EW Europe Symposium Keynote Highlights Europe's EMO Challenges

	General Angelo Gervasio

The first day of EW Europe kicked off with a symposium keynote from Lieutenant General Angelo Gervasio, Technical Advisor to the Chief Head of Defence, Italian Armed Forces Joint Staff, who discussed EW lessons from the Russo-Ukrainian War and provided an excellent perspective on the many technical and policy challenges facing Italy (and many other European governments) as they develop new capabilities in Electromagnetic Operations (EMO).

General Gervasio described the significant role that EW has played in the Russo-Ukrainian War. He said that both sides have relied on EW to disrupt communications, satellite navigation systems and drone operations. "Russia has deployed a range of advanced electronic warfare systems to disrupt Ukrainian communications and navigation systems like the R330-Zh Zhitel capable of jamming GPS, the Krasukha jammers that disrupt Ukrainian drones and artillery targeting the Leer-3 that disrupted cell phones and SMS with UAVs [and] the Murmansk jammed long-range communications. These jamming efforts made by Russia have forced Ukrainian drone operators to rely on visual landmarks for navigation as GPS signals are often unreliable due to interference." On the Ukrainian side of the electromagnetic contest, he said, "Ukraine has accelerated the development and deployment of its own electronic warfare systems – for example, the nationwide Pokrova system….With this system they distort satellite signals and mislead the navigation of enemy drones and missiles."

After discussing the role of EW in the Russo-Ukrainian War, General Gervasio covered several technical and policy challenges for EMO. One area was spectrum congestion and government divestment of important spectrum bands. "The complexity of electromagnetic spectrum control grows with the growing complexity of the technology and evolves accordingly," he said. "The growing number of services creates spectrum congestion, which is managed by the adoption of sophisticated techniques like the spread spectrum modulation. Military services need to be harmonized with civilian emerging band and service demand, like the 5G network that interferes with military bands. Also in Italy, we had to give to the civilian authorities portions of our dedicated military band for the 5G service. New communication services, like GPS communication satellite networks, introduce new vulnerabilities, like jamming and deceiving, that need to be properly addressed and confined."

He also addressed the influence that new technologies will have in EMO. "The broad availability of high tech equipment and systems introduce new possibilities for the adversary to modify their defense capabilities and adapt countermeasures. New technologies like quantum computing and artificial intelligence bring new capabilities, but also new threats. They also introduce ethical and legal issues that are not completely clear but need to be addressed in order to ensure that the use of these new technologies doesn't disable the human control of the conflict." 

At the policy level, he also discussed the importance of recognizing the EMS as a warfighting domain. "Finally, the complexity of the modern operations demonstrated that modern warfare is more and more multi-domain. And this is even more true with the introduction of the cyber and space domains which are for their nature shared by all the other three domains – classical three domains. To this regard, the electromagnetic spectrum is a strong candidate to be considered as a new domain of operations. But anyway, it is true that electromagnetic spectrum interconnects the domains and therefore contributes strongly to multi domain operations." – JED Staff