EW Needs $2B More A Year; ‘Major Deficiencies’ Found By Defense Science Board

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http://breakingdefense.com/2014/10/ew-needs-2b-more-a-year-major-deficiencies-found-by-defense-science-board/

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EW Needs $2B More A Year; ‘Major Deficiencies’ Found By Defense Science Board
By Sydney J. Freedberg Jr. on October 08, 2014 at 2:30 PM

WASHINGTON: A classified Defense Science Board study, now on the desk of Deputy Defense Secretary Robert Work, recommends that the Pentagon invest an additional $2 billion a year in electronic warfare and create a high-level executive committee to oversee the four services’ EW spending.

“We need to dig ourselves out of a big hole, because we have seen a significant erosion of our electronic warfare capability over the last two decades,” said Paul Kaminski. It was Kaminski who proposed the study — tentatively titled 21st Century Military Operations in a Complex Electromagnetic Environment — some 18 months ago when he was chairman of the Defense Science Board. A legend in the defense acquisition world, Kaminiski was the Pentagon’s top procurement officer in the 1990s. It’s the current holder of that post, Under Secretary for Acquisition, Logistics, and Technology Frank Kendall, who would co-chair the proposed executive committee alongside the Vice-Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Adm. James “Sandy” Winnefeld.

They’d have a big mess to clean up in electronic warfare, Kaminski made clear this morning at the annual conference of the EW group Association of Old Crows. (Click here for full coverage). In the DSB study, he said, “we found major deficiencies.”

The causes? The US took its eye off the EW ball after the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, especially after 9/11, when it focused on relatively low-tech threats in Afghanistan and Iraq. Outside the war effort, stealth aircraft like the F-22 Raptor and F-35 Joint Strike Fighter sucked up the lion’s share of investment. Meanwhile, our better-funded adversaries — Russia, China, Iran, and others — exploited rapidly advancing technology that can jam, deceive, or hack the sensors, networks, and GPS signals on which our military relied. The increasingly complex environment requires not only renewed investment in traditional EW equipment but the creation of battle management systems to coordinate operations in an increasingly complex electromagnetic environment, he said.