Introduction
As I’ve established in previous works, I am not a Space Force officer nor am I a naval aviator, you know what else I am not? An Electronic Warfare Officer. I come do a bit closer, I’ve held a FCC business license for half a decade, I was a comms guy and by extension more in tune with the electromagnetic domain because of it. I also am borderline obsessed with the electromagnetic domain and have been building my own Electromagnetic Battle Management (EMBM) and ISR tools within it for years before I started building Empyrean Defense.
Lame bonafide’s aside, this passion has translated into software that enables conducting Electromagnetic Spectrum Operations (EMSO) at the lowest deployable levels possible, for both the military, law enforcement, and anyone in the private sector, along legal and regulatory boundaries. Whether you want to take my word for any of it is largely moot, the electromagnetic domain impacts all of us across domain boundaries and in places you would not expect. Like it or not, if you have a radio, an EUD, run a SCADA system, fly in airplanes, or navigate over the waves in a boat, if you carry a phone, or use your own sensors: you are already a participant in the domain.
We can wax poetic about whether to call it Electronic Warfare (EW) or just Signals Intelligence (SIGINT), or perhaps you prefer the mid-2010s “Cyber Electromagnetic Activities” moniker (CEMA), or you just want to know what the hell is EMSO, or Joint EMSO (JEMSO). Not having a JEMSO cell in your unit or at your place of work will not make your Baofeng UV-5R, PRC-163, MPU5, nor your Starlink terminal any less susceptible to electromagnetic effects. Moreso, it certainly won’t help reduce the cross-domain blast radius and risk models we have to contend with. Our adversaries have learned their EMSO doctrine in blood, have novel tradecraft that is hard to counter, and they’re further ahead. Outside of the military? You may as well be left for dead.
I won’t let that happen. In this blog we will do a deep dive across the history that led up to EMSO and JEMSO. We’ll cover all subordinate activities within EMSO, how to carry it out, the various cross-domain effects, and most importantly: what we can do about it. Whether you are running physical security for an energy company, you are the Battalion S6, or you sit in D.C. and come up with the doctrine: there is something here for all of us.
EMSO Overexplained
Electromagnetic Spectrum Operations (EMSO), especially Joint Electromagnetic Spectrum Operations (JEMSO), is a dense topic; and rightfully so - given that the electromagnetic domain interconnects across all our proper warfighting domains. More than that, it also impacts civilian life whether it’s your day-to-day commute or as part of public safety, critical infrastructure, so there is something to learn here for everyone from day laborers to insurers to energy production plant managers.
Moreso, I want to highlight that the electromagnetic domain (or the Electromagnetic Spectrum \[EMS\]) writ large is not just a throw in, especially in the context of Joint All-Domain Operations (JADO). In Air Force Doctrine Publication (AFDP)/Space Force Doctrine Publication (SDP) 3-99, The Department of the Air Force in Joint All-Domain Operations, JADO is described as: “Comprised of air, land, maritime, cyberspace, and space domains, plus the EMS. Actions by the joint force in multiple domains integrated in planning and synchronized in execution, at speed and scale needed to gain advantage and accomplish the mission.”
I take issue with the “plus the EMS” wording. It feels like a throwaway; it is a cross-cutting domain, but it has equal (if not more) importance to all other domains. This goes beyond using jammers and Signals Intelligence assets, because the EMS can and will vastly impact civilian life if a state-aligned actor decided to bring it upon us. That is not to say it will happen, but the results could be disastrous which is why I think this topic is important for all Americans, and our allies and partners abroad. In this section we are going to dig into the history of electronic warfare and the changes and cross-disciplinary changes over the past decades that led us to modern EMSO and JEMSO. You will learn the history, the tradecraft, the doctrinal definitions explained in plain English, and the organizational strucuture and remit required to carry out EMSO and JEMSO.
From EW to EMSO: Why the Name Keeps Changing
On second thought, I am going to wax poetic about all of the name changes. Electronic Warfare (and in some allied or modern contexts, Electromagnetic Warfare) has existed much longer than it became settled doctrine. has existed much longer than it became “settled science” via doctrinal writings on the subject. One could argue that since Samuel Morse’s famous May 24, 1844, Washington-to-Baltimore telegraph message, there were individuals and organizations who wanted to exploit, intercept, or deny this new communications medium. It wasn’t too long after Morse invented the telegraph that the Union Army trained over 1000 telegraphers via the U.S. Military Telegraph Corps and laid tens of thousands of miles of telegraph poles to facilitate faster communications across the battlefield during the American Civil War.
Some of the earliest exploits against the telegraph, the roughest and basest form of Electronic Attack (EA, more on that later) if you would, were straight up destruction of the poles and probing the cables to intercept messages. This cat and mouse game of signals versus electronic warfare continues until this day, and nearly every conflict in between, we’ll cover down on what is doctrinal in the modern era but the Civil War serves as the basis of it all: deny your adversary the ability to communicate, and all other activities to make their life generally miserable - electromagnetically!
When you attempt to find out “when was Electronic Warfare invented?” one of the examples that comes up is from yacht racing, more specifically the 12th America’s Cup race held in 1903 between Cornelius Vanderbilt (replacing J.P. Morgan) and Sir Thomas Lipton. Monopolists and captains of industry aside. It was a battle between newscasters that led to concerted efforts to jam and deny wireless Morse Code transmissions of lesser newscasters by the Associated Press and the Publisher’s Press Association (PPA). It’s extremely fascinating that a lot of these names (or namesakes) are still around today and were indirectly involved in developing maritime electronic attack tradecraft. More details can be found in the blog, World’s First Jamming Transmission by Shortwave Central by Teak Publishing.
However, given that Electronic (or Electromagnetic) Warfare is clearly a military domain, the first official usage of EW in a military context happened during the Russo-Japanese War of 1904, during the (First) Battle of Port Arthur, not to be confused with the 1905 Siege of Port Arthur. The Imperial Japanese Navy got the jump on the Russian forces at Port Arthur and inflicted severe damage in land-attack and surface warfare roles. The Russians, battered as they were, used early electronic attack tradecraft to deny the Japanese Navy the ability to communicate on the radio for the purpose of correcting naval gunfire against them. There are plenty of other pre-Cold War examples to go over. During WWI and WWII there were several occurrences of concerted EW efforts to degrade adversary communications and sensing capabilities.
