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Electromagnetic spectrum operations touch nearly every part of modern warfare, yet the mission still has no clear owner.
For today’s conversation, Ken Miller sits down with Armada International editor and military historian Dr. Thomas Withington to break down why EMSO remains so hard to organize and prioritize. Together, they discuss whether a dedicated EMSO authority could coordinate the services and cut duplicate procurement, then they walk through a hypothetical GPS-jamming crisis in the Baltic to ask who would lead the military and civilian response if critical infrastructure were hit. They also make the case for distributed, affordable land EW systems, drawing on Ukraine’s real-world testing experience, and ask whether NATO needs an EW version of Red Flag.
We invite you to share your thoughts, questions, or suggestions for future episodes by emailing host Ken Miller at host@fromthecrowsnest.org or by visiting us on our Instagram @fromthecrowsnestpodcast.
To learn more about today’s topics or to stay updated on EMSO and EW developments, visit our homepage.
Creators and Guests
What is From the Crows' Nest?
Featuring 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.
[00:00] KEN MILLER: Welcome to From the Crow's Nest. I'm your host, Ken Miller from the Association of Old Crows. As always, it's good to be here with you, and thanks for listening. In this episode, I am pleased to welcome back to the show friend and colleague Tom Withington. He is with Armada International, and he is the editor, defense commentator, journalist, military historian, all good things. Tom, it's always great to have you on the show. Thanks for joining me once again.
[00:34] THOMAS WITHINGTON: Ken, real pleasure to be here. Looking forward to our chat today. Thanks for the invitation.
[00:39] KEN MILLER: Well, I wanted to have you on because every once in a while, obviously, we cover a range of issues on each episode, but sometimes it's always good to take a step back and see how everything is developing at the 30,000-foot level, not just here in the US, but across the pond over in Europe. A lot of stuff happening in NATO. And I can't think of anyone who is better prepared to have a nice casual conversation about what's wrong with the world and what's right than you. So thank you for the quick turnaround and willingness to get on the show with me today.
[01:10] THOMAS WITHINGTON: And as always, you're too kind. Yes, let's see what fun and games we can tackle over the next half an hour or so.
[01:16] KEN MILLER: So let me get started. Just in terms of context, now, we won't get into the weeds too much because there's not a lot of information out, and we'll probably cover this topic a little bit more in depth in the coming weeks. But here in the US, I want to talk about a recent development and then bring it up to a global perspective. A few weeks ago, the administration here in the US mentioned a new project called Project Meridian. It's a 120-day look into the future of warfare, and what critical technologies we need moving forward, and a lot of, I would say, vague commission points to pay attention to. With that announcement was also a plan to establish an Autonomous Warfare Command, another functional combatant command to go along with Cyber Command and Strategic Command and so forth, in addition to the normal geographic commands.
And the reason why I bring this up to begin with is, once again, when you hear people talk about the future of warfare, critical technologies, what do we need, how do we need to reorganize, so forth and so on, a lot of really interesting catchphrases, good ideas, but there's always a gap in their language, and that has to do with electromagnetic spectrum operations. We are in 2026. You look around the world, you have Russia, Ukraine, you have Iran, you have the Middle East, you have tensions on every continent. And everywhere around the world, we're seeing how critical EMSO is to future warfare. Why, in your estimation, when you hear this type of talk about where we need to go for the future of warfare, is EMSO glaringly absent from the conversation? How does that land on you, and what are your thoughts when you hear those types of future plans?
[03:20] THOMAS WITHINGTON: It's a great question, Ken. Interestingly enough, I know that John Knowles, editor of the Journal of Electromagnetic Dominance, has written about this and talked about this in the past concerning the US need to have, if you like, an electromagnetic spectrum combatant command. So exactly what you've just mentioned in your question. Let's say a division of the DoD that owns that mission, if you like, or owns that space. As we know, calling the spectrum a domain is problematic, but let's talk about it as a maneuver space.
