MILITARY TECHNOLOGYElectromagnetic Warfare: NATO's Blind Spot Could Decide the Next Conflict
The war in Ukraine has exposed a critical front long neglected by Western militaries: electromagnetic warfare (EW). Control over this invisible battlespace, where communications are jammed, drones blinded, and precision weapons thrown off course, can decide the outcome of a conflict.
The war in Ukraine has exposed a critical front long neglected by Western militaries: electromagnetic warfare (EW). Control over this invisible battlespace, where communications are jammed, drones blinded, and precision weapons thrown off course, can decide the outcome of a conflict. Russia has understood this sooner than NATO, using EW to isolate Ukrainian units, disrupt command networks, and neutralize Western systems. Ukraine has adapted with ingenuity, but it is learning in combat what NATO should have learned in training. After decades focused on counterinsurgency, the Alliance now risks confronting its most capable adversary without mastery of a defining domain of modern warfare.
This is not to say that EW is a new phenomenon. The electromagnetic spectrum (EMS) has been an element of warfare since the early 1900s and the birth of signals intelligence (SIGINT), when the interception of naval radio transmissions helped Imperial Japan to defeat Tsarist Russia in 1905. The EMS was gradually instrumentalized in different ways: via radar and the interception and cracking of Enigma in World War 2, radio broadcast jamming in the Cold War, guidance systems jamming in the Yom Kippur War, and GPS jamming in the Gulf War. But despite periodic discoveries of new and varied ways to use EW, Western militaries deprioritized such technologies in the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, as part of a broader shift away from large-scale, state-on-state warfighting towards counterinsurgency.
Over the last five years, EW has gained renewed prominence as a warfighting domain through its crucial role in recent conflicts, such as the Second Nagorno-Karabakh War, the war in Ukraine, the fighting in Gaza, the Red Sea, and Iran. Modern EW involves more than simple jamming: it can degrade command and control, disrupt GPS and targeting systems, intercept and spoof communications, and safeguard against similar attacks in turn. Mastery of the EMS is now essential for digitalized militaries dependent on sensors, satellites, and networked systems to function effectively under fire.