One of the most famous is the so-called “Battle of the Beams”, one of the first great contests of electronic warfare: a rapid cycle of radio navigation, SIGINT, jamming, and Military Deception (MILDEC) fought over Britain during the early parts of World War Two. German bombers used increasingly accurate radio-beam systems such as Knickebein, X-Gerät, and later Y-Gerät to find targets at night, turning what began as airfield Radio Navigation (RNAV) technology into a long-range bombing aid. British intelligence via the Air Ministry and figures like R. V. Jones, identified the beams, mapped where they crossed, and realized they were guiding Luftwaffe raids onto industrial targets.
The British response quickly moved beyond jamming and into spoofing, causing Luftwaffe crews to believe they were on course while being led away from their targets. Each Luftwaffe improvement triggered a British countermeasure, and each countermeasure forced the Luftwaffe to adapt again. By 1941, the British had largely neutralized the beam systems over the UK, and the German High Command shifted attention eastward before the contest could escalate further. What had been nearly 100 years in the making, the Battle of the Beams established a pattern that still defines EW today: every sensor, signal, and guidance system creates both an advantage and a vulnerability.
The better doctrinal anchor is the late 1960s to the early 1970s, by 1968 specifically, U.S. Army doctrine was already pointing commanders to FM 32-20 for the details of ground-based electronic warfare, and by 1971 Army intelligence doctrine was treating the electromagnetic spectrum as a broad military vulnerability touching radios, radar, electro-optics, surveillance, missile guidance, fuzing, control systems, and navigation aids. The 1975 [FM6-10: Field Artillery Communications](https://FM 6-10) made the point even more directly: “the principles and doctrine of Electronic Warfare are found in FM 32-20.”
In other words, by the Vietnam-to-post-Vietnam doctrinal cycle, EW had moved beyond improvisation and wartime technical tradecraft into formal manuals, staff responsibilities, reporting procedures, and planning assumptions. The later 1980s Intelligence and Electronic Warfare manuals did not invent EW; they reorganized and matured it, tying collection, direction finding, jamming, deception, and electronic protection more tightly to the commander’s intelligence and operations process. That is the bridge from the Battle of the Beams to modern EMSO: the spectrum started as a technical contest, became an EW specialty, then became an operational command problem.
For a deeper look into the subject matter of the period, consider the following archived Field Manuals and other publications:
- As previously mentioned, FM 61-100, 1968, already refers readers to FM 32-20 for “the details of ground-based electronic warfare,” which means EW doctrine was already formal enough to be cited from capstone divisional command-and-control doctrine by 1968.
- FM 30-5, 1971, explicitly states that all frequencies of the electromagnetic spectrum are conducive to EW operations, and says radio, radar, electro-optical systems, battlefield surveillance, missile guidance, fuzing, control systems, and navigational aids can all be affected by EW. It also cites FM 32-20 and FM 32-20A as detailed EW references.
- FM 6-10, 1975, is even cleaner because it says plainly: “The principles and doctrine of Electronic Warfare are found in FM 32-20.” This does point to definitive proof for the claim that EW had become doctrinally hardened by the 1970s.
- FM 100-32 (TEST), 1975, includes an “Electronic Warfare Officer” and “SIGINT Support Element / Electronic Warfare Element” in the tactical operations center structure, and cites FM 32-20, Electronic Warfare as a reference. Even in the mid-70s EW was no longer just a technology or intelligence discipline; it had a staff role and planning function. In many ways this was prescient versus what we have now with EMSO and JEMSO.
- For the 1980s institutional evolution, FM 34-1, 1987 shows EW integrated into Intelligence and Electronic Warfare, including collection and jamming assets at brigade/division support levels, while the FM 34-1 reference list identifies FM 34-40, Electronic Warfare Operations, dated 9 October 1987.
While the doctrine continued to evolve, we were left with the “traditional” take on EW. It was still very much a function at higher headquarters and one that lived across a few different “shops”. EW’s three traditional pillars are Electronic Attack (EA), Electronic Protection (EP), and Electronic Support (ES). Sometimes ES is discussed alongside the older term Electronic Support Measures, or ESM: sensing, intercepting, identifying, locating, and exploiting emissions for immediate operational use, often adjacent to or overlapping with SIGINT. Primarily, EW lived within the intelligence community, as the Vietnam-era 05-series MOS fell under the Army Security Agency (ASA) dedicated to code-breaking, intercepts, and overall degradation of North Vietnamese Army (NVA) and Vietcong guerilla communications.
However, this centralized shop function began to break down as militaries became dependent on radios, radars, GPS, datalinks, satellites, cellular systems, ISR feeds, and networked command-and-control. Throughout the late 1980s and into the 2000s and 2010s, the spectrum was no longer just a place where communication happened. It was where sensing, navigation, targeting, datalink coordination, electronic attack, force protection, and cyber-physical effects converged.
The Army’s 2014 FM 3-38, Cyber Electromagnetic Activities, captured that transition with the term CEMA, defining cyber electromagnetic activities as a unified effort to seize, retain, and exploit advantage in both cyberspace and the electromagnetic spectrum while denying the adversary the same. The instinct was right: cyber and EW could no longer be planned in isolation. Execution was always difficult because cyberspace and the electromagnetic spectrum do not behave the same way. They have different physics, different authorities, different timelines, different collection methods, different ways to assess effects, and different risks.
That is why the doctrinal center of gravity eventually moved toward Electromagnetic Spectrum Operations, or EMSO. In Joint Publication (JP) 3-85: Joint Electromagnetic Spectrum Operations, published in May 2020, the joint force stopped treating the spectrum as merely an enabler and described it as a maneuver space: a place where military forces operate to gain tactical, operational, and strategic advantage. While this rather antiseptic language is a hallmark of unclassified doctrinal publications, it does hint at widening the aperture across all domains and beyond “shops” and “cells” that lived standalone and conducted EW in branch-specific ways. It widened further beyond the CEMA concept of combining cyber and electromagnetic domains, as both of those have wider reaching effects, operational considerations, and risks.
