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Monday, March 18, 2019

Emit and Die

Electronic warfare is a threat to American forces in conventional combat.

Not only do enemy capabilities threaten our units with indirect fire, as Russian military action in Ukraine demonstrates, they can cripple our own operations:

“The denial of accurate position, navigation and timing can cause U.S. units to remediate their attack effects, cause fratricide or other accidents and create command and control confusion during operations,” she said. “The enemy recognizes that and they look at our ability to target our movement and our coordination. This could drastically be reduced by the enemy due to inaccurate [position, navigation and timing] information.

In the post-Cold War world such threats were nuisances that weren't decisive in deciding the outcomes of battles or wars. That will change if we don't master that threat.

Indeed, I'm not terribly confident at all that we would have mastered the threat if the Cold War had gone hot against the Soviet Union.