Army eyes larger all-source intelligence support to EW

AUSA 2025 — Electronic warfare has come to dominate the modern battlespace, and the Army is going to need greater all-source intelligence — using information from humans, signals, satellites and more — according to an army official. looking at greater all-source intelligence to support and inform electromagnetic warfare.

“We have to look at how all-source is supporting EW. We have to look at how HUMINT [human intelligence] is supporting EW through battle letter and through how their questions are flowing out to individuals that they’re interviewing,” Col. John Shemer, Army capability manager for intel sensors at the Intelligence Center of Excellence, said during a presentation at the annual AUSA conference. “We have to look at how counter intelligence is supporting EW, because they provide the baseline that is going to give all of our EW services … the protection that they need in order to be effective.”

Overall, Shemar said the Army needs to “look holistically internal[ly] to intelligence. In the past we would call it IEW. It’d be largely SIGINT [signals intelligence] related support to electromagnetic warfare. But when you look at the Department’s electromagnetic spectrum strategy. It’s more holistic than that.”

The service divested much of its electronic warfare capability after the Cold War. In the years since, the Army has sought not only to rebuild its arsenal, but its acumen in the spectrum against adversaries that are adept at maneuvering in the invisible domain, and it is now looking at more mature methods to inform its electronic warfare forces.

Signals intelligence and electronic warfare have been tightly coupled as there is a fine line between the two. But the battlefield of the future will be much more complex, and more sources will be needed to inform forces of their battlespace and what targets to jam. This will be important given that once forces decide to jam, they reveal their location to the enemy as well.

A potential example of all-source intel aiding the service, Shemer noted, is how geospatial intelligence could help inform units that what might look like an emitter on the battlefield based on its electromagnetic signature, could actually be something else.

“A GEOINT capability would detect that the emitter is not actually the target that you’re looking for. It’s not tank. It’s something else. It may look like a tank and smell like a tank, but through some geo technique, it is not a tank,” he said. “Then that flows through the all-source and that then informs the EW targeting layer that is going to go out and do their work on the battlefield.”