JP 3-85 also replaced older standalone joint publications for Electronic Warfare and Electromagnetic Spectrum Management, making clear that EW and spectrum management could not remain in stove-piped disciplines. The doctrinal shift matters because EMSO is much broader than classic EW. It still includes the three EW pillars (EA, EP, ES), but it also brings in spectrum management, deconfliction, electromagnetic environmental effects, intelligence support, space operations, cyberspace operations, and command-level prioritization. In plain English: the spectrum is no longer just something you use. It is something you fight in, for, and through.
That broader concept becomes Joint Electromagnetic Spectrum Operations, or JEMSO, when it must be coordinated across a joint force. JP 3-85 describes the Joint Electromagnetic Spectrum Operations Cell, or JEMSOC, as the staff element that helps the joint force commander prioritize, integrate, synchronize, and deconflict EMS activity across components, partners, and mission areas. This is where the “everyone’s problem” thesis becomes an organizational reality. The aircraft, the ship, the ground unit, the satellite operator, the cyber planner, the spectrum manager, the radar team, and the EW officer are all touching the same battlespace. Without a joint coordination layer, they can blind, jam, interfere with, or expose each other as easily as they can affect the enemy.
Now in 2026, EMSO is no longer only a concern for strategic theaters, state-on-state conflict, or overseas low-intensity warfare. The same dependencies are visible inside civilian infrastructure: aviation surveillance, GNSS timing, cellular networks, public safety communications, industrial telemetry, maritime navigation, and power-grid operations all rely on spectrum access and trust. Criminal organizations, state proxies, and technically capable non-state actors do not need exquisite military systems to create localized effects; low-cost jammers, spoofers, SDRs, and cyber-enabled RF tooling can still create confusion, denial, or cascading operational risk. Domestically, the United States is not much better prepared for electromagnetic disruption than it is for the full counter-UAS problem. The uncomfortable lesson is that EMSO has escaped the military whiteboard. It is becoming a fixed-site security, public safety, transportation, and critical infrastructure problem.
So, the historical arc is not simply “telegraph to radio to radar to cyber.” It is the expansion of the electromagnetic spectrum from a communications medium into an operational environment. Electronic Warfare gave militaries the language for attack, protection, and support. CEMA tried to reconcile cyber and spectrum effects inside land operations. EMSO elevated the spectrum into an operational maneuver space. JEMSO made it a joint command-and-control problem. That evolution is the real lesson: once every force depends on the spectrum, spectrum superiority stops being a niche technical concern and becomes a prerequisite for decision dominance.
What JP 3-85 Actually Says
JP 3-85 matters because it cleans up a mistake people still make: EMSO is not just a new name for Electronic Warfare. JP 3-85 defines Electromagnetic Spectrum Operations as coordinated military operations to exploit, attack, protect, and manage the electromagnetic operational environment. That phrasing is dense, but the meaning is straightforward.
- “Exploit” means using the spectrum to sense, communicate, navigate, target, collect, and understand the environment.
- “Attack” means denying, degrading, deceiving, disrupting, or destroying an adversary’s use of the spectrum.
- “Protect” means keeping friendly systems functional despite jamming, interference, deception, environmental effects, or adversary action.
- “Manage” means assigning, coordinating, prioritizing, and deconflicting spectrum use, so the joint force does not defeat itself before the enemy gets a vote.
The "classic" EW is still very much a part of EMSO, but it is now a subset of a larger operational framework. Electronic Attack, Electronic Protection, and Electronic Support remain foundational, but EMSO also brings in spectrum management, Electromagnetic Battle Management (EMBM), electromagnetic environmental effects, intelligence support, space operations, cyberspace operations, and command-level prioritization. In plain language, JP 3-85 takes EW out of the specialist corner and places it inside the commander’s operational problem. The “EW shop” still matters, but it cannot be the only place where spectrum decisions are made.
As I mentioned before, the most striking idea in JP 3-85 is that the electromagnetic spectrum is a maneuver space. That does not mean it behaves exactly like land, sea, air, space, or cyberspace. It does not. The EMS is cross-cutting: it touches every Joint All-Domain Operations (JADO) domain without becoming identical to any one of them. The EMS has its own physics: propagation, power, frequency, waveform, antenna geometry, atmospheric effects, terrain masking, line-of-sight, interference, and emission control all matter. But the operational logic is similar. Forces can gain access, lose access, deny access, deceive others, expose themselves, mask themselves, and create windows of advantage. A unit that cannot communicate, navigate, sense, or target is operationally degraded, not just simply inconvenienced.
JP 3-85’s definition of EMS superiority is also worth slowing down on. The choice of words is prescient because it avoids the marketing jargon of “spectrum dominance.” EMS superiority is deliberately bounded as the degree of control in the EMS that permits operations at a given time and place without prohibitive interference. EMS superiority is local, temporal, contested, and mission dependent. You may have it over one objective, at one altitude, on one frequency band, for one phase of an operation, and then lose it minutes later. This is obvious, but when it comes to EMSO, we’re not talking about airfield seizure or Vessel Boarding, Search & Seizure (VBSS) operations, where seizing the objective is often a binary “win or loss”. EMSO is more like maintaining a fragile corridor through a crowded, hostile, and constantly changing environment.
The service doctrine that followed JP 3-85 makes the point even clearer. Air Force Doctrine Publication (AFDP) 3-85: Electromagnetic Spectrum Operations describes EMSO as military actions to exploit, attack, protect, and manage the electromagnetic operational environment, with the goal of achieving EMS superiority in support of information advantage, decision advantage, and joint force objectives. The Air Force implementation ties EMSO into air component planning, spectrum warfare, reprogramming, and operational integration rather than leaving it as a boutique staff function. Space Force doctrine frames EMS access as essential to space operations and JADO, while emphasizing that the spectrum is contested, congested, and constrained.
So, when JP 3-85 says EMSO, it is not merely renaming EW. It is saying the quiet part out loud: every modern force is spectrum-dependent, every spectrum-dependent system is vulnerable, and every commander now has an EMS problem whether they asked for one or not. Joint and coalition forces increasingly rely on shared space-based assets, tactical downlinks, and integration touchpoints: Link 16, SATCOM, tactical MANET radios, and systems such as Wave Relay MPU5 networks. The second you lose EMS superiority in one of those areas, regardless of the effect that caused the degradation; the fighting force is in for a bad day.