I don't think that's a problem that's unique to the US. I think NATO has got to consider that, and I think NATO members do. You mentioned Russia in your earlier question, and China would be apropos to this as well. Russia has a dedicated electronic warfare command. The Chinese have what used to be called the Strategic Support Force, the name has since changed, but that sort of owns the [strategic]/operational level EMSO mission, if you like, or the electromagnetic space. But we don't have an equivalent in NATO and allied nations.
I think part of the problem is that it reflects, I have to be careful how I word this, but it reflects, I think, to an extent a political perception of the spectrum and of the mission as a whole. And that's not partisan. That goes across the board. But I think when you talk about something like uncrewed weapon systems, uncrewed aerial vehicles, that kind of thing, they're very tangible assets. Politicians, policymakers, people in those communities can understand very easily the damage a drone can do. It's very visceral. You can see it. When you start getting into discussions about the spectrum, sometimes it's a harder conversation to have at the policy level, because you're asking people to imagine a space which we have no ability as humans to sense. So it makes the conversation more difficult.
And one of the things, I know you and I have talked about this in the past, it's something I continue to bang the drum on, is the need for everybody to be spectrum-minded. So this is beyond the military. This is at the commercial level with businesses, civilian populations, politicians, you name it. To understand: if my access to the spectrum is disrupted in some way, could just be GPS jamming or it could be something more serious, how do I then react? By having that conversation, you then start to inculcate this idea in people that this is an area of potential vulnerability, or a scenario where an enemy could make a difference or have an impact.
And I think once you can start that conversation, which we're all trying to do as Crows, for instance, you can then expand that into this conversation about the importance of having an organization that owns this mission. And by owning it, I don't want to say lobby, but it can certainly advocate. It can push the importance of that mission at the policy level to the people who need to know about it, and perform that education function as well. So I think that's one of the things that's slowing this process of having this dedicated command. It's encouraging that the US is looking at that from the autonomous point of view. I think that could be a very useful template as we look towards establishing an EMSO command of some sort, whether it's in the US or NATO, wherever it is, and that work will be very, very instructive. But I think that's where the disconnect comes in at the moment.
[07:12] KEN MILLER: From my perch, it gets frustrating. I've been following this for years. When we were dealing with "is the EMS a warfighting domain" within the context of it being maneuver space, the rationale made sense. The notion was, well, if you make it a domain, you have to organize to it. And if you organize to it, then you create this division between your EMSO operators and the other combatant commands. Because EMS touches everything, everyone has to be responsible for electromagnetic spectrum operations. If you made it its own functional command, if you made it its own domain, then you would remove that responsibility from the other warfighting domains. And people viewed that as risky, because you could end up minimizing its importance by removing it from the responsibility of each of the other warfighting areas.
But when you look at announcements like the Autonomous Warfare Command, or even Cyber Command, other functional commands, these are also warfighting functions that every single geographic warfighting domain has to deal with. So if the rationale for EMSO was carried to other areas, it should produce the same results: hey, we don't want to have a functional command because it removes it from the responsibility of the other geographic domains. So from my perch, it gets frustrating, because they make a case with certain criteria for EMSO, for whatever the reason, for whatever the policy. But then when a new policy opportunity comes up, they take that same rationale and turn it on its head and say, oh no, this is actually what we should be doing.
And you're a military historian, Tom, and I'm sure you can talk a lot about all the recent conflicts where we have seen that the first and foremost criterion is that we have to control the spectrum before we do anything. It makes it hard for me to fathom that in 2026, after all we've seen, especially recently, we still have policymakers who aren't stopping and saying, wait a second, this is the first thing. Because we've talked on the show a lot about how, in the world of spectrum, the vulnerabilities aren't just at the front lines. They reach back into the domestic [arena]. Civilians are just as vulnerable in the EMS as our warfighters. Well, that's the same with cyber. It's the same with autonomous vehicles. So why can't we have consistent criteria to evaluate these advanced capabilities?
