EW in the New Threat Environment

摘要

Over the last few years, our potential opponents have been busy developing a whole new generation of threats and approaches that are specifically designed to counter the way we've been doing EW tasks with great success for generations. Over the next few months, we will be discussing the nature of the changes to the threats and the implications of those changes on EW systems and tactics. Because this column is unclassified, our information about these new threats must come from open literature. Fortunately, there is a great deal of information about new threats in open literature. However, anyone who has a security clearance is forbidden to either confirm or deny that open literature is accurate. My approach to this is to first look at any open literature description of hostile equipment or tactics from a "laws of physics" point of view. If the information passes that test, I treat it as accurate, but identify it as a quote from open literature. Let's be clear: I don't really care if the information is accurate or not, just that it makes sense; which probably means that it is in the right ball park. Later, when you need to perform EW operations seriously, you can get appropriate authority to access the real threat information from classified data bases. Plugging the real information into the formulas we will develop will yield the real answers that you need when things get serious.