Mitchell Paper: Strategies to Surge US Expertise in Electronic Warfare

The U.S. won’t keep pace with China and Russia in electronic warfare if it keeps “drip feeding” organizations, according to a new paper from AFA’s Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies. 

While those countries already field “informationized warfare capabilities,” the U.S. military keeps “relearning old lessons,” writes retired Air Force Maj. Gen. Ken Israel, a retired electronic warfare officer, who served as the Air Force’s first program executive for C4ISR (command, control, communications, computers, intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance).

Leaders in electronic warfare, or EW, need a substantial plan—not an “aspirational document” but one that “lays out what to do and by when to achieve spectrum superiority,” Israel writes in “Drip Feeding Improvements in EMSO Will Not Work.”