After being frankly scared by the Russian electronic warfare capabilities we saw in Ukraine and Syria, the Army took advantage of new NATO allies familiarity with old Soviet stuff and cooperation with Ukraine under assault by Russian EW in the ongoing war in Russian-occupied Donbas to quickly put countermeasures into the hands of our European troops:
This latest U.S. Army [EW] request is also seen as a side-effect of the new (since 2015) “terrify and train” approach to getting commanders, especially of combat units, ready for what they will face in wartime. Just putting officers through an “educate and familiarize” course on Cyber War is not enough so the army has also created cyber protection teams to give units they are assigned to a taste of what horrors await them in wartime on the network warfare front. This is an improvement over Cold War era policies that generally discouraged exposing combat units to realistic demonstrations of what kind of jamming and other electronic techniques the Russians had developed to cripple American military communications in wartime. That was the pre-Internet version of a network attack. Sometimes American units on training exercises did get a taste of electronic jamming and deception and it proved so disruptive to operations that it was discouraged.
European-based American units were the priority and others are now getting it.
China would also have similar equipment.
I've long read about the havoc that the radio-based Soviet disruption could have inflicted on NATO forces during the Cold War.
The post also discusses the effort to get the Army a secure battlefield internet, based on the Win-T system. This needs to work securely if the Army is to ever reach back for the squad, as I suggested here.
