Arizona Daily Star November 02, 2008
Army nears updating electronic-warfare doctrine
KANSAS CITY, Mo. — Legend has it that Pheidippides dashed mile after mountainous mile from Marathon to Athens to announce the Persians' defeat, then promptly dropped dead.
The Greek soldier could have taken an easier route — and perhaps spared himself the deadly strain. Instead, he opted for the steeper path to dodge the enemy and increase the chances that his message, one of victory, would get through.
In some ways, 21st-century commanders are in the same fix as Pheidippides' field marshals in the fifth century B.C. They need to pass messages — now in a world crowded with electronics and electronic snooping — to and from their troops. Like the ancient Greeks, they go out of their way to avoid enemy intercepts.
"We need to be able to talk to each other," said Lt. Col. Fred Harper, one of the officers working on the Army's electronic-warfare issues at Fort Leavenworth in Kansas. "We need to be able to protect our information from an adver-sary. . . . It can get complicated."
Even as the consumer market in communications gadgets exploded, the U.S. Army largely let its electronic-warfare muscles atrophy. It had become so weak, in fact, that Army commanders in Iraq were forced to bring in Navy specialists to make their radios work and to counteract insurgents using garage-door openers and cell phones to trigger roadside bombs.
Now the Army is on the verge of a new electronic-warfare doctrine — drafted at Fort Leavenworth and awaiting approval from base commander Lt. Gen. William Caldwell — recognizing that the Army needs to squeeze its operations into an electromagnetic spectrum crowded with all manner of civilian communications.
That doctrine will be carried out by a new cadre of specialists, perhaps more than 1,500- strong, working in Army units at every level. Those electronic warriors would make sure that troops can radio each other without fear of eavesdropping and that U.S. ground forces can shut down, or listen in on, the chatter of the enemy.
Perhaps most pointedly, they also would work to shut down the remote-control explosives favored by insurgents.
Analysts say that the Army's update is long overdue and that electronic warfare is an ever-trickier business made all the more critical by a digital age in which data can gush in torrents from one wireless, pocket-size device to the next.
Technology has come a long way from Pheidippides' time. Some historians point to the Civil War as the first conflict — by way of the telegraph — when communications could outrun a man on horseback. That profoundly altered the way a commander could shift troops and materials.
Generals learned just as quickly that severed communications — it was common to cut telegraph lines — could bungle the works.
Radio came later and couldn't be cut short so easily. In time, though, people figured out how to intercept transmissions and even jam signals.
Ever since, militaries have engaged in a sort of radio arms race — figuring out ways to scramble and secure their own conversations, to listen to what the enemy is saying, and to erect virtual shields that befuddle an enemy's radar or thwart its ability to send messages.
The U.S. Army long had been keen to triumph in the electromagnetic spectrum. During the Cold War, it invested heavily in the hardware and the know-how to stay on top. When the Berlin Wall fell and the Soviet Union broke into pieces, the threat seemed to evaporate, and the Army let its electronic-warfare capability go to seed.
"We kind of ran out of peer competitors," said Lt. Col. John "Chip" Bircher, deputy director for future electronic warfare at the Army's Combined Arms Center. "Then we had a capability gap."
In fact, the Army has not updated its electronic-warfare doctrine since 1986 — a day when portable telephones were the size of work boots .
Battleground airwaves today verily buzz with signals of all sorts — from push-to-talk radios to information bounced off satellites to microwave transmissions to cell phones.
So when Army forces barreled across the desert of Iraq in 2003, they often found that convoys had trouble getting radios on the same frequencies. When radios did work, transmissions often bled into the frequencies of other units, creating a chaotic cacophony.
Later, American forces often found themselves unable to shut down the remote controls for homemade bombs that the military refers to as improvised explosive devices, or IEDs. So Army generals called on the U.S. Navy and Air Force to loan out its specialists to improve radio communications and find ways to jam bomb triggers.
Part of the reason the Army lost interest in electronic warfare was because it has generally played the game in a more blunt way, said John Pike of Globalsecurity.org.
"The Army hasn't traditionally had much it needed to jam," Pike said. "They find a signal, and they just want to blow up the source."
© Copyright 2008, McClatchy Newspapers
