Electronic Warfare

Element of Strategy and Multiplier of Combat Power

Don E. Gordon

• Publisher: Pergamon
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781483222257
• Topic: Technology & Engineering
• Subtopic: Military Science & Technology
• Index: Technology & Engineering

Electronic Warfare: Element of Strategy and Multiplier of Combat Power describes how the application of electronic warfare allowed the Allies to multiply combat power during World War II in order to accomplish strategic objectives. This book is composed of eight chapters that also consider how the United States had best prepare a strategy to fight on the battlefield with electronic warfare. After briefly presenting the history of electric warfare equipment, this book goes on exploring the technologies of cryptology and microwave radar, and their significance in the battle. These topics are followed by a chapter focusing on the accomplishments of the German surface fleet. The succeeding chapters demonstrate the power of German army with their U-boats, and cruisers, Scheer, Lutzow, Hipper, and Prinz Eugen. The final chapter looks into the issues of preparedness, the cost of defense, the role of technology, political and economic appraisal, and the need to multiply combat power quickly and inexpensively.

CHAPTER I

Introduction

Publisher Summary

This chapter presents an introduction to electronic warfare. Electronic warfare includes all actions in the entire electromagnetic spectrum to intercept, analyze, manipulate, or suppress the enemy’s use of the spectrum and to protect friendly use of the spectrum from similar attack by an enemy—to be considered an element of the technological aspect of strategy and an element of the combat power of the United States armed forces. The electromagnetic spectrum includes both the visible and invisible ranges, measured in megahertz, of the spectrum. The use of signals intercepting, locating, identifying, detecting, jamming, disrupting, deceiving, protecting, analyzing, and cryptanalyzing is electronic warfare. Electronic warfare can be used to provide intelligence or combat power such as jamming, disruption, or deception. Previously electronic warfare was separate and distinct from the other aspects of cryptology and used mostly to describe the jamming and deception of radar devices during WW II.

Since WW II, the nature of combat has changed, the modern battlefield is more lethal than ever before. Losses to both sides may well be horrendous, and the United States can for the first time expect to fight outnumbered—outnumbered in tanks, artillery, aircraft, virtually all equipment, ships, and troops. If there is a next war, it may be a nuclear war, it may be a chemical war, but it will certainly be an electronic war. If a unit can be seen on this battlefield, either visually or electronically, it can most likely be hit, hit with first-round fires. Given the lethality of modern weapons, if a unit can be hit, it will most likely be destroyed.¹

To fight and win in this environment, the United States armed forces must depend on superb command and control communication systems to see the battlefield more quickly and clearly than the enemy, and to respond with the best mix of technologically superior weapons at the best time and place against a numerically superior enemy. Unless we are prepared, any future war against a major opponent is likely to find our front-line military electronic systems-including communication systems—severely crippled and totally shut-down for periods of time when they are critically needed. They will be shut-down by the weapons and methods of electronic warfare—Radioelectronic combat as it is referred to by the Soviets. The enemy will attempt to knock out our electronic emitters and sensors with massive jamming, electronic deception, and suppressive fires.²

The United States armed forces are dedicating expensive resources of both men and equipment to fight the electronic battle in the fourth dimension of the modern battlefield. There are billions of Army dollars at stake and similar amounts of money to be spent by the Air Force and Navy. Before these resources are dedicated, we had best insure that we are preparing to fight the right war at the right time. To do this, it is necessary to understand the development of electronic warfare—not in a technical sense—as an element of strategy and multiplier of combat power.

The origin of “electronic warfare” can be traced to the use of eleotronic systems to detect and protect aircraft by both sides in the European Theater early in WW II; however, the use of electronic warfare as an offensive element of ground combat is relatively new. Electronic warfare first emerged as a serious threat to ground force tactical communication systems when the British mounted a jammer in a Lancaster type bomber to be used against Rommel’s Afrika Korps in 1941. This first attempt at airborne jamming of ground forces was successful; it was also short-lived, however, as the Germans spared no effort to destroy the bomber. Today, analyses of the 1973 Mideast War and the Soviet radioelectronic combat capability indicate that electronic warfare will be a decisive element in future battles. Unfortunately, our national security strategy may be preparing to fight the wrong war at the wrong time. A strong case is made within the Department of Defense that the Allies gained a decisive advantage over the enemy during WW II by listening to the enemy-signals intelligence—listening to his secret radio messages. This is referred to as Ultra. We need to understand more than has so far been told if we are to understand that chiefly listening to the enemy on the modern battlefield will not be satisfactory. If we do not want to lose a next war, we had best be prepared to fight the electronic battle and this includes a great deal more than listening in on the electromagnetic spectrum in which that battle will be fought. The United States and NATO must control that electromagnetic spectrum. To do this, we must thoroughly understand the relationship of signals intelligence—cryptology—within electronic warfare and accept that signals intelligence may most likely have to be part of and subordinate to electronic warfare. This is not widely understood or believed today.