[09:46] THOMAS WITHINGTON: [...] EMSO mission amongst the armed forces, so Army, Air Force, Navy, Space Command, obviously in the US, but also in other nations now. But you need to have some kind of coordinating body that sits above that and ensures that those actions are coordinated, ensures that they're joined up and complementary. It probably has a spectrum management function in there as well, and is also responsible for, if you like, the strategic/operational EMSO doctrine. So in the US, for instance, you've got the joint electromagnetic spectrum operations doctrine, a joint publication, but then below it you've got things like FM 3-12, I think it is, which is the US Army's doctrine, all of these kinds of things. So actually, doctrinally, the building blocks are already there.
One of the things we've done in the UK is that we've set up a CEMA command, Cyber and Electromagnetic Activities Command. That's being raised at the moment, and that command's job is that kind of operational/strategic ownership of the mission. So it brings in cyber as well, and space obviously comes into that. But you've still got the ownership of, for instance, the Army's land forces electronic warfare mission at the operational/tactical level.
But I think as you've got more and more connectivity on the battlefield, as you're facing a contested and congested electromagnetic battlespace, and, just as an add-on to that, we've all embraced the multi-domain operations philosophy now, the coordination of that becomes really, really important. And you can't just do that in wartime. That's in peacetime as well. What would happen, for instance, if you have the army and the air force effectively buying very, very similar EW kits? What an EMSO command could do is deconflict that. Is it necessary for both services to duplicate that kit, or could it be procured as a joint capability? I mean, the possibilities are endless.
But I think the key thing is to have somebody who owns that mission at the strategic/operational level, to leave the services free to then decide how they perform that mission at the operational/tactical level. But the need is not going to go away. We've talked about this for a while now, and we're still talking about it. And as you say, you see it in space, cyber, autonomous vehicles, that kind of thing. We're not seeing it come down to EMSO. So we have to ask the question as to why that is, and what we need to do to move things in that direction and start that conversation, so we get the mission ownership that we need, I think.
[12:46] KEN MILLER: Over the last few months, especially going back to the spring of this year, we really began looking a little more closely at the advancements in NATO. And one of the policy proposals that AOC is advancing is a combat support agency. When I was over in Europe back in the late spring, it got some positive response from folks associated with NATO that this is something that could actually be good for the Alliance as well. Do you see any shift happening where NATO is actually in a better position to lead policy development across its member nations? And I'm not talking about being the responsible party, but advocating and influencing how its member countries all align some of their advanced capabilities, particularly in the EMS. Do you see a shift happening, or is it still very much disaggregated, with member nations trying to do their own thing and then coming into the Alliance with different capabilities that need to be deconflicted on the fly?
[13:57] THOMAS WITHINGTON: I think there's a bit of both happening, actually, in a sense. At the NATO level, we've got the various committees, the various NATO working groups that look at electronic warfare, for example, and then we've also got the overarching NATO doctrine, AJP-3.6. Logically, what is supposed to happen is that that overarching doctrine, which is effectively written by those committees, then filters down to the member states, and the member states use that as the template to write their own doctrine. So technically speaking, everybody should sort of be coming from the same place. They've got that doctrine, those are the guidelines, and they write their doctrine from there.
I was writing about this actually this morning for a piece that's being published quite soon. And I was saying you can often look at doctrine in two ways. You can look at it as sheet music, written by a composer, and you follow the sheet music to the letter and follow all of the directions within the music, which would arguably be very much the Russian approach towards EW. Or you can see it as jazz, in which case you've got a set of chords and a set of notes that you follow, but you leave the interpretation up to the player, which I think is more NATO's approach.
I think where things start to get complicated is, okay, so NATO has got those building blocks, and that's great and very, very welcome. But what we're seeing from around the world, you mentioned Ukraine and Iran in your question earlier, is that EW or EMSO is not just about the kit you're bringing to the fight anymore. It is about how quickly you are developing jamming waveforms, how quickly you are iterating industrial development, how good your software developers are, how good you are at identifying capability and getting that into the hands of the spectrum warrior, all of these kinds of things. And that is probably too big for the NATO committees as they stand at the moment. And to be fair, it's not their brief either.
