AFA 2025 — As it supports operations around the globe, the Air Force’s electromagnetic spectrum reprogramming wing has sped up the cycle for testing and deploying different waveforms to stay ahead in the cat-and-mouse game of electronic warfare, according to a key service official.
“What we have learned [as] they’re stressing the system is we have to be able to operate in multiple AORs [areas of operation] and be able to push the information that the warfighter is going to need in all of those AORs to make sure that the warfighter is dialed into what that electromagnetic operating environment is put in,” Col. Larry Fenner, commander of the 350th Spectrum Warfare Wing, told Breaking Defense in an interview. “We have contributed to multiple operations, whether it’s in the Middle East, [Indo-Pacific Command], in Europe, we and we continue to do so, even to this day. It’s nonstop for us.”
The 350th Spectrum Warfare Wing was born in 2021 as a direct result of a landmark study over six years ago known as the Enterprise Capability Collaboration Team that sought to dive deeper into electromagnetic spectrum issues and develop institutional changes. The wing is focused on three missions: rapid reprogramming, target and waveform development, and assessment of Air Force electronic warfare capabilities.
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In electronic warfare and electromagnetic spectrum operations — where adversaries seek to deny access to the spectrum for communications or navigation through jamming — agility and speed are paramount. Once a signal is detected, forces must work to reprogram systems to counter it. During the Cold War that could take weeks to months as the signal had to be sent back to a lab, a fix devised, and then sent back to the field. Today, it needs to happen in days or even hours.
Fenner, who spoke on the sidelines of the annual Air and Space Forces Association conference at National Harbor, Md., said that in the year he’s been in command of the wing, he pushed his airmen to “really move out aggressively on those waveforms and starting to introduce that extra capability into our treasure chest.” Early returns, he said, are promising, as the wing has halved the time for waveform reprogramming in some cases.
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“Not only just building but testing those waveforms and seeing how effective they [are] … hitting the test and bringing them back, refining them and doing further analysis on it,” Fenner said. “We’ve already started moving on that. I’m very pleased in seeing just on the limited lab space and things that we do have that they are moving forward with building us the waveforms that we’re going to need to add to these platforms that are going to be out there on the forward edge.”
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The organic development of waveforms is being conducted by the 850th Spectrum Warfare Group.
They’re approaching it from what are the most important things to the combatant commander and then having the team tear those particular nodes apart to figure out what waveforms they need to develop to get after that particular node. They then go through a testing and evaluation process to determine what level of disruption, degradation or denial they’re going to be able to provide.
If it’s up to a certain level to provide a credible effect — which Fenner decline to describe due to sensitivities — then they start looking into how to get it added into the test and potentially adding either a virtual or modeling construct or going to a range.
Current conflicts, he said, have offered important lessons. One, from Ukraine that can also be applied elsewhere in the world, is the asymmetric capabilities being brought to bear in the spectrum.
“We are definitely paying attention and we are noticing how our adversaries are utilizing the spectrum with low-cost, attritable systems to mitigate some of the higher-end and more exquisite systems,” he said. “We’re taking a look at that, but it’s not just in the Europe. We’re taking a look at the Middle East as well, because we’re seeing how our adversaries, they’re piecing things together that very asymmetric, to give them an advantage that normally we haven’t seen before.
“But we’re incorporating a lot of the technology and the lessons learned that they’re putting out there and we’re learning fast of how they’re utilizing the spectrum with some of these low-cost, commercial, off the shelf capabilities, and figuring out ways to mitigate them,” he said.