How would you describe the pace at which near-peer adversaries are advancing their EW capabilities?
Advancements in electronic warfare by both allies and adversaries are progressing rapidly and deliberately, fueled by substantial investments in offensive and defensive communications technologies. Similar to the commercial sector’s focus on IT innovation, defense industries are leveraging cutting-edge wireless technologies to strengthen their communications and EW capabilities. These wireless innovations are continuously evolving to address the growing demands for capacity, connectivity, and reliability in congested electromagnetic environments.
DoD resiliency facilities (engineering and T&E), like NIWC Atlantic’s RIVAL Lab, are identifying, testing, adapting and looking to transition commercial advancements to countermeasure adversarial advancements to disrupt, degrade, and deny warfighter communications in the EW battlefield. What capabilities of ours are adversaries looking to degrade? Adversaries are focused on degrading or denying our capabilities across the board including command and control (C2) capabilities, making communications a critical attack vector. By targeting communication capabilities, adversaries aim to disrupt the flow of information, sow confusion, and undermine decision-making processes. NIWC Atlantic and JTNC established the RIVAL Lab to characterize communication technologies against detection, degradation and interception techniques. This characterization enables the identification of possible vulnerabilities and capability improvements.
What does the military need to do to stay ahead of these threats?
The DoD must continue prioritizing and investing in a multi-faceted approach for identifying, evaluating and integrating resilient communication innovations that sustain effective communications under congested, constrained and contested environments. Similar to the investments made by NIWC Atlantic and JTNC for the RIVAL Lab, DoD investments should continue collaborating with industry and academia to leverage emerging commercial technologies such as Low Probability of Anything (LPx), artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), RF agility techniques to enhance electromagnetic spectrum operations (EMSO). The RIVAL Lab is one example of a Department of the Navy capital investment for characterizing evolving TRANSEC features for operational maturity.
What’s the state of our Anti-Jam and LPD capabilities?
The state of our Anti-Jam and LPD capabilities is promising, but continued investment in R&D and rapid fielding is essential to ensure these technologies are warfighter ready. In recent years, the defense industry has witnessed significant advancements in resilient communication technologies that incorporate robust transmission security (TRANSEC) features, including Anti-Jam and Low Probability of Detection (LPD) protections. While many of these capabilities are still in early Technology Readiness Levels or derived from commercial technologies, efforts are underway to mature and transition them to operational use for the warfighter as quickly as possible. By prioritizing collaboration between the DoD Programs of Record, industry, and research institutions; we can accelerate the critical capabilities to maintain operational superiority in the contested environments (EW battlefield).
What are the various methods used by the DoD to address EW like frequency hopping and spread-spectrum?
Like commercial industries, the DoD employs several technologies to enhance communication capacity, performance, reliability and survivability. The DoD EMS strategy aims to enhance TRANSEC by reducing the likelihood of RF energy detection and impacts of interference using techniques like frequency hopping, spread spectrum, multiplexing, adaptive modulation, and dynamic spectrum access.
Similar to the Services tasking their respective research laboratories to investigate technology advancements, JTNC tasks the RIVAL Lab to characterize COTS and NDI innovations that often combine TRANSEC techniques to increase robustness or obfuscate detection. Recent RIVAL Lab investments have focused on enhancing emulated RF environments and expanding RF measurement technologies to better characterize advanced signal processing and software defined radio technologies without restricting the System Under Test’s (SUT) capabilities to support the T&E infrastructure.
What are your thoughts on present-day Anti-Jam/LPD techniques? How have some of those techniques like spread spectrum become compromised over time, such as in a reduction in data rates?
Resiliency features like anti-jam and LPD for communications are continuously evolving and require creativity, innovation and adaptation to survive the EW battlefield. While significant communication advancements have been made, the increasing sophistication of adversaries, coupled with the legacy technology limitations (frequency hopping and spread spectrum techniques were introduced 50+ years ago) and understanding the system performance tradeoffs with employing TRANSEC techniques, effective resilient communications will face ongoing challenges. Identifying these challenges and understanding how they impact CONOPS with current and future communications is crucial for maintaining a competitive advantage.
DoD Working Groups, like JTNC’s Resiliency Sub-Working Group (RSWG), work with warfighters, intelligence communities, industry partners, and DoD T&E facilities (like the RIVAL Lab) to better analyze communication resilience based on threats and operationally relevant environments to ensure real-world effectiveness. Operational effectiveness requires more than specifications; it requires understanding the realities of performance tradeoffs associated with employing TRANSEC techniques and exercising these capabilities to validate end user needs are met. TRANSEC can impact data throughput and range, requiring a balance between stealth, operational effectiveness and survivability.
Where do LPD systems fit in within this conversation?
Detectability comes in many forms such as visual, acoustic, infrared (thermal) and electromagnetic. Since the RIVAL Lab is a radio T&E facility, LPD characterization primarily revolves around characterizing electromagnetic detectability.