During the past forty years, signals intelligence has remained separate and distinct from and predominant to other aspects of electronic warfare. That relationship was suitable for WW II, of proven value again in Korea, it began to break down in Vietnam, and is totally unsuitable for the modern battlefield of which the 1973 Mideast War serves as an example in miniature. That battlefield has become so lethal that commanders on both sides will attempt to disrupt the entire electromagnetic spectrum in order to increase or reduce the lethality of modern weapons dependent upon electromagnetic energy. If the United States is to fight and win on that battlefield, it needs a sound strategic electronic warfare policy, a policy based on war fighting and not entombed in security.

A generation of silence was broken in 1974 with the open publication of first-person and institutional reports describing the effect of electronic warfare and cryptology during WW II. Material pertaining to cryptanalysis is now popularly referred to as Ultra and Magic. Material pertaining to the use of radar and other electronic detection, disruption, and deception techniques is referred to as electronic warfare in those reports. The dichotomy is convenient for the technocrat and the historian but not for the strategist or the commander. Today, all forms of cryptology and manipulation of electromagnetic energy are so thoroughly woven together that one can no longer distinguish one from the other when measuring their cause and effect or when developing strategy. Though cryptanalysis was singularly distinguishable within cryptology and from other forms of electronic warfare during WW II, the advent of modern electromagnetic systems is so complex that there will most likely never again be the opportunity for opposing forces, fighting on a modern battlefield, to read the secret messages of the other to the extent that this was done during WW II by both sides. The ability to manipulate the opposing force by controlling the electromagnetic spectrum has the potential to provide the winning side with an even greater advantage than provided by “code breaking” during WW II.

By modern standards the WW II method of encrypting messages was primitive, but, fortunately for the Allies, it was barely within the human ability of cryptanalysis when aided by calculating machines. Without in any way intending to detract from the contribution of Allied cryptologists during WW II, it must be understood that a great deal of good fortune on the part of the Allies and almost unbelievable naivete on the part of the Germans were as responsible for the Allied success as was cryptologic skill. While the success achieved in actually reading the secret messages of the enemy was important, the use that the Allies made of that information was the crux of the success. Nothing further should be said without acknowledging the great debt owed by the Allies to the Polish cryptologists for their skill, perseverance, and special courage. As is seen in Chapter III, the Polish cryptologists provided the foundation for cryptanalyzing the German Enigma cipher system.

From the time of the Czars, the Russians have demonstrated considerable sophistication and skill in protecting their communications. There is no indication that the Soviets have paid any less attention to the security of their important electronic data during the intervening years.⁸

If there is a next war, a modern battlefield will include not only the customary three dimensions of depth, width, and airspace of previous wars, but an added dimension as well. The fourth dimension, the electromagnetic spectrum, is a mostly invisible medium which will saturate the entire battlefield upon which the use of all electromagnetic devices will depend.⁴

On 15 February 1980, the Associated Press reported that Soviet missile coding may have prevented monitoring by the United States when the Soviet Union test fired a new strategic missile which radioed key information in code. The use of the code was assumed to have prevented the United States from fully monitoring the performance of the missile according to unidentified administration officials. The missile is designed for use in the advanced Soviet Typhoon submarine.⁵

Consider a battlefield so thoroughly saturated with electromagnetic radiation of every type that commanders of fighting forces may well have to transmit continuous wave radio transmissions to bounce off the ionized trails of meteors—perhaps manmade meteors.⁶

It will be a battlefield on which not only the command and control of armies, navies, and air forces and weapons in space will depend upon tens of thousands of emitters conveying messages, digital firing data, imagery, intelligence, logistics, and detection information, but one which may very well be controlled to the extent that it can manipulate human behavior by the manipulation of radio frequency energy or the polarization of the ions contained in the very air we breathe. [Investigation involving the control of aberrant behavior among emotionally disturbed children in a drug-free environment has been continuing for several years outside the military.] Each opposing military force will make every effort to control the full range of the electromagnetic environment by detecting, deceiving, and disrupting the electromagnetic energy used by his foe.

