Army Upgrades Its Electronic Warfare Training

February 23, 2007
American Forces Press Service

WASHINGTON – U.S. Army soldiers and insurgents have something in common: They share a single electromagnetic spectrum to communicate and launch attacks.

"The spectrum is that invisible world inhabited by television transmissions, by all sorts of radios, by cell phones, by satellite links, by GPS links," Army Col. Lauri Moe Buckhout, electronic warfare division chief, told reporters at the Pentagon yesterday.

"In Baghdad you might have American soldiers, coalition soldiers ... an Iraqi friendly forces mother and father talking to each other to coordinate a taxi to pick up their sick son and take him to the hospital," she said. "They are all legitimate users of the spectrum."

Buckhout said the U.S. forces' enemies haven't historically used electronics to wage warfare, but things are changing and the spectrum is wide open.

"In the middle of it, there's a bad guy using a cell phone to make something bad happen," she said. "So we have to get good at finding that one hostile spectrum user and take him out. "Electronic warfare is defined as using the spectrum to attack an enemy, to deny, degrade, defeat the capabilities of an enemy," Buckhout said. "We need to dominate the spectrum."

The Army's fight to dominate electronic warfare is hampered by its lack of experience, she said.

The last time the army wielded electronic warfare as a major tactic, soldiers used "barrage jammers" to prevent enemies from using the spectrum. But these former methods are now ineffective, Buckhout said. More.....