Depending on the phase of war, LPD features can be central to ensuring resilient and secure communications in contested environments. Minimizing the RF signatures against energy, structure and imperfection detectors reduces the adversary’s ability to target communications to disrupt C2. Think of it this way: LPD can be the first line of defense in a signals-based kill chain. Detection is the critical first step before the other sides can geolocate, intercept, identify/classify, or jam. Breaking the adversary kill chain as early as possible using TRANSEC enabled mitigations while maintaining effective (reliable) communications is critical in preventing detection, geolocation and targeted jamming in the EW battlefield.
LPD is more than a TRANSEC feature; it’s a fundamental requirement for maintaining operational superiority. Characterizing the systems through rigorous testing is essential for determining limitations and strengths of different LPD approaches and providing independent analysis to enable informed decision-making about system acquisition and deployment. The RIVAL Lab is set up to characterize detectability across a range of SDRs and sensors.
What are your thoughts on current acquisition requirements around Anti-Jam and LPD capabilities for military communications systems? Are they reflective of the current need, and what do they typically look like?
Requirement development for system acquisition is evolving, and it is critical that it addresses performance as well as aspects such as Size, Weight, and Power (SWaP), security, and interoperability. As for resiliency related specifications, this topic has been at the forefront for the efforts of the JTNC’s Resiliency Sub Working Group (RSWG) under the DoD CIO and Joint Staff J6 chartered Communications Technology and Waveform Working Group (CTWWG).
JTNC’s RSWG works across various communities, including acquisition offices, industry, warfighter groups, and intelligence centers to better understand emerging technologies and desired capabilities in support of defining testable requirements. Acquisition requirements for AJ and LPD capabilities are evolving to reflect the growing complexity of EW threats. These requirements emphasize resilience, adaptability, and interoperability.
However, resiliency needs and definitions are different for each tactical domain (sea, ground, air, space) and also unique based on the environment (urban, mountain, desert, foliage). Characterizing a system’s resiliency performance is highly influenced by context and tradecraft. Resiliency analysis from a ground-based line-of-sight (LoS) T&E facility will not completely align with results from maritime beyond LoS T&E facility. Context matters!
Tell us about the work you are doing on testing comms systems that can mitigate EW threats. How do you go about doing this work?
In partnership with JTNC, NIWC Atlantic’s Resiliency Innovation & Vulnerability Assessment for LPx (RIVAL) lab represents a crucial investment in enhancing the DoD’s ability to characterize resilient communication systems. The lab delivers results that enable better informed acquisition decisions and requirements development. This lab offers a platform and system-agnostic approach vital for evaluating a broad spectrum of military communication systems.
The RIVAL Lab aligns with JTNC’s RSWG Assessment, Analysis, Test & Evaluation model to ensure a consistent approach to capability characterizations, EW resiliency T&E, and threat-informed EW T&E. The RIVAL Lab emphasizes deriving meaningful resiliency criteria based on use case, technology, and operational relevance. As a result, the lab provides actionable intelligence for data-driven decision-making and improved capabilities necessary for success in contested environments.
JTNC’s Capability Characterization initiative focuses on characterizing innovative solutions from commercial vendors and NDI vendors who can provide operational impacts to the warfighter. Candidate products can range in Technology Readiness Level from prototype to field ready system. Through JTNC’s sponsorship, the characterization events are free to product owners; but the final reports are posted to JTNC’s Joint Communication Marketplace for use by a broad swath of US military agencies. Capability vendors and developers are encouraged to participate as much as possible and they are provided with the final reports as well.
What is top of mind right now in this work?
What is at the top of our mind is getting the right capabilities to our joint warfighters so they are prepared and protected against our near peer adversaries.
What are the demand signals you are now getting on what you should be working on?
The demand signals we’re seeing are being shaped by the accelerating shift toward Joint All-Domain Command and Control (JADC2), the need for resilient, interoperable communications in contested environments, and the growing emphasis on coalition interoperability.
Stakeholders, from the Combatant Commands COCOMs to Program Executive Offices (PEOs) and industry partners, are driving requirements for secure, software-defined, standards-compliant networking capabilities that can scale across services and mission profiles.
How are the results of your work shared with the DoD and industry?
Through partnership with JTNC, the RIVAL Lab conducts evaluations on resilient comms products developed by industry. This gives us the opportunity to directly engage with vendors. The RIVAL Lab posts the reports for US Government military and civilian access, which include DoD stakeholders, including program managers, system developers, and operational units.
The RIVAL Lab makes diligent efforts to have vendors participate throughout their product’s evaluation event, including a post event sit-down to discuss results and findings. Additionally, the RIVAL Lab periodically briefs industry during JTNC RSWG Industry Technical Exchange Meeting (TEM). This allows the RIVAL team to present resiliency evaluation techniques and results to key industry stakeholders at the appropriate classification level.