We already know that even the slight polarity emitted by digital watch batteries influences the accuracy of hand-held lensatic compasses by several degrees. Radio-controlled garage doors are mistakenly opened by interference from electrical devices. Consider the potential for an enemy to transmit the right combination of electronic data at the right time to cause all attacking pilots to prematurely eject from their aircraft before firing the first missile or dropping the first bomb. New aircraft ejection systems are controlled by digital systems not manual levers. As another example, consider the potential with the advent of new digital speech security devices used with tactical radios for an enemy to broadcast, at relatively low power, a continuous digital signal which succeeds in locking all radios used by a defending force into the receive-only mode, preventing communication, as the radio attempts unsuccessfully to authenticate the bogus digital security bits. One may presume that no military force could possibly attempt to deliver equipment to its field units before faults similar to those just described are detected in operational and developmental testing.

As one last example, consider a situation in which one adversary saturates the battlefield with positively charged ions while protecting his own forces with negatively charged ion fields. One familiar with the subject may reply that should an adversary do this he would increase the vulnerability of his own forces to chemical weapons because the negative ion field will increase the persistence of chemical droplets and vapor; that this would be too great a risk to assume in order to modify the behavior of the opponent with positive ion fields. That is exactly the point, the battlefield will be manipulated in the fourth dimension in ways never before considered in the Geneva Conventions of Land Warfare, by Clausewitz, Mahan, or Sun Tzu Wu. It isn’t so much that our war colleges do not believe this to be true as that their faculties do not understand it; and not understanding it, they do not make the effort to integrate electronic warfare as an element of strategy and multiplier of combat power.

To fight and win in the electronic environment, on and above both land and sea, the United States must depend upon electronic warfare as a weapon to prevent the enemy from controlling the electromagnetic spectrum. First, we must understand the characteristics of electronic warfare. Electronic equipment has changed greatly during the period between WW I and the present day, but sound fundamental principles governing its use have stood the test of time and remain valid for electromagnetic devices of any sophistication and technology. Decisions that led to strategic errors during WW I predictably caused the same type of errors during WW II and can be expected to cause similar errors in a next war on the modern battlefield.

First, it is necessary to understand those basic fundamental principles. These are explained in succeeding chapters by tracing events during WW II which are illustrative and now unclassified. Secondly, it is necessary to understand that intelligence and electronic warfare must be thoroughly interwoven if either is to serve as an element of strategy and multiplier of combat power. Together they can win battles. The Battle of the Atlantic presents this case clearly. Thirdly, if electronic warfare is indeed to serve as an element of strategy and multiplier of combat power, then examples must be provided of this application. Finally, a definition of electronic warfare which is adaptable to both the technocrat, the strategist, and the commander is required. Our present understanding of the term electronic warfare does not suffice.

CHANGING THE DEFINITION OF ELECTRONIC WARFARE

In the past, electronic warfare has meant mostly jamming, techniques to counter jamming, and electronic deception. Explanations of the most commonly related terms follow:

Cryptology: The science of deriving information from the electromagnetic spectrum. Cryptology includes signals intercepting, identifying, recording, direction finding, fingerprinting of transmitter characteristics, cryptanalysis, and the analysis of electromagnetic...

Table of contents

• Cover image
• Title page
• Table of Contents
• Copyright
• FOREWORD
• Chapter 1: Introduction
• Chapter 2: The Strategy
• Chapter 3: Cryptology
• Chapter 4: Microwave Radar
• Chapter 5: The German Surface Fleet
• Chapter 6: A Unique Trilogy: Tirpitz, Convoy PQ 17, and Raiders
• Chapter 7: U-Boats
• Chapter 8: Can the United States Win the Next War?
• NOTES
• BIBLIOGRAPHY
• INDEX
• ABOUT THE AUTHOR