The Future of Warfare Is Electronic - WSJ

The Ukrainian army has launched a stunning offensive into Kursk, Russia, under a shield of advanced electronic weapons. The war in Ukraine is demonstrating that 21st-century conflicts will be won or lost in the arena of electronic warfare.

Think of electronic warfare as casting spells on an invisible battlefield. Combatants strive to preserve their own signals, while disrupting those of the enemy. In Kursk, the Ukrainians took advantage of their technical knowledge to achieve a leap in battlefield tactics. Using a variety of electronic sensing systems, they managed to figure out the key Russian radio frequencies along the invasion route. They jammed these frequencies, creating a series of electronic bubbles that kept enemy drones away from Ukrainian forces, allowing reconnaissance units, tanks and mechanized infantry to breach the Russian border mostly undetected. This is the chaotic way of modern combat: a choreography of lightweight, unmanned systems driven by a spiderweb of electronic signals.

During visits to Ukraine over the past year, we observed the convergence of unmanned systems and electronic warfare, increasingly conducted by front-line troops. An island in the Dnipro River delta south of Mykolaiv is held by a contingent of Ukrainian special forces. These units would normally be supported by heavy artillery, attack aviation, and air-defense missiles, and resupplied by traditional maritime assets. Today, short on conventional resources but buoyed by Ukrainian tech entrepreneurs, they are pioneering the development and use of quadcopters and drone boats for resupply, reconnaissance, evacuation and amphibious assaults.

via www.wsj.com

Porter Smith and Nathan Mintz.