Commanding the Spectrum: Marking Electromagnetic Warfare Awareness Week
The electromagnetic spectrum (EMS) is invisible, but the fight to control it is very real. Every radio call, drone link, and data feed depends on it. As militaries, regulators, and security forces increasingly recognize the spectrum as a warfighting domain in its own right, Electromagnetic Warfare Awareness Week is a timely reminder that spectrum superiority is no longer optional. It is decisive.
Lose control of the spectrum and the effects are immediate and physical: a convoy loses its communications, an air-defense operator goes blind to an incoming threat, a hostile drone slips through unchallenged. Whoever sees, protects, and controls the spectrum first shapes what happens in every other domain — land, sea, air, and cyber. That is why the world’s most capable militaries now treat spectrum superiority as a precondition for winning, not a supporting act.
The spectrum fight is not theoretical. Across the Baltic and Nordic region, Russian GNSS jamming and spoofing has become a daily occurrence — Estonian regulators report the vast majority of flights experiencing navigation disruption, and Tartu, host of this year’s EW Live, has already seen airline service suspended over GPS interference. A wave of drone incursions that has closed airports from Copenhagen to Vilnius and forced NATO to scramble jets, and it is clear why spectrum superiority has moved to the top of the agenda for militaries and civil authorities alike. This is the environment we all now operate in.
At SPX Communication Technologies, commanding the spectrum has been our mission since 1967. This week, we want to step back from the hardware and explain what electromagnetic warfare actually is, why it matters more than ever, and how awareness translates into real operational advantage.
What Is Electromagnetic Warfare?
Electromagnetic warfare (EW), is the use of the electromagnetic spectrum to sense (ES), protect (EP), and attack (EA). It is traditionally broken into these three pillars:.
Electronic Support (ES): Detects, intercepts, and locates signals to build a picture of what is happening in the electromagnetic environment,
Electronic protection (EP): Keeps your own systems working through interference, whether that interference is deliberate or accidental,
Electronic attack (EA): Disrupts, denies, or degrades an adversary’s use of the EMS. Jamming a hostile drone’s control link is a familiar example.
A related and increasingly common term is Electromagnetic Spectrum Operations (ESMO), which folds EW together with spectrum management and communications. Where EW is often about winning a fight, EMSO is about orchestrating everything that uses the spectrum so that friendly forces, regulators, and civilian systems can all operate without stepping on each other. Communications intelligence (COMINT), sits within this world too, focused specifically on intercepting, understanding and making sense of adversary communications.
The Modern Spectrum Threat Landscape
Two emerging forces have made spectrum awareness more urgent today than ever before; the appearance of drones as an effective force in the battlespace, and EMS congestion.
Small unmanned aerial systems are cheap, widely available, and capable of carrying sensors or payloads. Early use of small, unmanned drones initially relied on commercially available “toys” and flying camera platforms which relied almost entirely on radio frequency links to fly, which makes the spectrum both their lifeline and their vulnerability. While countermeasures have been developed, such as drones controlled via fiber optic lines, control of small, unmanned drones via radio links across the EMS is still widely used. Detecting, tracking, and defeating these systems is now a frontline concern for airports, critical infrastructure, and deployed forces alike. The same logic applies to remote-controlled improvised explosive devices, where controlling the spectrum can mean the difference between a neutralized threat and a detonation.
The second force is congestion. The spectrum is crowded and getting more so. Commercial networks, civilian broadcast, emergency services, and military systems all compete for the same finite resource. In a contested environment, adversaries deliberately add noise and interference on top of that. Operating successfully means seeing through the clutter, understanding what is friendly, what is hostile, and what is simply background, and then acting on that understanding faster than the other side can.
The third demand follows directly from the first two. The same congested, contested environment that hides hostile drones and buries signals in noise also puts your own links at risk. Airborne intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) feeds, command channels, and the data that ties a force together all have to keep flowing through interference that is sometimes deliberate and always unforgiving. Seeing and defeating threats is only half the job. Keeping your own picture connected when the RF environment is working against you is the other half, and it is just as much a spectrum problem.
Capability Spotlight
Awareness is only useful when it connects to capability. The threats above, hostile drones, a congested and contested spectrum, and the constant need to keep your own links alive, map directly onto three areas where we help partners sense, manage, and dominate the EMS: Spectrum Battlespace, Spectrum Monitoring and Management, and Tactical Data Links.
In Spectrum Battlespace, our BLACKTALON Ecosystem anchors an open-architecture approach to Counter-UAS, pairing detection and direction-finding with defeat options including RF jamming. Alongside it sit tactical COMINT and high-frequency direction-finding solutions that locate signals of interest across HF, VHF, UHF, and above.
In Spectrum Monitoring and Management, our fixed, mobile, and transportable stations give regulators and defense customers the ability to monitor, measure, and locate emitters, supporting everything from national frequency regulation to airport interference detection and maritime direction-finding.
In Tactical Data Links, we specialize in moving secure video, audio, and IP data across long ranges and difficult RF conditions over air-to-ground and ground-to-air links, keeping airborne ISR systems connected when the environment works against them.
Awareness in Practice
Technology alone does not create spectrum superiority. People do. That is why education is central to how we work with partners. Through SPX Communication Technologies Trainings and our library of technical white papers, we help operators, regulators, and analysts build the fluency to read the spectrum and make good decisions under pressure. Awareness Week is a natural moment to invest in that fluency, whether you are new to the field or refreshing a seasoned team.
Looking Ahead
The clear direction of travel is toward open architecture and interoperability. Threats evolve quickly, and closed, single-purpose systems struggle to keep pace. Systems that integrate cleanly, share data, and adapt to new missions will define the next decade of spectrum operations.
If you want to see where the field is heading in person, we will be at EW Live 26 in Tartu, Estonia, from 15 to 17 September. It is an excellent venue to talk through real spectrum challenges with our team.
Take the Next Step
Explore our full product range, download the latest issue of our newsletter, The Frequency, or reach out to start a conversation about your spectrum challenges.