This is the cutting edge of sensor-to-shooter integration that JADC2 promises but cannot deliver without EMS superiority. That idea is one of the reasons Empyrean Defense exists. Sensor-to-shooter is not slideware magic; it is a dependency chain. Sensors must detect, classify, and report. Networks must carry the data. Command systems must fuse it. Operators must trust it. Shooters must receive it in time to act. EMSO is what keeps that chain alive. In a hybrid warfare battlespace this context-rich, the force cannot afford to treat spectrum degradation as a technical inconvenience. It is operational friction at best, and decision collapse at worst.
The Organizational Landscape
The hard part about EMSO is not only physics, but also the ownership problem. Everyone uses the spectrum, everyone can interfere with everyone else, and almost nobody wants to be the person who discovers during execution that the jammer, radar, datalink, tactical radio, UAS control link, or ISR feed were all competing for the same operational space. That is why JP 3-85 (and JADC2 writ large) does not treat EMSO as a purely technical function. It is a command-and-control problem.
At the joint level, the practical hub is the Joint Electromagnetic Spectrum Operations Cell, or JEMSOC. The JEMSOC helps the joint force commander plan, integrate, synchronize, and deconflict EMS activities across components and mission areas. In practice, this means the JEMSOC is where spectrum use & frequency protection, electronic attack, and component-level EMS requirements get reconciled before the force creates its own interference problem. One of the key products in that process is the Joint Restricted Frequency List (JRFL), which identifies frequencies that must be protected, guarded, or restricted, so friendly operations are not degraded by friendly action. If EMSO is everyone’s problem, the JEMSOC is one of the places where “everyone” is forced into the same room.
That does not mean the JEMSOC owns every transmitter, sensor, jammer, or datalink. It means it helps coordinate the electromagnetic operating environment for the joint force; they do not remove accountability from a Battalion S6 or a Special Forces Signals Detachment (SIGDET). AFDP 3-85 describes this through the EMS Control Authority (EMSCA), normally delegated by the joint force commander to the J-3, with direct liaison authority approved for the JEMSOC director. That detail matters because JEMSO C2 goes beyond even a J-6 communications issue or a J-2 collection issue. It touches operations, intelligence, communications, fires, cyber, space, aviation, maritime forces, ground maneuver, and coalition integration.
Above the operational level, the Department of War created the EMSO Cross-Functional Team (CFT) in 2019 to attack the broader institutional problem. The EMSO CFT exists because no single service, program office, or staff directorate can solve spectrum superiority by itself. The job of the CFT is to help coordinate EMSO capability development, strategy, planning, and resourcing across the Department. Simply, the CFT is the Pentagon-level forcing function for a problem that has been spread across too many disconnected owners for too long.
At the service level, the picture becomes more specialized. The Air Force’s 350th Spectrum Warfare Wing is one of the clearest examples of EMSO becoming an operational enterprise instead of a boutique EW specialty. Its core missions include rapid reprogramming, target and waveform development, and assessment of Air Force EW capabilities. That matters because modern airborne EW is not static. Threat radars, emitters, waveforms, missile seekers, and electronic orders of battle change. Mission data files and reprogramming pipelines must keep pace, or aircraft are forced to carry stale assumptions into a live fight.
The Army still carries much of this through the CEMA lineage. FM 3-12: Cyberspace Operations and Electromagnetic Warfare remains the key Army doctrinal anchor for cyberspace operations and electronic warfare, and the Army has built planning and management around EW officers, spectrum managers, cyber planners, and tools such as the Electronic Warfare Planning and Management Tool (EWPMT). EWPMT gives commanders, EW officers, and electromagnetic spectrum managers software to plan, coordinate, integrate, and synchronize cyber electromagnetic activities. The next-generation EWPMT-X effort is meant to modernize that architecture and move toward joint electronic warfare and spectrum management capabilities rather than a purely Army planning tool.
The Navy’s organization looks different because the Navy fights from platforms and task forces. Surface combatants carry shipboard EW through the AN/SLQ-32 family and the Surface Electronic Warfare Improvement Program, or SEWIP. SEWIP Block II improved electronic support and situational awareness; Block III adds a much more serious electronic attack capability for surface combatants. In naval aviation, the EA-18G Growler remains the central carrier-based electronic attack aircraft, while legacy EP-3E ARIES II aircraft represented the older land-based SIGINT and Multi-INT reconnaissance side of the maritime EMS fight. On a ship, EMSO is not a separate whiteboard exercise. It is tied into combat systems, emitters, decoys, sensors, datalinks, and the commander’s ability to survive missile attacks.
As United States joint forces continue their Pacific focus in INDOPACOM, the maritime EMSO model becomes even more important. The People’s Republic of China has built an integrated kill web across the People’s Liberation Army Navy (PLAN), People’s Liberation Army Air Force (PLAAF), People’s Liberation Army Rocket Force (PLARF), Strategic Support Force successor organizations, and a growing space and counterspace architecture. From long-range sensing and over-the-horizon radar concepts to dual-use EO/IR and SIGINT satellite constellations, to anti-access/area-denial (A2/AD) fires, the problem is not one emitter, one missile, or one sensor. It is a system-of-systems kill chain.
That is where JEMSO becomes more than a staff function. If the adversary’s kill chain depends on sensing, classifying, tracking, targeting, communicating, and updating weapons in flight, then EMSO is one of the few ways to attack the chain before weapons leave the rail. EMSO-led non-kinetic effects are among the few ways to disrupt left-of-launch kill chains without immediately entering a kinetic exchange, especially in terrestrial and counterspace settings. We have modeled what happens if the PLARF gets their shots off in two Research Artifacts so far, against the Navy and against the Marine Corps, EW effects are high on our recommendation list for both. In both cases, EW and broader EMSO effects sit high on the recommendation list because they attack the connective tissue of the threat system, not just the terminal weapon.
