Electronic Warfare & Spectrum Operations

During the Second Boer War, the British Army attempting to relieve Ladysmith bounced Morse code signals off clouds using a searchlight. The Boers spotted this and used their own searchlight to jam the British signals, an episode described by Winston Churchill. It is the earliest documented instance of deliberate interference with an enemy's signalling.

AWT&T journalists used a code to report the leading ship while occupying the frequency, preventing rival reporters from transmitting the result. This gave them a considerable reporting lead and stands as the first documented case of deliberate radio jamming.

The Royal Navy reportedly attempted radio jamming in exercises in 1902, followed by the US Navy in 1903. These trials marked the entry of spectrum attack into formal naval practice.

HMS Diana recorded Russian telecommunications while stationed in the Suez Canal. This established signals interception — the sensing half of spectrum operations — as a practical naval capability.

During the Japanese Navy's long-distance bombardment of Port Arthur, a spotter destroyer radioed ballistic corrections to the cruisers. A Russian operator used his spark-gap transmitter to drown out these communications, allegedly causing the Japanese to retreat without achieving their objectives.

When the Russian fleet was spotted by the Japanese merchantman Shinano Maru in the Tsushima Strait, the captain of the Ural sought permission to transmit a stronger signal to distort Japanese communications. Rozhestvensky refused, fearing it would reveal his position, and maintained radio silence. The episode shows that both jamming and interception were already understood as standard practice.

Both sides in the Second World War used electronic warfare extensively, with the first application being interference with the navigational radars guiding bombers to their targets. Chaff was introduced during the war to confuse and defeat tracking radar. Churchill's phrase "Battle of the Beams" captured this first systematic EW campaign.

As battlefield communication and radar technology improved, electronic warfare played a major role in several military operations of the Vietnam War. Aircraft on bombing and air-to-air missions relied on EW to survive, though many were defeated by Vietnamese electronic counter-countermeasures.

Electronic warfare was employed on a large scale during the Gulf War, principally by EF-111A and EA-6B electronic attack aircraft. Their task was to disrupt Iraq's large and capable surface-to-air missile and ground-controlled intercept network, demonstrating EW as an enabler of air campaigns.

In the strike on a suspected Syrian nuclear site near the Euphrates, Israeli electronic warfare systems disrupted Syrian air defences while jets crossed much of Syria and returned unopposed. Some reports claim Israeli EW deactivated all Syrian air defence systems for the entire raid, a landmark demonstration of non-kinetic spectrum attack.

Reports emerged that Ukrainian F-16 pilots were being instructed in low-altitude visual navigation and terrain-based orientation to compensate for degraded satellite navigation. The training responded to Russian GPS disruption, which had reduced the accuracy of HIMARS and JDAM weapons from about 5 metres to about 27 metres by forcing reliance on inertial navigation.

Trump said the device was used in the 2026 United States intervention in Venezuela to jam electronic equipment used by the Venezuelan military. The claim brought electronic attack into public political discourse.

Ukraine reported on 11 March 2024 that it had destroyed a Palantin system capable of suppressing satellite radio navigation along the entire line of contact and spoofing the navigation field across most of Ukraine. An estimated three Palantin systems have been hit, in June 2022, February 2023 and March 2024, alongside a Layer system in Zaporizhzhia. These strikes show EW assets becoming priority counter-targets.

The Economist reported electronic warfare in widespread front-line use to impair small battlefield UAV activity. Russia installed jammers targeting drone video feeds and control links on tanks and artillery, pushing EW down to the individual vehicle level.

The 19 May 2023 report estimated losses averaging 300 drones a day. It noted Russian EW posts roughly every 10 km along the front, set back some 6 km from the line of contact, quantifying the attritional effect of spectrum denial on drone warfare.

In the first two days of the invasion Russian EW disrupted Ukrainian air defence radars and communications, though it also interfered with Russian communications and was scaled back. By late March and April 2022 extensive jamming infrastructure had been deployed, with concentrations of up to ten complexes per 21 km of frontage, and suppression of GPS and radio caused heavy UAV losses. By summer 2022 only about a third of Ukrainian UAV missions succeeded.

Scorpius was presented as able to disrupt radar and communications from ships, UAVs and missiles simultaneously and at varying distances. It illustrated the move towards multi-target, multi-band electronic attack systems.

The ESSS set out US policy for dominance of the electromagnetic spectrum and incorporated cognitive electronic warfare. It framed AI-enabled adaptation within the spectrum as a strategic objective rather than a research curiosity.

Development began in 2004 and evaluation testing completed in December 2010. Mounted on nine MT-LB armoured vehicles and combining four types of jamming station, the system suppresses mobile satellite communications and satellite navigation signals and conducts electronic reconnaissance. Swedish reporting in August 2015 said its initial usage caused concern within NATO.

The conceptual document MCM_0142 of November 2007, the Military Committee Transformation Concept for Future NATO Electronic Warfare, treated the electromagnetic environment as a warfighting environment or domain. This doctrinal recognition elevated spectrum operations from a support function to a domain of manoeuvre.