Army’s new, flexible approach to EW could lead to programmatic changes: Official

WASHINGTON — The Army’s recently released request to industry for broad electronic warfare capabilities could reshape ongoing programs and change the way the service outfits units with emerging technology, a service official revealed this week.

In the past, the Army limited itself to some degree, outlining specifications to capabilities for which industry would design bespoke and exquisite solutions. But many of the technologies in electronic warfare, to also include signals intelligence, are software and radio-based, meaning a solution for one capability could have applicability elsewhere, according to Joseph Welch, Program Acquisition Executive for Command and Control (C2)/Counter C2.

Now, Welch told Breaking Defense the Army is trying to take advantage of these technological similarities and populate them across the force, which could have implications for existing programs and capabilities. 

“If we’re hyper specific about what it needs to do, we’re failing to recognize the opportunity and just looking at the capability that exists and trying to think through how would we implement that for spectrum warfare writ large,” he said in an interview on the sidelines of the McAleese Defense Programs Conference 2026. 

Getting away from specific requirements in favor of industry-led solutions to broader problem sets has been a wider push across the Department of Defense.

The Army released what it calls a characteristic of need for electromagnetic spectrum operations in February. That follows other similar documents such as ones for the Army’s sweeping Next Generation Command and Control initiative.

Welch said there were a combination of factors that led to the realization that EW is a similar problem set to NGC2 and necessitated a CoN. He offered the specific example of the Army’s Spectrum Situational Awareness System tool, designed to provide sensing and visualization of what units look like in the electromagnetic spectrum, saying that capability is inherently able to perform other types of EW activity.

“By and large these capabilities, they’re very broad-based, software-defined, radio-type architecture,” he said. “The core box, the capabilities themselves, there’s a lot of similarity there.” 

The Army has struggled to some degree delivering on EW equipment. Russia’s incursion in Ukraine’s Crimea in 2014, served as a wake up moment for the service to modernize its EW enterprise following divestment from the Cold War. However, several efforts — from jammers to planning tools to analyzers — have sputtered, struggled, shifted or have been killed.

The new CoN approach will likely lead to programmatic changes, Welch said, noting he wants to relook programs of record and ensure they’re structured under the framework of the new, more flexible CoN.

While there may be some program adjustments, Welch said it is still too early to tell how it will all shake out as they’re only just now receiving comments back on the RFI. 

“If something is identified and it addresses our problem space and it makes sense, then we have everything we need to be able to move out,” Welch said. “We’ve got the budget in the right lines, described appropriately, at the appropriate level of balance and we have a contracting approach that allows us to move forward without doing a bunch of twists on that to take a year.”