The State of EMSO Today

Show Notes

Electromagnetic spectrum operations (EMSO) is rapidly changing the way we think about modern warfare. Too often, EMSO is placed on the back burner and only thought of until a crisis arises. This forces leaders to scramble to find solutions for achieving an advantage. We need a proactive approach that provides our warfighters what they need today and anticipates what they need tomorrow. Is EMSO on the right path? We answer this in today’s episode with John Knowles, editor of the Journal of Electromagnetic Dominance (JED). 

Ken and John discuss the biggest developments in EMSO over the past year, from new joint doctrine to a unified strategy to greater oversight by Congress. To learn more about today’s topics or to stay updated on EMSO developments, visit our website. 

Thank you to our episode sponsor, Northrop Grumman Corporation.

Creators & Guests

Host

Ken Miller

AOC Director of Advocacy & Outreach, Host of @AOCrows From the Crows' Nest Podcast

Producer

Laura Krebs

Editor

Reese Clutter

What is From the Crows' Nest?

This podcast features interviews, analysis, and discussions covering leading issues of the day related to electromagnetic spectrum operations (EMSO). Topics include current events and news worldwide, US Congress and the annual defense budget, and military news from the US and allied countries. We also bring you closer to Association of Old Crow events and provide a forum to dive deeper into policy issues impacting our community.

Ken Miller (00:10):
Welcome to From the Crow's Nest, a podcast on Electromagnetic Spectrum Operations or EMSO. I'm your host, Ken Miller, Director of Advocacy and Outreach for the Association of Old Crows. Thanks for listening.

Ken Miller (00:21):
Today, we focus our attention on the current state of EMSO. Before I introduce my guests, I want to thank our sponsor, Northrop Grumman Corporation. Northrop Grumman provides full-spectrum superiority. Their innovative multifunction interoperable solutions ensure warfighters have full spectrum dominance to make real-time decisions no matter the environment or domain. Learn more at ngc.com/ew.

Ken Miller (00:43):
My first guest is a good friend and no stranger to the EMSO community. He is John Knowles, editor of the Journal of Electromagnetic Dominance, the JED, which is AOC's official monthly publication. John first joined JED's editorial team back in 1994 and has been writing exclusively about electromagnetic warfare and Signals Intelligence for the past 27 years. I have known John for about 22 of those years, and he is highly respected across the EMSO community for his work behind the scenes with leaders from the Pentagon, Congress, and industry to help focus more attention on challenges and opportunities facing EMSO today. John, it's great to have you. Welcome to the show.

John Knowles (01:19):
Thanks for having me, Ken. Good to talk with you again.

Ken Miller (01:22):
I want to dive right into the topic of this episode, the state of Electromagnetic Spectrum Operations or EMSO. The past few years have been busy for the EMSO community. There have been several pivotal developments across the Department of Defense, military services, Congress, and even NATO. This year in particular has seen new joint doctrine, a new EMSO strategy and even congressional language to move EMSO out from under US strategic command. Sitting here today in April of 2021, what is the state of EMSO and are we on the right path?

John Knowles (01:55):
Well, I think it's interesting. We tend to learn about EMSO, the DOD tends to learn about EMSO in conflict. It's really an unfortunate way to find out what's working and what's not on a grand scale and what your adversary's employing for either technology or tactics. But that is sort of the episodic pace to electromagnetic warfare. We don't have to live that way. We can do better certainly through training, simulation, things like that, but we're not there yet. So we're still in this sort of reactive management style to EW. We try to anticipate threats. Occasionally we do better than other times, but largely that's been our history. And that's probably the most important paradigm that we need to break out of right now is that we're so dependent on the EMS. Our network force is so dependent on the EMS that if we could to have this, let's find out what happens approach, to EW or to Electromagnetic Spectrum Operations, we're so strategically on the EMS that we can't play that game anymore, or approach EMS Operations with that strategy.

