DoD puts 'foot on gas pedal' to catch up on electronic warfare.

• Author: Magnuson, Stew

After what one senior official called "25 years of inattention," the Defense Department is pushing ahead to make its defensive and offensive electronic warfare capabilities more robust.

"There is an appreciation on the dependency of our electronic warfare capabilities [and] to make sure that the force--all the platforms--are survivable. I think that appreciation is very real and very substantial," William Conley, deputy director of electronic warfare in the office of the undersecretary of defense for acquisitions, technology and logistics, said during a recent Mitchell Institute speech.

"The foot is fully on the gas pedal" when it comes to catching up on EW capabilities, he said.

Electronic warfare is among the fields that the Pentagon has identified as part of the "third offset"--a collection of battlefield technologies that the U.S. military must master in order to leap ahead of potential adversaries.

In the wake of a Defense Science Board report on the military's electronic warfare shortcomings, Deputy Secretary of Defense Robert O. Work created an electronic warfare executive committee comprising high-level military leaders who meet once per month with the goal of reversing the "inattention."

The July 2015 report, "21st Century Operations in a Complex Electromagnetic Environment," concluded that the United States military was "no longer the overwhelming leader in these technologies." The neglect set in after the end of the Cold War and with the perception that advanced threats had all but disappeared, it said.

"Superiority in electronics is now severely challenged and a substantial set of initiatives is needed to regain the advantage," the report said.

The committee includes the undersecretary of defense for acquisitions, technology and logistics, the vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the services' acquisition executives, Strategic and Cyber Command commanders, the directors of Operational Test and Evaluation and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, and others.

Conley is the point man in the Defense Department's campaign to make electronic warfare more robust.

"We--in my opinion--basically got to where we are in electronic warfare after 25 years of inattention. We will get out of it with 25 years of attention," Conley said.

His office released in the spring a strategy document that looks at the current state of electronic warfare and where it is going. While Defense Department personnel and contractors can access the...