Pivoting away from potential wars, the private sector has no JEMSOC equivalent. In the United States, civilian and commercial spectrum conflicts are handled through regulation, licensing, enforcement, and interagency coordination rather than operational battle management. The FCC is the independent federal regulator for non-federal spectrum use across a vast range of services: commercial wireless, broadcast, satellite, aviation and maritime radio services, public safety, industrial and business land mobile radio, amateur radio, and unlicensed Part 15 devices. NTIA, inside the Department of Commerce, manages federal spectrum use for agencies such as DoD, FAA, NASA, NOAA, DHS, and other federal users, while also advising the President on telecommunications and information policy.
That dual structure works for peacetime allocation, licensing, certification, interference disputes, and federal/non-federal coordination. It is not the same thing as operational deconfliction under adversarial conditions. A port, airport, utility, stadium, refinery, or logistics hub does not have a joint EMSO cell that can dynamically coordinate every SCADA system, radio, LTE/5G site, GNSS receiver, UAS link, public safety network, and interference report in real time.
That gap is why EMSO matters outside the military. The military at least has doctrine, cells, authorities, and a growing toolchain. The civilian world has dependencies, regulators, vendors, and incident response processes. Those are not the same thing. As spectrum threats move from nation-state battlefields into critical infrastructure, public safety, transportation, and fixed-site security, the organizational question becomes brutally practical: who sees the electromagnetic environment, who has authority to act, and who can deconflict the response before interference, spoofing, jamming, or outage becomes a crisis? It took nearly a decade for the United States to begin seriously wrestling with domestic counter-UAS authorities and implementation. The same attention must now be paid to the EW and EMSO side of the problem.
What EMSO Actually Does Across the Joint Force
JP 3-85 does not describe EMSO as tidy pillars, instead it describes EMSO as coordinated military actions to exploit, attack, protect, and manage the electromagnetic environment. That doctrinal phrasing matters because EMSO is broader than classic Electronic Warfare. EW remains inside EMSO, but EMSO also touches cyberspace operations, space operations, intelligence, spectrum management, command and control, fires, maneuver, protection, and information advantage.
For readability, the rest of this section breaks EMSO into the operational functions a non-EW practitioner needs to understand: Electronic Attack, Electronic Support, Electronic Protection, EMS Management and Electromagnetic Battle Management, Emission Control, Cyberspace Operations, Space Operations, and Information and Deception effects.
This is not meant to invent new doctrinal taxonomy (ahem ontology), it is an (opinionated) translation layer. JP 3-85 gives the joint force the formal language: exploit, attack, protect, and manage the electromagnetic environment. This section turns that language into the practical functions that operators will actually see: jamming, sensing, hardening, deconfliction, emission discipline, cyber-spectrum convergence, space dependency, and information effects.
Electronic Attack: Attack the Adversary’s Use of the Spectrum
Electronic Attack (EA) in its purest form is simply making your adversary’s life a living hell in the electromagnetic domain. The older doctrinal works regarding EW that I mentioned in the previous section typically used a series of “D” words to describe how EA works: degrading, denying, disrupting, destroying, and otherwise. That is the issue I have with doctrinal publications, you get a high level, the “Sense” if you will - but hardly ever the “Make Sense”, or the “how.” The major areas that EA works out into regarding tradecraft can be bucketed in the following ways:
Jamming: Deliberate electromagnetic interference against receivers, radars, datalinks, navigation systems, communications systems, or the links between them using a variety of mechanisms (barrage, spot, sweep, responsive jamming).
Spoofing: Deliberate production of electromagnetic signals used to deceive or confuse, or replaying previously captured signals to overwhelm systems without deliberate interference via jamming.
Directed Energy Weapons (DEW): Using offensive energetic weapons to achieve electromagnetic or kinetic effects, typically these include High-Energy Lasers (HELs), High-Powered Microwaves (HPMs), and technically Electromagnetic Pulse (EMP).
Anti-Radiation: Or, anti-radar, using specialized kinetic weapons with seekers and fuzes meant to detect, home on, and attack radar or other RF emitters, including emitters that may attempt to shut down or change behavior once threatened.
Jamming is by far the easiest to understand, but is much more involved in its particular tradecraft, especially in a military systems context. Every military knows that jamming is an easy EA effect to carry out, so within Electronic Protection (EP, more on that in a later section), electromagnetic systems are typically built with electronic protection and electronic counter-countermeasures features to resist jamming, which in turn forces EA operators into a catalog of jamming tradecraft that would make Smuckers blush. Jamming is the mechanism in which you use Radio Frequency (RF) radiation to overpower legitimate use, rendering transceivers unable to send or receive legitimate data, be they radios, radars, or even other jammers; essentially create a “denial-of-service" (DoS) attack vector. Jamming is usually split across two technique families: noise techniques and repeater techniques, they split out into some of the techniques mentioned earlier, this list will not be exhaustive.
Spot jamming is a form of noise jamming technique, where a jammer focuses all its available power on a single frequency, rendering the technique less effective against a transmitter with frequency agility (or, frequency hopping). Radars that work across a large swath of RF energy or radios (voice or data) that use frequency hopping or other passive sensing to avoid “busy” channels can easily counteract the degradation. The counteraction to frequency hopping is using sweep jamming, another noise jamming technique, where frequencies are “swept” or scanned across to continuously degrade a wider swath of bandwidth. A similar technique is barrage jamming where the power of the jammer is instead split across multiple frequencies at the same time, the contraindication here is that your EA operators have less power to dedicate while suppressing multi frequencies simultaneously.
A more advanced repeater technique is Digital Radio Frequency Memory (DRFM), which is intended to confuse a radar or other RF system by capturing, digitizing, modifying, and retransmitting received RF energy. For example, changing the timing, phase, frequency, or amplitude of a radar return can alter what the radar believes it is seeing. That can create false targets, shift apparent range, manipulate apparent velocity, or complicate target tracking. DRFM systems are complex because they must intercept the signal, process it quickly, preserve enough coherence to be believable, and retransmit a manipulated version that the victim receiver accepts as real.
DRFM is the basis for many modern deceptive jamming techniques, especially in airborne and maritime electronic attack suites. It is also the bridge between Electronic Support and Electronic Attack: you first have to sense and characterize the signal before you can convincingly manipulate it.