John Knowles (03:07):
I think the biggest thing is that the real last operational lessons we've learned were in the 2000s in Iraq and Afghanistan, and that's a long period. That was a particular kind of conflict. It wasn't a near peer conflict. We had really nobody trying to jam us or go after our dependence on the spectrum. A lot of the interference and things we had were self-inflicted. So, we are in sort of in analyze, in watch mode right now where we think we have an idea of how we want to compete with a China or a Russia or even Iran. But we don't know.

Ken Miller (03:46):
One of the challenges that we've talked about over the years is the need for leadership and really a governance structure that aligns authority and resources. Oftentimes, the conversation is centered around those governance structures in relation to a domain. With the electromagnetic spectrum being deemed a maneuver space, does that provide the impetus for establishment of authority and resources down there that we need to make sure that we keep up against emerging threats?

John Knowles (04:24):
Historically in the US we have been very domain oriented over the past 30 years, certainly, where it matters to your resources to be designated as a domain. The question that you're posing and everyone is really asking is, is can you get to where we need to be with EMSO in resourcing the enterprise to be able to fight maneuver and effect control in the EMS without the domain status? Big question. My personal opinion is no, I don't think we can do it without. It's just too important to be a domain to get what you need. Especially when you look at the DOTMLPF enterprise, so doctrine, organization, training, leadership, and all that, we have under-resourced EW historically. And now with EMSO, as they sort of capstone concept bringing EW and spectrum management together, when you go against a peer adversary, you got to ask yourself, "Have you resourced it?"

John Knowles (05:29):
The resourcing isn't adequate. And again, without domain status, I think Electromagnetic Spectrum Operations will not be a complete idea on its own. It will always be seen as a portion of something else, whether it's cyberspace operations or something else. And if it is a really important strategic maneuver space, which when you build a network centric force, you're basically making the EMS strategically relevant and essential, then you have to ask yourself, can you get there without domain status? That's the bet that DOD is making right now, is that they can get to, in my mind, what they need to be, where they need to be at 2030 against a peer adversary or a peer competitor at least. And they can do that without having to commit resources and fundamentally change cultures especially in the services by not recognizing the EMS as a domain. It's a big question and it's a big gamble.

Ken Miller (06:28):
Our sister podcast, The History of Crows, were looking at the fundamental science behind EW and EMSO. One point is that electromagnetic energy is a fundamental force of the universe. It's everywhere. It touches everything we do. Yet today, when we talk about EW about using electromagnetic energy, we relegated to a support mission. In your view, how do we make enduring progress on EMSO if we only view it as a support mission? How should we be viewing this important capability?

John Knowles (06:57):
I think what's interesting about electronic warfare or electromagnetic warfare and EMSO writ large is that we tend to learn our lessons at very specific times in very consequential conflicts. You can look at the history of EW and look at World War II and the Vietnam War and the Yom Kippur war, and Bekaa Valley Campaign that Israel launched in 1982. You can look at number of conflicts and learn lessons from them. That's a double-edged sword. You learn your lessons, but there's always a number of people that will argue that the next war isn't going to be like the last one and so you tend to dismiss a lot of lessons as well. So we tend to relearn a lot of lessons in the EMS over and over again, but we only learn them in very specific conflicts. It's not like cyber operations where it's going on every day.

John Knowles (07:58):
And it's just you tend to think... Going into the Iraq war, we created a network centric force. Everybody did their training at various places. When we brought everyone into theater together, the amount of interference in electromagnetic fratricide going on was significant. And you could sit there and say, "Why didn't we see that before?" Well, we didn't bring everybody together before in one joint environment to do that. So suddenly, some of the data links on the UAVs weren't really working. Some of our jammers were interfering with some of the communications. And convoy commanders had to figure out, "Do I make a call? Do I communicate or do I keep my ID jammers, my RCEID jammers on?" Things like that. And we tend to learn those lessons, as you said, in an episodic way.

