The Return of the Essential Art: Electronic Warfare and the Lessons of the Russia-Ukraine War

A Post-Cold War Assumption That No Longer HoldsFor three decades, the Alliance operated under a dangerous assumption: that the electromagnetic spectrum was a permissive sanctuary. Lulled into complacency by counter-terrorism campaigns that allowed precision strikes and networked command to go largely unchallenged, we forgot how to fight in the dark. The Russia-Ukraine war has violently corrected that amnesia. Today, electronic warfare is not an enabling function; it is the apex of modern combat power. If a force cannot survive in the spectrum, its sensors are blind, its networks collapse, and its kill chains are severed.The Alliance stands at a critical inflection point. The time for incremental modernization has passed; this short piece is a call to arms to reclaim our operational advantage. The war in Ukraine has proven that the half-life of a technological advantage is measured in days, not decades. If we do not aggressively institutionalize agility across our warfighting commands, we risk entering the next conflict blind, deaf, and disconnected.Russia’s Spectrum Offensive at ScaleRussia entered the war with a deep inventory of EW systems, rooted in Soviet-era investment and mod...