DRFM can also be used for spoofing, which we already define as the deliberate replaying or manufacture of RF energy that can fool their intended receivers. Spoofing also manifests in civilian contexts where open broadcast standards were designed for safety and visibility rather than adversarial trust. Automatic Dependent Surveillance-Broadcast (ADS-B), Automatic Identification System (AIS), and Open Drone ID (ODID) all broadcast identity, position, or telemetry information in ways that create verification challenges. These systems serve important safety and coordination functions, but they were not originally designed as cryptographically hardened, non-repudiable truth sources. That means receivers and fusion systems should treat them as useful reports, not unquestionable facts.
Spoofing can obviously extend into more proprietary waveforms and standards via DRFM as we covered before, but more broadly can be used to degrade GPS, decoders and sensor fusion systems can pick up on even very advanced standards-based spoofing but spoofing GPS - or more broadly, any Position, Navigation, and Timing (PNT) systems - is harder to manage around given that PNT is also used by EA systems as well as a variety of other RF systems. Instead of injecting false ADS-B packets, adversaries can spoof GPS signals and force aircraft, ships, and SUAS to think they are somewhere they are not. This obviously cascades into a myriad of safety issues, and in the case of SUAS, can induce a forced landing or “return to home”, as well as in other autonomous systems that rely on PNT solely instead of Inertial Navigation Systems (INS).
Next up is DEW, which we already identified as HEL, HPM, and EMP systems and mechanisms. HELs work by concentrating high-powered laser energy on a target long enough to heat, damage, blind, deform, ignite, or structurally weaken a vulnerable component. HPM systems produce microwave energy that can induce soft-kill or hard-kill effects against electronics, sensors, antennas, control systems, and receivers. Compared with lasers, HPM systems are often discussed for wider-area effects against drone swarms, though public performance claims should be treated carefully because range, power, beam shape, shielding, and target orientation all matter. Finally, EMP is typically a byproduct of nuclear detonations but can also be induced by non-nuclear effects, coincidentally HPMs. EMP is a wider-reaching, higher-energy burst of electromagnetic energy that can overwhelm all systems and concerted efforts in developing non-nuclear weaponry for it has been tested for some time.
Finally, anti-radiation finishes off the EA kill chain as a kinetic effector that induces kinetic effects but relies on the electromagnetic environment for both its targeted and terminal guidance. In this case, “anti-radiation” refers to radiators of RF energy and not radiological systems. The most well-known anti-radiation weapon is the AGM-88 Advanced Anti-Radiation Guided Missile (AARGM) series of missiles typically carried by aircraft who participate in Suppression of Enemy Air Defenses (SEAD) and Destruction of Enemy Air Defenses (DEAD) missions but can be used in different roles such as a CAP and Escort missions as well. ARMs are one of the most direct counters because they turn the radar’s own emissions into a targeting source. Counterparts to the AGM-88 series of ARM include the Kh-31P ARM from the Russian Air Force (VKS) and modified People’s Liberation Army Air Force (PLAAF) derivative, the YJ-91.
EW follows its own version of Newton’s Third Law: every electronic attack creates pressure for an electronic protection response. For every jamming, spoofing, directed energy, or anti-radiation mechanism, there is a corresponding effort to harden, hide, hop, authenticate, filter, deceive, or degrade gracefully. That is where Electronic Protection comes in.
Electronic Protection: Keep Your Own Systems Alive
Electronic Protection (EP) is the foil to Electronic Attack. If EA is how you deny, degrade, deceive, disrupt, or destroy the adversary’s use of the spectrum, EP is how you keep the adversary from doing that to you. It is the defensive side of EW, but “defensive” should not be mistaken for passive. EP includes the hardware, waveforms, procedures, training, cryptography, spectrum coordination, and fallback plans that allow friendly forces to keep communicating, sensing, navigating, targeting, and fighting when the electromagnetic environment becomes austere or downright hostile.
The easiest way to understand EP is to go back to the EA mechanisms from the previous section. If the adversary uses spot jamming, EP may involve ensuring the usage of frequency hopping. If the adversary uses barrage jamming, EP may involve spread spectrum techniques, directional antennas, power control, filtering, or shifting to alternate paths. If the adversary tries to deceive a radar with DRFM-based false targets, EP may involve radar signal processing, waveform diversity, sidelobe blanking, adaptive nulling, track validation, or multi-sensor correlation. If the adversary targets GPS or broader PNT, EP may involve M-code receivers, anti-jam antennas, inertial navigation, terrain-aided navigation, visual odometry, timing holdover, or degraded-mode procedures. The point is not that any single technique solves the problem, but that EP is intended to be a layered defense against spectrum failure.
Some EP is built into the system. SINCGARS uses frequency hopping to make tactical voice communications harder to jam or exploit whereas HAVEQUICK was built to protect UHF air communications. Link 16 uses time-division multiple access (TDMA) and frequency-hopping spread spectrum (FHSS) techniques to support resilient tactical datalink operations. Modern military GNSS receivers increasingly rely on M-code and anti-jam antenna designs to improve resistance to jamming and spoofing. Radar systems use techniques such as digital beamforming, low sidelobes, adaptive processing, sidelobe blanking, and waveform agility to make deception and jamming harder. Public descriptions of the AEGIS AN/SPY-6 emphasize its digital architecture and software-controlled RF energy, which is exactly the kind of architecture that makes modern radar more adaptable under contested EMS conditions.
This resilience also extends to civilian and law enforcement systems as well. Digital Mobile Radio (DMR) is a TDMA waveform that can transmit across two time slots or be attached into a digital trunking systems just like Project 25 (P25) radios such as APX8000s to offer resilience against RF degradation. Systems such as the goTenna Pro X VINE and ECHO or Silvus MN-MIMO Mobile Ad-Hoc Network (MANET) data radios can detect spectrum usage and move to other programmed channels to support Low Probability of Intercept (LPI), Low Probability of Detection (LPD), and jamming resistance use cases.
