The war in Ukraine has exposed a critical front long neglected by Western militaries: electromagnetic warfare (EW). Control over this invisible battlespace, where communications are jammed, drones blinded, and precision weapons thrown off course, can decide the outcome of a conflict. Russia has understood this sooner than NATO, using EW to isolate Ukrainian units, disrupt command networks, and neutralize Western systems. Ukraine has adapted with ingenuity, but it is learning in combat what NATO should have learned in training. After decades focused on counterinsurgency, the Alliance now risks confronting its most capable adversary without mastery of a defining domain of modern warfare.
This is not to say that EW is a new phenomenon. The electromagnetic spectrum (EMS) has been an element of warfare since the early 1900s and the birth of signals intelligence (SIGINT), when the interception of naval radio transmissions helped Imperial Japan to defeat Tsarist Russia in 1905. The EMS was gradually instrumentalised in different ways: via radar and the interception and cracking of Enigma in World War 2, radio broadcast jamming in the Cold War, guidance systems jamming in the Yom Kippur War, and GPS jamming in the Gulf War. But despite periodic discoveries of new and varied ways to use EW, Western militaries deprioritised such technologies in the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, as part of a broader shift away from large-scale, state-on-state warfighting towards counterinsurgency.
Over the last five years, EW has gained renewed prominence as a warfighting domain through its crucial role in recent conflicts, such as the Second Nagorno-Karabakh War, the war in Ukraine, the fighting in Gaza, the Red Sea, and Iran. Modern EW involves more than simple jamming: it can degrade command and control, disrupt GPS and targeting systems, intercept and spoof communications, and safeguard against similar attacks in turn. Mastery of the EMS is now essential for digitalised militaries dependent on sensors, satellites, and networked systems to function effectively under fire.
Unlike the West, post-Soviet Russia did not pivot away from EW in the 1990s and 2000s. It has developed and is continuing to develop some of the most advanced EW capabilities in the world. Today, Russia has over four hundred radar sites spread across its and its allies’ territories (Janes, 2025), and at least fourteen military EW units. It possesses mobile tactical EW equipment, such as the Krasukha-4 and Moscow-1 systems; ground-based, 300-kilometer-range jammers like the Murmansk-BN (theoretically able to limit high-frequency radio communications for most of the theatre); airborne radar jammers like the Divnomorye; surface-to-air missile radar jammers like the helicopter-mounted Mi-8MTPR-1. EW is deeply embedded in Russian military formations and doctrine.
Russia’s favoured strategy in Ukraine is that of using EW to find and isolate Ukrainian positions, before overwhelming them with artillery fire. Russia also uses EW to degrade Ukrainian communications, jam GPS, radars, or subsystems on Ukrainian drones—or indeed, to fully disable them. Since 2022 especially, Ukraine has developed ways to defend itself from Russian EW and to use EW systems offensively—with rapid innovation on both sides in pursuit of windows of advantage.
Russia’s large, mature EW arsenal stands in stark contrast to NATO’s EW capabilities. Under the NATO Integrated Air and Missile Defence Policy, the Alliance has the right to conduct EW operations in peacetime. However, this use would be subject to international law and require political approval. In practice, this limits activity to exercises, simulation, and testing, offering little EW warfighting experience to NATO forces. Russia meanwhile is testing out different tactics and technologies on an active battlefield, learning how to improve their capabilities, and gaining insight into where further investment would lead to the most useful innovations.
NATO’s dependence on the United States (PDF) compounds the problem. The United States provides critical EW capabilities, such as intelligence (ELINT) collection via airborne and space-based assets, threat library data centralisation and management, electronic suppression of enemy air defences (SEAD), and jamming. With the second Trump administration prioritising the war on drugs and the Indo-Pacific theatre, this dependency has become a strategic vulnerability. NATO’s reliance on the United States signals to Russia the comparative weakness of European NATO in this increasingly decisive dimension of warfare, undermining deterrence and increasing the risk that the Kremlin attacks Europe’s defences and tests its resolve in future.
There are signs that this capability gap has started to be understood by some NATO members. In April, NATO and Ukraine established a new EW Coalition to formalise the exchange of equipment, training, and doctrine among thirteen current signatories. The Coalition will go some way towards bridging the knowledge deficit that NATO suffers in EW matters and help Allies gain a better understanding of what sort of technical systems they should be looking to acquire for themselves. But deep EW capability will take time to develop, especially when the specialist skills and experience to make use of that materiel properly are in short supply.
NATO must show that it will be ready and able to fight Russia in the EMS with or without the United States’ equipment, expertise, and participation. To achieve this, European NATO members must invest in EW expertise, materiel, and infrastructure to ensure resilience to U.S. retrenchment or distraction in other theatres.
That means prioritising more ambition on EW in NATO planning and capability targets, building on the new 5 percent GDP target for defence spending. It also involves encouraging more countries to join the EW Coalition with Ukraine and making the systematic integration of the EMS dimension of warfare into NATO and national exercises and wargames mandatory—testing to failure, forcing troops to get used to operating with degraded comms, sensors, or GPS. Additionally, it requires strengthening European supply chains for EW components to reduce external dependencies.
However European NATO chooses to deal with this issue, its response must be fast and visible. The threat of direct conflict with Russia is not abating and Europe cannot afford to lag in the electromagnetic domain. The Alliance needs to demonstrate that, across every domain including the EMS, it is ready and able to fight and win.
– Clara Le Gargasson is a junior analyst and James Black is deputy director of the Defence and Security research group at RAND Europe. Published courtesy of RAND.
