Science & Tech
Old-Time Radio: Pentagon’s Electronic-Warfare Gear Is Dated, Experts Say
Lawmakers say more of the EW budget should go to R&D.
Patrick Tucker
By Patrick Tucker
Technology Editor
May 11, 2021 05:53 PM ET
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The U.S. military is spending too little on new electronic warfare gear, putting it behind China and Russia in the race to jam radios, spoof radars, and hide their own emissions, experts and lawmakers said Tuesday.
A decade of past development is bringing new tools online, but too little of the approximately $10 billion per year allocated for electromagnetic warfare is being spent on what comes next, while too much is being spent to maintain even older gear, said Bryan Clark, a senior fellow and director of the Center for Defense Concepts and Technology at the Hudson Institute.
Speaking online during a Hudson Institute event, Clark said the U.S. military “needs to move away from” having “a small number of relatively large systems that are mostly devoted to protecting legacy platforms, so systems for the protection of aircraft that have self-protection jammers or...ships that have counter missile systems that use electromagnetic warfare.”
Timothy Walton, a Hudson colleague of Clark’s and co-author of a new report on EW, said that Chinese electromagnetic warfare tactics have evolved in recent years.
https://www.defenseone.com/technology/2021/05/old-time-radio-pentagons-electronic-warfare-gear-dated-experts-say/173971/