Hardware EP is only half the story; the less glamorous half is procedural EP, and this is where organizations usually fail. Do you have alternate frequencies? Are they coordinated? Do operators know when to switch? Are encryption keys loaded correctly? Are time sources synchronized? Are guard channels monitored? Are emitters using the right power levels? Is there a PACE plan (primary, alternate, contingency, emergency) for communications and navigation? Does the UAS team know what to do when GPS quality degrades? Does the C-UAS team know what happens when the radar picture becomes unreliable? Does the port, airport, or base know which commercial systems could interfere with mission systems during an incident?
This is why EP is not merely a procurement problem. Buying a better radio does not create EP if the comms plan still has one frequency and no fallback. Buying a better GPS receiver does not create EP if every workflow assumes perfect PNT. Buying a better radar does not create EP if nobody baselined the local RF environment, coordinated nearby emitters, or rehearsed what degraded radar performance looks like. The most common EMSO failure is often not a brilliant adversary jammer. It is friendly interference, bad planning, unmanaged emitters, mismatched configurations, or multinational forces stepping on each other because nobody treated the spectrum as an operational environment.
Spectrum fratricide is the embarrassing cousin of Electronic Attack. A friendly jammer can protect one unit while blinding another, whereas a datalink can interfere with a sensor. A contractor radio can step on a range frequency. A ship, aircraft, or ground unit can radiate in a way that degrades somebody else’s receiver. A coalition partner can arrive with equipment that was never integrated into the frequency plan. From the outside, these failures can look like maintenance issues or vendor problems. From an EMSO perspective, they are usually command-and-control failures.
For the non-EW practitioner, the “so what” is straightforward: EP is continuity planning for the spectrum. If your company, site, port, airport, or task force depends on radios, GNSS, cellular, radar, datalinks, Wi-Fi, public safety networks, UAS control links, or industrial wireless, then you already have an EP problem. The only question is whether you have acknowledged it. A real EP plan identifies critical spectrum dependencies, assigns backups, rehearses degraded modes, authenticates users and systems, protects timing, coordinates frequencies, and gives operators simple decision rules for when the environment stops behaving normally.
EP is what keeps “degraded” from becoming “dead.” It is the difference between a jammed radio net and a unit that shifts to its alternate plan. It is the difference between GPS interference and a UAS team that can recover the aircraft. It is the difference between radar degradation and a defender who still has another sensor, another procedure, and another way to make a decision. If EA is how the adversary tries to break your connection to the spectrum, EP is how you refuse to be brittle.
Electronic Support: Exploit the Spectrum for Awareness and Targeting
If Electronic Attack is offense and Electronic Protection is defense, Electronic Support (ES) is the intelligence function that enables both. ES is the detection, interception, identification, location, and analysis of sources of electromagnetic energy for the purpose of immediate threat recognition, targeting, planning, and conduct of future operations. That phrasing is almost directly from JP 3-85, and the key word is immediate. ES exists to give the commander and the operator something they can act on now.
The first thing to get straight is the line between ES and Signals Intelligence (SIGINT), because the sensors are often the same and the confusion is constant. ES is an Electronic Warfare element, full stop; it’s not under an S2 shop (or at least, it should not be). It is commander-directed, operationally focused, and supports immediate tactical decisions: what is transmitting, where is it, what kind of system it is, is it a threat, and what should we do about it right now. SIGINT is intelligence. It falls under Title 50 authorities, is managed by the intelligence community, and produces intelligence products through collection, processing, exploitation, and dissemination cycles that often do not operate at tactical OpTempo. The same antenna, receiver, and signal processor can serve either purpose. The difference is who tasked it, under what authority, and what happens with the output. An ES operator who detects and locates an adversary radar to cue an anti-radiation missile is doing EW. A SIGINT operator who intercepts the same radar waveform to characterize it for a national-level emitter database is doing intelligence work. So, to wit: same signal and physics, but different mission.
That distinction matters because it drives who owns the sensor, who sees the data, and how fast the information moves. ES should flow at the speed of the fight (one could argue must). SIGINT flows at the speed of the intelligence cycle. In practice, the two get tangled because modern systems often do both simultaneously, and the organizational seams between EW and intelligence shops are not always clean. If you have ever watched a unit, try to figure out whether an intercept should go to the S2 or the EW officer first; you have seen this problem in action.
(Of course, with a multi-intelligence and sensor fusion platform like the Decision Dominance Engine they wouldn’t need to worry about it!)
The core ES capabilities are Direction Finding (DF), emitter identification, signal characterization, and Electronic Order of Battle (EOB) development. DF uses a variety of techniques and hardware to achieve the goal, with the most prevalent being Angle of Arrival (AoA) analysis by using antennas and different receivers that are geographically distributed to triangulate a receiver. AoA works by measuring the timing or phase differences at each DF receiver. These differences are processed into angles relative to the DF receivers within the deployed array, in turn deducing the transmitters' origin and direction. AoA receivers are susceptible to multipath effects from RF energy bouncing off structures, the terrain, and can also be sensitive to the array’s geographical distribution - to say nothing of adversarial EA effects on them.
Besides AoA there is also Time Difference of Arrival (TDOA) techniques which conduct multilateration of transmitters by only measuring the time differences between reception at the various arrays. This can be scaled up or down and is useful in Digital Force Protection to detect potential co-travelers or approaching emitters with lower powered Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) or Wi-Fi/802.11 transmissions. TDOA multilateration is one of many techniques we use in the Empyrean Defense DFP module.
Signal characterization, sometimes called Digital Signal Processing (DSP), tells you what it is: frequency, bandwidth, modulation, pulse parameters, waveform fingerprint. In general, DSP is conducted by capturing In-phase and Quadrature components (I/Q) data from a specific transmission and determining bandwidth, modulation, and other characteristics using physics and/or advanced Machine Learning (ML) techniques to measure cyclostationarity, burst rates, hopping rates, and more to figure out the parent waveform, which can in turn help fingerprint and identify the emitter. This points back to the dual-use nature of ES and SIGINT, as this is not only applicable to EMSO or JEMSO but also to Counter-UAS, Foreign Instruments Signals Intelligence (FISINT), and Electronic Intelligence (ELINT) as well.
