DISPATCHES FROM THE FRONT LINE OF AEROSPACE TECHNOLOGY
TACTICAL COMMUNICATIONS HEAD UNDERSEA
RUSSIA AND CHINA have been rapidly improving their ability to disrupt US military communications during wartime. Now the US Department of Defense is waking up to the problem — and exploring new, harder-to-jam comms systems.
The latest might even be the most innovative so far. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is preparing to test a network of radio relays mounted on sea buoys and connected via hair-thin fiber-optic cable.
If the DARPA system works and the Pentagon chooses to acquire it, there could soon come a time when American warplanes swap data via buoys bobbing on the ocean waves.
The jamming problem has been getting worse in recent years. Russian and Chinese forces have deployed increasingly powerful electronic warfare gear in the air, on the ground and at sea — all aimed at denying the radio frequency, or RF, to the US military.
The Americans are uniquely vulnerable to RF jamming, as many US warfighting concepts rely on the ability of ground forces, aircraft and warships to exchange information via radio networks.
‘We’ve just been assuming that the RF spectrum is a benign environment and…