So you have to say, well, we need somebody to do that. We need someone to have that coordinating element. And what form should that take? Now, I'm always loath to introduce new levels of bureaucracy into any apparatus, because it can slow things down. I often say that bureaucracies tend to be developed for a reason. They can take on a life of their own, but there's usually a logical reason why you have them. And so I think another way to sell this into NATO is to look at, if you had, say, a NATO center of excellence for EMSO, which becomes that authority, how much of the heavy lifting does that then pick up from a particular Alliance member? By having this at the NATO level, in Brussels or wherever it is, you free NATO members A, B and C from having to have that themselves in their MoD, with the budget lines and everything else that comes as part of that. So on one hand, you're doing a bit of membership heavy lifting, and you're paying for that through the members' contributions. And the attraction is you improve the coordination, but you also improve the ability to innovate and get innovation into the hands of the warfighter, which we've seen is so essential now in EW. And that's just going to continue.
We saw it, I think, to an extent in Iraq and Afghanistan. People probably forget about this, but when we saw the menace and the scourge of improvised explosive devices, radio-frequency-activated devices, we saw very rapid development of countermeasures. So we've been there before. We've got the building blocks. We just have to remember how to do it again, and then think about what bureaucratic structures we want to help the coordination of this and, again, to own that mission. That's the key thing.
[17:56] KEN MILLER: Interesting, because you mentioned the cat-and-mouse game. You come up with countermeasures to certain capabilities, and things have to go really fast. It seems to me that when we don't have control of the spectrum, we often just think, well, it's chaotic, we don't know what we're doing. But when we don't have control of the spectrum, what we're basically doing is telegraphing, no pun intended, a vulnerability to the adversary that they don't really have to invest in to defeat us or to hold us back. And a lot of times, when you're talking about rogue states or smaller state actors, they don't have the resources to begin with to compete at a capability level. So when we don't have control of the spectrum, what we're telling our adversaries is: just confuse us, because eventually we're going to have blue-on-blue issues. We're going to have IFF issues. We're going to have chaos on our own. We're going to have delays on our own. And it's a lot easier and cheaper and faster to produce chaos than it is to produce capability. So if we don't have control of the spectrum, we're telling the adversary, here's an easy way, maybe not to defeat us, but to certainly frustrate us to the point of prolonging the conflict.
How do we turn the tables on this? Because, like I said, we're in 2026. We've been talking about these issues, you and I, for years at AOC. It's been our life. It's been the association's mission for 65 years. What do we need to do to turn the corner? We have policy proposals, we have leadership, we have all these different things, but it seems that, as a global community, not just AOC, we reach a point and then progress stops and we revert back to the way we've always done it.
[19:52] THOMAS WITHINGTON: I would ask a question at this point regarding a hypothetical situation. We've seen this already happening in Europe, but let's suppose you've got significant GPS jamming occurring in the Baltic, and it's particularly serious, particularly intense. It's causing quite serious disruption. Who do I call in NATO when that's happening? Or who do I call in the respective Baltic states? Who owns the response to that mission? Now, I suspect several agencies may in the respective countries. The spectrum regulator will be one. The military will be another. Possibly ministries of the interior. There will be a number of agencies responsible for mounting a response to that, both, arguably, a military response if necessary, but also a critical national infrastructure response to ensure that the disruption is kept to a minimum. So immediately, with a scenario like that, you see you need to have a central authority somewhere that owns it, that is responsible for it, and that can then coordinate the responses of the respective agencies to that problem.
So I think one way you start to get people aware of this, particularly people outside the EW community, because they will ultimately be the decision-makers on this, is illustrating it with practical hypothetical examples: if you do not have a mechanism to coordinate spectrum activities, civilian and military, in your country, this could be what happens. And that's a conversation I'm really keen to have with people, getting them to think about the unthinkable, because once you do that, you start to realize what you need to do about it. Because we deal in a medium that's invisible, that we can't sense, we have to have concrete examples where we can demonstrate the impact.
