If you speak, you can be heard

I guess this is electronic warfare week at CDRSalamander ... and why not.

Our Navy has a problem; it has gone so long without a serious competitor at sea that we have convinced ourselves that some temporary assumptions we gained after the fall of the Soviet Union have become permanent. We are designing entire systems around assumptions that are fragile and based on peacetime operations and permanent naval supremacy.

At war against any global or regional peer, we need to look carefully at all our assumptions. Most fragile of all are our assumptions that we will have full access to the electromagnetic spectrum, satellite vox and data bandwidth, and the deep sea will be our sanctuary.

The irreplaceable David Larter rolled a little ball of truth a few days ago that would be funny if it were not so serious;

The Navy’s investment in SPY-6 is not without some controversy. Bryan Clark, a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, said while the Navy needs a radar like SPY-6 for ballistic missile defense, the service still must figure out how to perform passive detection to avoid giving away its location to adversaries that will be able to electronically sniff out a big, powerful radar.

Kremer said he wasn’t comfortable discussing concepts of operations surrounding the issue of keeping electronically quiet with SPY-6. But he reiterated that during active electronic attack, the radar would perform.

“You have to be able [to] operate around electronic attack, and on the active side we have a lot of capability to do that,” he said. “But when you get into that other stuff, you’re really starting to talk about concepts of operations, and I don’t think it’s appropriate for a contractor to talk about CONOPS.”

The enemy gets a vote, and they have capabilities too.

We used to practice fighting in EMCON. Hopefully we have some tricks under our sleeves that will let us. No reason to discuss them on this net, but let's hope.