Electronic Warefare in Ukraine has Lessons for US Weapons, Navigation

The U.S. is gaining valuable insights about the performance of its technologies amid electronic interference as Ukrainian troops use them on the front lines, according to one official.

Washington and other governments have committed billions of dollars of security aid to Ukraine, including long-range missiles, armored vehicles and secure communication devices.

The jamming and spoofing that blankets fighting in Eastern Europe offers a trial against Russian tools rarely seen in action.

Michael Monteleone, the director of the Army’s Assured Positioning, Navigation and Timing/Space Cross-Functional Team, on May 5 told reporters the conflict is a “huge learning experience for us.”

“The global community has shared a lot of our technology, our weapons systems, our command-and-control systems and others, with the Ukrainians,” he said on the sidelines of the GEOINT conference in Florida.

“You’re seeing that being used in real time, and it is a source of feedback.”

Monteleone’s cross-functional team, expected to shift its focus to so-called all-domain sensing in the coming months, is tasked with improving soldier access to critical sources of situational awareness, including where they are, where they are headed and when they will arrive.

“Even early in the war, we learned what happened when GPS just didn’t exist, and how the Ukrainian soldiers dealt with that, and how the Russian soldiers dealt with that,” Monteleone said.

The lessons gleaned from Ukraine’s fight are making “everybody think about the problem space,” Monteleoene said, “including where our investments truly need to be.”

- Defense News