Cyber is a good example of this. If you remember Y2K, the concern over what would happen between 1999 and 2000 when the clocks in machines turned over, all kinds of nightmarish scenarios were anticipated. But from what I understand, things pretty much passed off without a hitch, and a lot of that is credited to the fact that people took the risk very, very seriously and planned for it. So that's not in the EMSO domain, but it's a good example of showing people, through a tangible example, the risk and how that risk can be averted. So that's something I'm quite keen to do, to get the conversation going and get awareness increased.
[22:50] KEN MILLER: I think when you look at even just commercial and civilian life, the leaps being taken into smart technologies at home, where we're all connected in ways that we've never been before, there's a new vulnerability out there. We're all nodes in the network. There's an old adage with spiders that you're never more than six feet away from a spider. It's kind of the same way with technology. You're never more than six feet away from something that's connected to the network, some sort of wireless technology that is listening, that is surveilling, doing something. And so there's just that presence of the vulnerability and the threat. It'd be good to have a level of leadership, civilian as well as military, that can really discuss that threat and how to mitigate it without creating too much unnecessary fear that can cause other rash actions. So it takes a level of acumen that I don't think, from a societal standpoint, we're ready for yet.
Over recent years, I've been looking more at what's been happening in Europe and the defense investment that's taking place. From your perspective across the Atlantic, just looking at NATO, not NATO compared to the US or any of its specific member countries, what is keeping you up at night in terms of NATO, and how do you look at the steps NATO has taken in the last year or couple of years to really respond to modern threats or vulnerabilities in modern warfare?
[24:28] THOMAS WITHINGTON: Well, one of the things that keeps me up at night, certainly in the land domain, is the attraction still to buying large, monolithic electronic warfare systems for deployment with the maneuver force. There is a role for those systems. I wouldn't advocate not procuring them. But one of the things I would certainly like to see European NATO land forces doing is more investment in attritable, distributed electronic warfare architectures that you can distribute over large distances, that are not necessarily expensive from a unit perspective. The system may be expensive, but the individual parts aren't, and they use open architectures so that they can be modified, they can be upgraded with ease when they need to be, and they can be replaced easily.
The German government has an [existing] land electronic warfare program that was originally going to be based on a number of vehicles, a bit like the Terrestrial Layer System in the US, or what was, I think, the brigade-and-below system, which I think has now morphed into a more distributed and smaller architecture. So the Germans had a much more conventional, large land vehicle, lots of antennas on it, server racks inside, you can picture the kind of scene. And they're looking again at that program in terms of having something more distributed. So that keeps me awake at night. I'd like to see more investment in that area.
What's frustrating is that there are a lot of people doing this in Europe, and they're doing it really, really well. And on top of that, they're having their kit tested every day in Ukraine and shown that it can perform. So this is a known quantity. But I think that's also part of a wider conversation about needing to move away a bit from the big primes doing this. They may well act as coordinating authorities, but a lot of the innovation is happening in much smaller companies, sometimes companies not even hitherto involved in defense. And that requires a change of mentality by some policymakers.
The other thing that keeps me awake is what you alluded to in your question earlier. One of the things you've got in Europe, which has been good, is a desire to familiarize populations over here with what to think about if there is a war with a large-scale strategic adversary, brackets, Russia, although it's never that upfront. So all very normal stuff, like make sure you've got 72 hours of food, lots of bottled water, all the stuff you would expect. But I would add to that: make sure you're spectrum-minded. Make sure you know that you may well not have access to cell phones, or it may be very limited, you may have very limited data.
As you said, in that lovely phrase you have, you're never more than six feet away from a spider. I must tell friends of mine who are acutely arachnophobic that one. But the thing here is that up until very recently, we lived in a world without connectivity, and we managed. Things were obviously different, but we managed. As I used to like to say to people, D-Day was prepared without a single email ever being sent. And so part of the resilience you need to inculcate in populations is this idea that you will have to fall back on things like paper maps, your landline, all these very quaint technologies, but it's not impossible.
