The U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is developing "cognitive electronic warfare (EW) systems" to learn how to jam enemy systems using never-before-seen frequencies and waveforms such as those generated by digitally programmable radars.

These new waveforms are harder to defeat using current EW technologies. A Defense Science Board study in 2013 recommended the Pentagon develop agile and adaptive electronic warfare systems that can detect and counter digitally programmable radars.

Like Us on Facebook

This new subset of EW called "cognitive electronic warfare" is still in its early stages of development but devices that can make it happen might appear on the battlefield by the 2020s.

DARPA began pioneering cognitive EW in 2010. It has two flagship programs to advance research into this field: Behavioral Learning for Adaptive Electronic Warfare or BLADE seeks to use the technology to jam communication systems. The other program, Adaptive Radar Countermeasures, is targeted at defeating radar. Both programs lean heavily on using artificial intelligence (AI) to attain their goals.

The U.S. military's current approach to EW is to study enemy systems for vulnerabilities; figure out ways of disrupting them and then building a playbook filled with different EW tactics, said Yiftach Eisenberg, deputy director of DARPA's microsystems technology office.

"That approach has worked well for us in the past when the adversaries systems were relatively stable," in other words, when it took enemies years to develop analog sensors and communication systems," he said.

In recent years, however, there's been a fundamental shift to systems that are digital and reprogrammable in nature, and can thus adopt different frequencies, signal characteristics and waveforms to avoid being jammed.

"We need to have the ability to respond to new threats, new waveforms that those systems are using that we haven't anticipated," said Eisenberg.

"If things are changing quickly, then we need systems that can respond in similar timeframes to enable us to protect our aircraft."

Eisenberg said all cognitive EW systems share the same process: characterizing a threat, using machine-learning algorithms to exploit an adversary's vulnerability and ensuring the countermeasure worked. 

TagsDefense Advanced Research Projects Agency, DARPA, adaptive electronic warfare, Behavioral Learning for Adaptive Electronic Warfare, Adaptive Radar Countermeasures, Artificial Intelligence, AI, cognitive electronic warfare