John Knowles (08:48):
We don't train to learn those lessons. We don't train very well yet so we don't learn them as a regular day to day occurrence in our military. We think we learn them and then we go somewhere and our adversary gets a vote and gets to maneuver because we've left certain frequencies available for them to maneuver, things like that. And we tend to learn the lesson. The war ends and we tend to say, "Okay, that was that." Now, let's keep going the way we were and not really internalizing as many of the lessons. So that's, I think one of the key things that we have to understand in our history. But that's why I think we have a systemic problem as we've just got a very technologically focused strategy for managing EW and EMS.

Ken Miller (09:35):
You talk about the US learning lessons at specific points in time, but the other side of the equation is also important. Our peer competitors are also learning lessons from our behaviors and our responses to problems that we face. They are adapting too, the way they operate, their technology, their organization, because they are looking for an advantage and they are making decisions based on what they perceive to be our vulnerabilities. So I wanted to get your take on how our adversaries are learning lessons from us and how does that translate into what we need to do and how we need to approach EMSO?

John Knowles (10:08):
So, it's a really interesting point you make because if you look at the United States since the end of the Cold War, we've engaged in a number of conflicts. We have built up our network centric force, our cyber capabilities, and we have designated information as strategically essential. And we're still having a hard time articulating what information advantage is, information operations, information warfare. We're debating that, but we don't doubt that we are an information dependent force. Our sensor-to-shooter kill chain, kill web is based on moving information across the force from the sensors to the shooters. And we can't fight without that. We built that in the second offset at the end of the Cold War, in the last decades of the Cold War. Our adversaries are now replicating that second offset sensor-to-shooter kill web. They're doing it with the advantage of playing a home game so they can tap into command and control resources that the US cannot because we are playing, always going to play an away game, which means we don't get to tap into a country's telecoms infrastructure easily. Our adversaries can because they're playing a home game.

John Knowles (11:36):
We depend on the EMS. We depend on space. We depend on cyberspace operations. And those three, basically, if you think about the doctrine, the JP 3-85, when they talk about JEMSO related missionary is it's interesting how they describe it. They have described cyberspace operations, they described space operations, and then they lumped together air, land and maritime operations as if the other two are not separate, but maybe share a unique dependency on the EMS, cyberspace and space, versus air, land, and maritime, which tend to also have a dependency on the EMS, but maybe not as dependent. And so, when you think about global power projection, which is what the US is geopolitical strategy is in the [inaudible 00:12:27] for military operations, we have to plan away game. We have to have access to the EMS. We have to be able to control frequencies in certain locations at certain times in the EMS in order to exert control or in order to succeed with our operations wherever they are in the world.

John Knowles (12:45):
But it's that concept that we need to play in away game, that is our going in strategy, that makes you inherently dependent on the EMS. And again, it goes back to the question, do you want to treat this as a utility which you assume you're always going to have access to? Or do you want to treat it as a contested congested maneuver space that you need to resource like it's a domain? I don't mean to go back to our original conversation, but that to me is like our history of... How we got to today is really a history of what we've learned from conflicts and then what we've discarded sometimes some of those lessons. And I think that's a really important thing is we do have a repetitive cycle. But it's not because of EW, it's because of the way we've approached and managed EW and EMSO for 80 years, and we need to change that right now.

Ken Miller (13:37):
I want to talk about EMSO training. We often talk about train like you fight. We try to design realistic scenarios and replicate the electromagnetic environment that we expect to fight in. On the other hand, you could say that our adversaries, most notably Russia and China train by fighting. They're conducting operations, testing technology, and refining their tactics. In some ways, our adversaries or peer competitors are more prepared for the next fight than we are. Can you discuss our progress on EMSO training? Again, are we on the right path?

John Knowles (14:11):
I think our training is starting to get onto a better path than it was. Coming out of the Cold War in the '90s and in the 2000s, we were basically working on solutions. I think there's some bigger efforts outside of the EMSO community with live virtual constructive, things that were developed largely more in the test community and then they're being adapted over to the training community in that period where we really weren't facing a peer competitor. And then, when the Iraq and Afghanistan operations began in 2002, 2003, we really focused on irregular warfare and I guess I'd call it lower threshold, not near peer competitor type scenarios. And so, again, a lot of resources went into fighting the war we had to fight, and we continue to let our peer type of training infrastructure and training itself that we would need to conduct for operations against a peer competitor, that continued to atrophy.