And again, having this conversation, getting the civilian population to think about it, is also an important part of the political education of, listen everybody, you're going to have to think about somebody to own this mission. Who is that going to be? Because the attraction of having the kind of EMSO command, the EMSO authority you're talking about, is that it doesn't need to restrict itself just to the military sphere. It can also play a key role in advising critical national infrastructure. What do you do if spectrum access is compromised or unavailable? And again, this is something where we should probably bring our Ukrainian friends in as well, and say to them, well, listen, you're a developed, industrialized economy. How do you do it? What should we be doing? So that for me is also an important part of this conversation, I think.
[29:09] KEN MILLER: It's interesting, in the war in Ukraine, a lot of the way that Ukraine responds to the conflict going on on their border and really throughout the country is that the battlefield is the test field, it's the test bed. So you can go out and you can just try it. Worst-case scenario, it doesn't work well and you don't do it again. Best-case scenario, it uncovers or reveals some sort of capability that you want to replicate or expand upon. It's a great environment for advancing capability, but it's also not an easy environment to maintain or to share across other NATO countries. Because as we've seen even in Europe, at least from what I've heard, and maybe you can shed some light on this, there are certain companies picking up stakes in one country and moving to another, where it's a lot easier to test in real-world scenarios, if not in Ukraine, something similar.
So how can we take steps to improve the testing and evaluation of these advanced capabilities? You mentioned the Terrestrial Layer System and capabilities like that. Great technologies. Part of the TLS, I think it was the Stryker aspect, and I might be saying too much, but I think the Stryker aspect of TLS was canceled because requirements just kept piling on, and all of a sudden they realized, oh crap, some of these capabilities interfere with each other. So how do we stop that mission creep? How do we test in real-world environments and integrate EMSO earlier, particularly at the NATO level, when we have so many countries bringing their own perspectives and technologies into the fight? It's easy to multiply some of these challenges when you get to the Alliance level. So how can we turn the tide so that it's easier and more effective to train like we fight and move these advanced technologies into the field a lot faster through an Alliance structure?
[31:11] THOMAS WITHINGTON: Well, I can't remember if it was a US Navy officer, I think it was, who, when talking about the Aegis weapon system, had this lovely mantra of "build a little, test a little." So you're continually evaluating what you're doing, what you're building, what you're buying. And I think the other thing is to take as much advantage as possible of existing capability in Europe in terms of testing, and of subjecting your EW kit to the rigors of it. Make the electromagnetic environment as unpleasant as humanly possible for anything you're testing. There is a move towards doing that. There's still work to be done.
One of the things I've been harping on about for years is having an EW equivalent of Red Flag. Your listeners will be familiar with the big exercise the US Air Force sponsors, I think every year, in Nevada, where effectively you fight an air war for, I don't know, is it a week, 14 days, something like that. And people I've spoken to who've been involved in it say it's frighteningly realistic. It's really well done. So could we have a Hertz Flag, let's say, where we're doing something similar, a large-scale EW exercise in an area where you're not going to end up jamming people's TV reception or their mobile phones, which is an understandable concern? The EW Live event in Estonia that happened in September tries to do that, and it does it pretty well. It's effectively an EW conflict fought over a number of days. But we probably need more of that, and we probably need to do it on a much bigger scale. The move is going in the right direction, but we can always do more.
I think part of the problem might be that in Europe we've got a lot of ranges. There's the Polygone range between France and Germany, and there's the Spadeadam range in the UK, in the northwest of England. In both cases, with Polygone and Spadeadam, there are environments where aviators can fly against both real and simulated EM threats. Spadeadam's got things like Spoon Rest radars, all these lovely things, and simulated emitters. The air environment has always been really good on this, and the naval environment is good. They've been really, really good at replicating threats and then flying or fighting against them. In the land domain, I think there's work we can do, and I would like to see similar capability rolled out across Europe and used regularly. Because I think that's the step to ensuring, as you mentioned in your question, that you train as you fight. It starts with things like that. What can we learn from what the air power folks or the Navy folks have done in that regard?
