“If we don’t win the cyber/EW fight, then the maneuver fight may not matter because we may not get to it,” Maj. Gen. Wilson Shoffner, director of operations, Army Rapid Capabilities Office, said during a presentation at the beginning of June, noting that the decisive fight may well be the electromagnetic spectrum as opposed to maneuver. ...
Deputy Defense Secretary Bob Work discussed how this new paradigm will affect future conflict, explaining last October that the “old adage was … if you can be seen you can be hit, and if you can be hit, you can be killed. The new adage is if you emit, you die.”
So to survive the Army has to have the electronic emission profile of an 18th century army?
That's a lot to ask of an army that has to find an enemy and fight it. At some point, you have to emit in order to kill.
Yes, we have to suppress a lot of our troop electromagnetic emissions to avoid enemy massed firepower. But it can't be just that unless you want to field 18th century armies.
Part of suppressing emissions has to be converting 360 emissions that can be detected with point-to-point emissions hugging the earth that can't be detected. You may need to string short-ranged directional emissions or even wires again once you enter the enemy firing envelope.
You may need mobile 360-burst emissions that send and receive accumulated transmissions and then shut down emissions to displace before the enemy can shoot at it. There might be large numbers of these mobile, perhaps robotic, communications systems.
And where we need to have continuously emitting systems, make them autonomous drones cheap enough to be considered expendable. Use them like ammunition or any other consumable, providing information to manned systems with line-of-site or wired links. The enemy will destroy them, but with enough put into action continuously, we will retain continuous necessary emissions and allow our units to find enemies and shoot.
For the manned systems, we will need active defenses that can buy time for the unit under fire to displace out of the target zone by taking out incoming rounds. Maybe the autonomous drones get the active defense role to emit and shoot at incoming rounds while they can in order to let the manned systems escape.
I just don't think that we can totally suppress emissions if we want the Army to fight rather than just evade attack.