John Knowles (15:20):
And so, we came into probably the 2010 timeframe looking at, okay, we have integrated air defense systems that will be facing out there are full of threats that we don't replicate very well on our ranges the entire electromagnetic environment that we would need to simulate in a training scenario with not only the blue and red emitters, but also all of the neutral... well, gray, but also the neutrals and things like that, emitters, that make for a very congested and complex electromagnetic environment, we realized that, "Wow, we're really behind that." And that's been a struggle.

John Knowles (16:00):
We're really looking to the simulation world right now. We're looking to DARPA with programs like MODSIM and others to create higher fidelity models, things that we can really use that will truly replicate the environments that we're going to be in. And those are, if you think back to again, the Cold War, because the threats and the jammers and everything that we were operating against and operating with had a limited range and they weren't covering massive volumes of airspace or of electromagnetic environment, but now you have threats that ranges up to 400 kilometers and longer, you have early warning radars that are much longer than that, like 1,300 kilometers, things like that. And they're operating at much lower frequencies. And because of processing power, they're able to pull more targeting data or better data out of those things that used to not be true threats. They're now getting a little more concerning in the kill chain.

John Knowles (16:58):
So you think about all that, and you've got to replicate those massive volumes at higher fidelity and you just realize like, "Wow. We really can't do this in a training scenario that's purely live. We need the virtual and constructive pieces of it." And so, EW and EMSO has a lot of catching up to do because what we learned in Iraq for example was we can train all day and we had no adversary there really who was trying to take away our access to the EMS. The worst, from the perspective of taking away our access to the EMS, the biggest offender was us. And that's a really big problem that we had to solve. And that's why we created EMSO was to bring spectrum management in with EW so that they are thought about together at the beginning, not as a reaction after you've already conducted a lot of operations and realize what you couldn't do because you were interfering with yourself or jamming yourself.

John Knowles (17:53):
And so, training is just so much more complex than Red Flag in 1991 on the eve of the Gulf War. It's just so much more complex. It's not one-on-one. It's many on many. It's dynamic. Your adversary has access to all kinds of commercial communications technology and other technologies that allow them to maneuver. When you jam in a certain place, they can maneuver somewhere else. They're going to find ways through. And you have to be able to train in that environment.

John Knowles (18:22):
And so, we're behind. We're capable of catching up. But again, it's not a technology problem. It's really the way you approach the problem. It's a mentality problem right now. It's definitely challenging. But I don't doubt that we have the technological resources to do it. What I wonder is, is when we will truly recognize the problem. Are we going to solve our training problem because we thought it through before we got to a fight? Or we get in a fight and realize that we didn't train right and we got to go back and fix it which is not a good scenario to put it mildly.

Ken Miller (18:59):
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Ken Miller (20:06):
I'm back here with John Knowles, editor of the Journal of Electromagnetic Dominance. DOD is making progress in that area, starting to pivot away from a more asymmetric conflicts or counterinsurgency and looking at the near peer competition that's in front of us with, you mentioned Russia and China. And they're trying to... Seems like they are making progress in moving away or hopefully moving away from the more episodic nature of addressing EMSO challenges. Over the past year, there's been a number of key moments and I'm thinking back, there was the electromagnetic spectrum superiority strategy. Before then, there was a joint publication, 3-85, that basically addressed DOD's approach toward EMSO which is really a key piece of a doctrine that set the stage for a lot of other activities over the past year. Can you talk a little bit about the effect that some of those reports and changes in doctrine have on how we think about EMSO today?

John Knowles (21:08):
I think the EMS superiority strategy laid a lot out there and did a good job of that. I kind of view strategies somewhat as a good overview of what we should do. And the implementation plan is the reality of what we will do. Connecting strategy to the implementation plan is pretty important because you don't want to lose a lot of the vision in the strategy or the capabilities or the areas you want to focus on. So I think the strategy did a good job of talking about problems like readiness and technology investment and innovation and the technologies that we need because I do think we need a new generation of technologies that use AI, that are adaptive and cognitive, that are not necessarily the high power systems that we used in the past, that we've been able to use in the past when we haven't had an adversary who was trying to compete or defeat us in the EMS. They just haven't been able to since the Cold War. We haven't run into anyone that's really been good at that.

