location.

Demonstrations by sophisticated nation-states in recent years have made clear the detriment of big, static command posts or units with large electromagnetic spectrum footprints. Nation states have geolocated units based on their electromagnetic spectrum emissions alone and been either jammed or fired upon. The Russians demonstrated this to great effect in Ukraine.

Now, the US Army is pursuing a spectrum analyzer capability to improve situational awareness, helping prevent adversaries from geolocating teams in the field, said Col. Daniel Holland, Army capability manager for electronic warfare.

This technology, still in the concept phase, is expected to work through a portable, tablet-like piece of equipment, with sensors at tactical operations centers or mounted on vehicles to allow monitoring on the move.

The tool will integrate with the Electronic Warfare Planning and Management Tool (EWMPT), a command-and-control capability that allows forces to visualize the potential effects of electronic warfare in the field and chart courses of action to prevent jammed capabilities. Integration of the two tools will provide a better operational picture of this invisible terrain in near real-time, as reported by c4isrnet.com.

“We believe that the combination of a spectrum analyzer with EWMPT allows the commander to visualize and plan network-enabled operations in the electromagnetic spectrum,” Holland said. “This planning and visualization is critical to winning on a multidomain battlefield teeming with many low-cost, but extremely capable adversary sensors.”