[34:09] KEN MILLER: [Well, Tom,] we've kind of reached the end of our time. At the top of the episode, I mentioned, of course, that you're with Armada, you're the editor there, a defense commentator. To wrap up another fantastic conversation, what are some of the things on your docket for your readers and your audiences that you want to let people know you're working on or thinking about in the coming months?
[34:35] THOMAS WITHINGTON: Well, Ken, thanks for the opportunity to plug some of our wares here. For yourselves, obviously, coming up in a few months, you've got a big show in North America, AOC North America, which will be taking place in December, I believe, just outside Washington, DC.
[34:51] KEN MILLER: It does. It's December 8th to 10th.
[34:54] THOMAS WITHINGTON: December 8th to 10th, there we go. So at Armada we're publishing a supplement that is going to go to that event, and it touches on a few things we've been talking about today: where does cognitive electronic warfare fit into established NATO EW doctrines? How do we ensure doctrine is fit for purpose as far as cognitive approaches to electronic warfare are concerned? Now, a dear friend and colleague, Karen Haigh, has done a lot of work on that with a colleague, Julia Andrusenko, in their fantastic book, Cognitive Electronic Warfare, two editions now. Those books and conversations with Karen got me thinking about this: are our doctrines fit for purpose? And if they're not fit for purpose regarding cognitive EW, what do we need to be doing? So that's something on the horizon that I'm having great fun writing about at the moment.
And then a couple of other things. At Armada, we continue each month with our Beating the System column, which is where we try to share as much open-source intel as we can on opposing EW systems, that kind of thing. And we've got a new column that some of your listeners might be interested in called Absolute Beginners. Let me explain this to everyone, because Absolute Beginners, named after the David Bowie song of 1982 [sic; the song is from 1986], is where developers who have kit, and it can be software, it can be hardware, anything, get to place it in my hands for a finite amount of time to see if an idiot like me can learn how to use it. The reason we started doing this is because there are a lot of companies out there, a lot of organizations, who will say, "Great human-machine interface. This is completely intuitive." And we will see just how good those claims are. We've done one column already, and the first system we tested was very, very easy to use. So, yeah, busy, busy few weeks ahead, and Ken, as you know, the rest of the year will fly past in the blink of an eye. So it's going to be a busy time.
[37:06] KEN MILLER: Yeah, we're just a couple of months away from 2027, and I really cannot wait to get to that year. Well, Tom, that is all the time that we have today. I can't thank you enough for taking time to join me here. I know we're recording this on a Monday morning, and you've already gone through the whole Monday morning blues there, but here on the East Coast we're still dealing with that. So I appreciate you putting up with me on a Monday. Always good to talk with you. I hope I get to see you at the AOC convention here in the US in December. Hope you're planning to be there. If not, I will have to look you up next time I'm over in Europe, especially for AOC Europe. But thank you for taking time to join me on From the Crow's Nest.
[37:49] THOMAS WITHINGTON: It's been an absolute pleasure. I always enjoy our conversations a great deal, as you know, and there's always a glass or two of something waiting for you here in Toulouse, or failing that, at one of the other shows we've got on the horizon. In terms of your Monday morning, it's Monday afternoon now for me, and I'm already three cappuccinos deep. So I'm wired and bouncing around the apartment with abandon, as I'm sure you will be soon as well.
[38:17] KEN MILLER: I think I'm on ounce number 40 of coffee. I've got 52. So we're getting there. But thank you so much for joining me, Tom. Great to have you on the show.
That will conclude this episode of From the Crow's Nest. As always, I want to thank my guest, Tom Withington, for joining me. Always great to sit down and talk with him. Please take a moment to review, share and subscribe to this podcast. We always enjoy hearing from our listeners, so please take a moment to let us know how we're doing. That's it for today. Thanks for listening.