John Knowles (22:12):
So, I think about EMSO and there's the conversation inside the EMSO community where we have a lot of very diverse... It's a very diverse community. It's sometimes difficult to herd our own cats and get us on the same page so that we can then have a conversation with leaders outside of our community. And so, probably over the past 10 years, I think we've come to a fairly decent agreement on where we need to be as for EMSO as a capability and strategy. And now, we're trying to communicate that out. That's where JP 3-85 and the EMS superiority strategy and things like that are coming in. They're kind of at that point where we need to find a way to communicate outside to senior leaders in the Pentagon and in Congress and the others to help them understand what we think we need to do.

John Knowles (23:05):
And so, that's a big step for us because we've really spent a lot of time, had some I would almost call them false starts. We had some earlier EMS strategies that didn't really... They reflected sort of what I guess I'd call thinking at the time as opposed to a fully mature understanding of where we needed to go. But now I think we're ready to really engage at that, have a strategic discussion about EMSO and what we need if we want to have any sense of competitiveness or overmatch in the EMS against the potential adversary.

John Knowles (23:41):
Some of the areas that the strategy got into that I think that the DOD has had hardest time swallowing have been things that are more cultural. The DOD does not like to create organizational change. They did not like to create leadership. And this area, they would rather probably see what they can attach EMSO to rather than look at EMSO from its own perspective.

Ken Miller (24:05):
We often talk about what the Defense Department or the military services must do to address challenges in Electromagnetic Spectrum Operations. But there is another important piece of this puzzle, and that's Congress. For years, Congress has been very active in advocating solutions for persistent gaps in EMSO. Sometimes those actions are subtle and other times, Congress intervenes legislatively with reforms that move the ball forward. Last month was one of those times that Congress placed EMSO into the spotlight. The House Armed Services Subcommittee on Cyber, Innovative Technologies, and Information Systems, also known as the CITI Subcommittee held a hearing and it marked an important step EMSO to be an exclusive topic at a congressional hearing. The witnesses included Bryan Clark, a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, Dr. Joseph Kirschbaum from the Government Accountability Office, the GAO, and Dr. Bill Conley, the Chief Technology Officer at Mercury Systems and also the former director for EW and OSD. There was a very good discussion between the witnesses and the members of the subcommittee and they covered a lot of ground. I wanted to know what your takeaways were from the hearing.

John Knowles (25:12):
I watched that hearing and it was really eye-opening and a very good hearing. I thought actually the Congressional Subcommittee members did a good job of asking questions. They got into a lot of areas that are important. I also thought the testimony from the three experts were very good. The hearing got into operational concepts, technology development, manpower, and really where are we going to get people from and how are we going to train them. And also, what we were just discussing, was the DOD's inability to develop a strategic focus on EMSO. It got into a lot of areas. I really thought it was good.

John Knowles (25:48):
I thought Bryan Clark at the Hudson's too, he really made a good point. At one point, he said the US dependence on active sensors, like radars and broad area, high power communications networks like Link 16. We can't do that anymore. Our adversaries... We broadcast where we are and typically what we're doing, and we can't do that anymore. We need to invest in much better smarter systems that can reduce their power, be harder to detect LPI/LPD type of things. But at that operational level, I thought that was a really good discussion.

John Knowles (26:22):
Dr. Conley, he really made a good point in terms of strategic focus. He made a good point that the CITI's Subcommittee was... I think they'd already conducted a few hearings already this year. This was their first hearing without a senior OSD leader, either the assistant secretary or deputy assistant secretary level who could testify. And that really shows that you have to go pretty far down the leadership chain at OSD to find someone who is an expert in EMSO. And that is not a good thing if this area is that important. I thought that was a really important point that he made there.

