An Acquisitions Process Built for Today's Contested Spectrum Battlefield

Russian jamming cut the effectiveness of precision artillery in Ukraine from 70 to 6 percent in six weeks. Spoofed navigation signals pulled a British tanker off course before Iran seized it in the Strait of Hormuz. Russian electronic warfare targeted Starlink terminals in Ukraine, disrupting the satellite communications Ukrainian forces relied on for battlefield command and control.

For the past four decades of combat operations, American forces could largely assume dominance of the electromagnetic spectrum. Sensors, weapons, and command-and-control networks relied on links designed around relatively stable conditions. However, adversaries have spent the past ten years eroding that dominance. The modern battlefield is now characterized by jamming, spoofing, interception, and electronic attacks, that are increasingly accessible and fast-changing.

The department's default answer to communications risk is redundancy, but redundancy is not a substitute for adaptive resiliency. PACE plans (primary, alternate, contingency, emergency) are necessary, but they provide redundancy rather than the adaptability required for resilience in a contested spectrum environment. In the PACE paradigm, a program office picks a main link, stages two or three fallbacks behind it, and an operator switches over when the primary link fails. The structure is responsible, but rests on an assumption that planners can accurately predict bands an adversary will attack.

Software defined radios create significant new capabilities to update the resilient communications paradigm. For example, a radio whose behavior is governed by software can sense interference on the band it occupies, characterize it through onboard processing, and move to another band or waveform on its own while the mission continues. Requirements for new communications programs across space, tactical, and joint platforms should demand this type of resilience and score bids on demonstrated performance in a contested environment. America’s warfighting enterprise must no longer rely on redundancy alone as a sufficient solution for operations in a contested spectrum battlefield.

This updated acquisition policy would reflect a new paradigm that treats spectrum like a warfighting domain. Recognition of every previous warfighting domain had practical consequences. Air and space each got budgets, career fields, doctrine, and training that assumed contested environments. Acquisitions in these domains were judged on whether they held up against known and unknown adversary capabilities.

The spectrum has not received comparable treatment as a distinct warfighting environment. Exercises rarely jam their own participants hard enough to realistically test capability. Acquisition requirement documents still describe how a system performs when the environment cooperates, and acceptance testing measures that same benign case. Finally, electromagnetic operations are split across services and buried as secondary requirements that enable the system’s primary use. However, as the examples above show, the primary function of a weapon or other system will fail if its RF link fails.

America’s acquisition process for RF systems must change just as our warfighting enterprise should increasingly consider spectrum operations as its own warfighting domain. All acquisition requirements must assume RF interference and product developers must test adaptability as deliberately as they test performance. A communications system should demonstrate that it can operate through a representative jammer, and that it can accept a new waveform, processing technique, frequency plan, or network configuration without restarting the acquisition process. Further, all exercises must judge RF systems by whether they operate through realistic, contested spectrum conditions. Finally, acquisitions programs must buy adaptive capability on commercial timelines rather than waiting a decade for a bespoke program to arrive obsolete.

Ukrainian gunners learned in six weeks what a contested spectrum does to a weapon that assumes an uncontested one. A tanker crew followed a false position into seizure. Electronic warfare eliminated commercial communications capabilities that a broad swath of warfighting operations relied on. To avoid incidents like these in future conflicts, the Pentagon must require every RF-dependent program to be built resilient, from first requirements through operational testing, and updates post-fielding.

American forces cannot wait years to respond to a threat that changes in weeks. Adversaries already treat the spectrum as contested terrain. American systems must treat it the same way. 

John Malsbury is CEO and co-founder of AnySignal.

image: U.S. Army electronic warfare specialists compete in Spectrum Blitz 2026 at the Joint Multinational Readiness Center’s Hohenfels Training Area, Germany, June 24, 2026. The competition tests Soldiers’ ability to detect, locate and exploit enemy electromagnetic emissions while providing electronic warfare support and protection for friendly forces in realistic operational scenarios. (U.S. Army photo by Staff Sgt. Jamie Robinson)