John Knowles (27:01):
And Dr. Kirschbaum, I thought he have a great perspective. Kind of depressing in a way on where we've been. He cited how many studies we had done. I can't remember the exact number, but it's up there over the past decade or so, and how consistent they've been in their findings and how little of those findings have translated into actual, generated any kind of change or results inside the DOD. They have been very good at deflecting it. I think that's because a lot of the change that has to happen needs to occur in the services. And they're probably the most bureaucratically conservative institutions in the DOD. And so, they're very resistant to change and they're very reactive by nature.

John Knowles (27:44):
A friend of mine once said the EMSO problem is out there at 300 meters and the combatant commands own that entire 300 meters in sense of operational responsibility, the services. Because they're about organizing training and equipping, they're institutionally only asked to look out 100 meters. They cannot see the whole problem. And it's at the entire full range that they have to think about it. But in the DOD, they're given most of the decisions to make on EMSO right now and so that balance needs to change. I do think the COCOMs need to weigh in more. I thought it was a great hearing. In my memory, which isn't great probably, that's probably the first EMSO focused hearing or even EW focus hearing certainly on a long time, if the first ever. I can't remember going back 27 years. But that was a really healthy thing to have about that.

Ken Miller (28:41):
I want to take a few moments to talk about the JED. The JED is the monthly publication of the Association of Old Crows. In each issue you have feature articles that kind of help direct us to focus on key issues emerging in our community. In the April Edition of the JED, you talk about Air Force electronic warfare and the progress that they've been making. What can you tell our listeners about where they're at and what are some of the key issues they're trying to tackle today?

John Knowles (29:11):
The Air Force is interesting. We chose that topic for the April issue, the US Air Force, because in a way, when you think about the atrophy of electronic warfare following the Cold War, no service took it on the chin as much as the US Air Force. So you think about the retirement of the F-4G Wild Weasel and its replacement with the F-16 CJs, and you go from a two-seater seat aircraft to a single seat where the pilot is also the EWO. So you're relying a lot more on automation and things like that for your [inaudible 00:29:49] seat capability. And then you think about the Air Force retiring the EF-111s and not replacing them. It's not just a material question. And this is what the Air Force inside the EW community knew right away in the '90s but it took a long time for this to play out for the leadership to understand it. It was the loss in expertise in manpower. Because you didn't need the EWO pipeline, Electronic Warfare Operators that you were developing for all those platforms, you now basically didn't develop them.

John Knowles (30:19):
And then at the same time, the Air Force actually took the EWO discipline and created the Combat System Officer, the CSO, which was much more watered down and focused on a lot of other things. A lot of things, frankly, that had to do with the EMS, but they didn't have the specific skills that an EWO would need if they went into a Compass Call squadron or a Rivet Joint squadron or something like that. And so, what's happening was the squadrons themselves were kind of finishing off the EWOS. And that was not what they wanted to do. They did not want to be that kind of a training ground. They needed to take someone and make them really expert in their weapons system, but they didn't want to get into more of the basic training, the basic EWO education that EWO needed. That was some of the inadequacy of creating a CSO.

John Knowles (31:04):
They revamped the syllabus awhile ago and they're now making EWOs again. But the Air Force is now trying to get, basically, I won't say back into the game because they didn't get completely out of the game, but they need to ramp up. They understand that the EMS is a strategic maneuver space and that they need to think about an enterprise EMSO approach. They need to think about doctrine which they updated in 2019. They need to think about training and doing a better job in their training. They need to think about leadership and organization. They've created some new EMS superiority organizations within headquarters Air Force. They're standing up a new wing, the 350th Spectrum Warfare Wing down in Eglin to handle a lot of the reprogramming.

John Knowles (31:49):
The April JED, although we looked at this in September, from our perspective of talking to everyone that we could in the air force about where they wanted to go, interestingly, in just less than a year, they've really gained some traction, and it was worth revisiting. And we have two Air Force EWO, electronic warfare leaders writing this article for us. They wanted to write this to give us an insider's perspective on where they're going. So it's a really good article. And it really does talk about real concrete steps that are taking less focus on where they want to go in terms of strategy. I mean, they've discussed that. But more importantly, kind of implementing that strategy and looking at how they're going about basically creating an EW Renaissance within the Air Force.

Ken Miller (32:35):
And then, in the May Edition that's coming out in a few weeks, you step away from the United States and you look more at our coalition. You look at EMSO from a coalition perspective with NATO.

John Knowles (32:49):
Yes. The May JED is looking at NATO EMSO strategy or EMS strategy and where we go, where NATO goes as an alliance. This gets into big issues like interoperability, things that have always been challenging within an alliance or within a coalition that has different companies and different national approaches to their radios, their radars, their EW systems in a fight where the exchange between a radar and a jammer is happening in milliseconds. Interoperability and things like that, you have to have that figured out upfront. You have to figure out your spectrum plan. You have to figure out everything. And so, as we move to this more EMS focused force, more network centric focused force, the complexity that you need to manage is tremendous.

John Knowles (33:42):
I think that the US, especially in the EMSO area has tended to be the leader within NATO. In the first weeks of a conflict, when they need to take down an adversary's air defense system, they typically have relied mostly on the US aircraft, especially this... Although Europe has some legacy lethal SEAD capabilities and their Tornados, they really didn't have a lot during the Cold War, and since then, in Airborne Electronic Attack in the support jamming and escort jamming walls. They're addressing that now. That began in the 2014, 2016 meetings. They gave themselves a deadline where European members of NATO or the rest of NATO basically would account for about 50% of the AEA Mission or what they would call the SEAD mission by... I can't remember the year, but in the late 2020s. That doesn't need to be just material. That can be databases, that can be training. There's a number of things that go into AEA, but it is an acknowledgement on the part of the alliance that the AEA mission, the SEAD mission needs to spread wider across the alliance.

John Knowles (34:56):
They're doing a number of things in Europe right now. If you look at Saab, at Thales, at Leonardo, at Electronica, they're developing support jammers. Turkey just recently announced that it's pursuing a UAV based airborne electronic attack solution, things like that. So they're getting in there. They're doing things that they need for themselves because a lot of those countries just individually are facing neighbors or facing situations where they need an AEA capability. So you're seeing a lot more evolution across the Alliance in EMSO in that particular area.

John Knowles (35:35):
Another area would probably be active protection systems for ground vehicles. Europeans are definitely focused on that as well because AirLand Battle is such a big part of European strategy. So there's a lot of that activity going. But there's also a long way to go. There's a number of areas in the [inaudible 00:35:53] realm and others that they probably need to also focus on. NATO is trying to do their best, but the alliance has always been kind of hampered by the fact that as Russia emerges, everybody is focused on that threat for the most part. But there has been a long gap, 90 years. And I would say that NATO took the brunt of the so-called peace dividend in terms of defense budgets across the alliance.

Ken Miller (36:17):
Thank you, John, for joining us on the first episode of, From the Crow's Nest. I appreciate your time. It's a great discussion. I look forward to having you on again in the future and on a regular basis.

John Knowles (36:30):
Thanks, Ken. I really enjoyed this and as always look forward to talking with you again, and let's do it again.

Ken Miller (36:36):
Great. Thank you. This concludes this episode of, From the Crow's Nest. I want to thank Northrop Grumman Corporation for sponsoring this episode. Northrop Grumman's multifunction, interoperable solutions create full-spectrum superiority for our warfighters across all domains. Learn more at ngc.com/ew.

Ken Miller (36:54):
You can follow or subscribe to this podcast. We will be back in a couple of weeks with a new episode. You can also subscribe to our upcoming sister podcast, The History of Crows, which will air May 5th. The History of Crows will take you through the global history of electromagnetic warfare and Electromagnetic Spectrum Operations from the earliest scientific discoveries to modern military operations around the world. This podcast will provide you history, insight, and all you need to know about the unique and imperative contributions of EMSO to military operations. Thank you for listening.