From DSP, emitter identification matches those characteristics captured by DSP analyses against known systems. This combined with additional analysis such as reverse propagation to measure received power as well as “golden samples” from known allied and foreign communications systems. This emitter identification (and DSP writ large) can be fed back to EA assets to pick better jamming techniques or can be helpful in Counter-UAS or Digital Force Protection use cases to positively identify a UAS or cellular device. Many popular ES systems also make use of advanced ML such as Deep Neural Networks (DNNs), Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs), and specifically trained AI systems in addition to the “golden samples” to facilitate high confidence identification.
Finally, the Electronic Order of Battle (EOB/EOOB) is the cumulative intelligence ES product: the map of who is transmitting what, from where, with what pattern of life. EOB is to the electromagnetic domain what the intelligence preparation of the battlefield is to the ground domain: the foundational picture that enables everything else within EMSO; EA and EP most specifically. Now, the EOB does not necessarily need to be a map; it can also be a well-structured database or other corpus that details the enemy's electronic emitters (radars, radios, fire control systems, etc.) as well as friendly forces.
On the military side, dedicated ES platforms include the EA-18G Growler's AN/ALQ-218 receiver suite, the RC-135 Rivet Joint, the EP-3E ARIES II (legacy, largely retired), and ground-based systems like the Prophet family. Surface combatants integrate ES through SEWIP Block II, which provides improved situational awareness of the ship's electromagnetic environment. The Army's tactical ES capability lives in electronic warfare companies and CEMA cells at the brigade and division level. All of these are multi-million-dollar, exquisite systems operated by trained specialists.
Here is where it gets interesting for everyone else. ES is the most accessible EMSO function for non-EW practitioners, and it is not even close. A $35 RTL-SDR dongle plugged into a laptop running SDR\#, GNU Radio, or Universal Radio Hacker gives you passive spectrum awareness. You can see what is transmitting on your operating frequencies, identify interference sources, baseline your local RF environment, and detect anomalies. You are not doing SIGINT. You are not collecting on an adversary. You are looking at your own electromagnetic environment the same way you would look out a window to check the weather.
Scale that up slightly and you get real capability. KrakenSDR is a 5-channel coherent RTL-SDR array that costs roughly $700 and provides direction-finding capability. It can geolocate emitters using time-difference-of-arrival and phase-based methods, output bearings on a map, and integrate into broader sensor fusion architectures. Empyrean Skywatch is our first-party RTL-SDR integration that feeds wideband spectrum data directly into the Decision Dominance Engine for correlation against other sensor domains. These are not toys. They are operationally useful ES tools at price points that put them within reach of a port authority, an airfield defender, a law enforcement agency, or a private security operation.
On the commercial side, CRFS RFeye sensors provide wideband spectrum monitoring and DF for spectrum regulators, critical infrastructure, and defense customers. ThinkRF offers software-defined wideband receivers. Rohde & Schwarz produces the R&S ESMD and ATOS systems for military-grade tactical ES. Each of these serves a different point on the cost-capability curve, but the principle is the same: if you cannot see the electromagnetic environment, you cannot protect it, you cannot attack it, and you cannot make decisions about it.
The practical implication for the non-EW practitioner is that ES is no longer a gated capability. The physics of radio propagation does not care whether the receiver costs $35 or $35 million. A cheap receiver with a good antenna, placed intelligently, will detect emissions that a $50 million system would also detect. It will not process them as well, it will not DF them as accurately, and it will not fingerprint them as precisely. However, it will tell you that something is there, on that frequency, at that power level, and that it was not there yesterday. For a site security operator, a Counter-UAS team, or an infrastructure defender, that awareness alone changes the conversation from 'we had an unexplained interference event' to 'we detected a new emitter on our operating frequency at bearing 270 and we are investigating.'
ES is the foundation. Without it, EA is shooting blind and EP is guessing what to protect against. Without it, spectrum management is paperwork without ground truth. The force or organization that cannot sense the electromagnetic environment is operating with a blindfold in a domain that everyone else can see.
EMS Management and EMBM: Manage the Environment Before It Manages You
If ES is how you see the electromagnetic environment and EA is how you fight in it, spectrum management is how you keep your own force from defeating itself before the adversary gets a vote (they always get a vote). Spectrum management is the administrative and operational process of planning, coordinating, allocating, assigning, and deconflicting frequency usage across every system that touches the electromagnetic spectrum. On paper it does not sound as sexy or exciting as EA or EP but done right it is what stops your lower echelons from stepping on each other.
At the joint level, the primary deconfliction mechanism is the Joint Restricted Frequency List (JRFL). The JRFL identifies three categories of frequencies: protected (must not be jammed or interfered with under any circumstances), guarded (monitored for specific purposes; interference requires coordination), and taboo (must not be used for transmission). The JRFL is a living document that changes with the operation, the phase, the threat, and the force composition. It is managed through the JEMSOC and represents the baseline agreement between every component, partner, and coalition contributor about who can use what, where, and when.
Getting the JRFL right is harder than it sounds. A joint force in a Pacific scenario might include Navy surface combatants with SPY-6 and SEWIP, Marine Corps expeditionary units with tactical MANETs, Air Force ISR with wideband SATCOM, Army CEMA cells with their own EW and cyber systems, coalition partners with national-specific frequency allocations, and special operations forces with communications plans that cannot be disclosed to the broader coalition. Every one of those elements is transmitting, receiving, sensing, or jamming in the same spectrum. The JRFL is the document that keeps them from stepping on each other. When it fails, the result is spectrum fratricide, and spectrum fratricide looks almost exactly like adversary EA to the operator on the receiving end.
Electromagnetic Battle Management (EMBM) is the operational extension of spectrum management. If spectrum management is planning who gets which frequencies, EMBM is the real-time operational picture of who is using what, where interference is occurring, where EA effects are being applied, and whether the force's electromagnetic posture matches the commander's intent. Think of EMBM as the Common Operational Picture (COP) for the electromagnetic domain, or a friendly-only Electronic Order of Battle. Just as a ground COP shows where friendly and enemy forces are positioned and moving, EMBM shows where friendly and hostile electromagnetic activity is occurring, what systems are radiating, what frequencies are in use, where interference or jamming is present, and how the electromagnetic environment is changing over time.
EMBM-J extends this to the joint level, providing the JTF commander with a fused view of the electromagnetic battlespace across all components, in theory at least. In practice, the tooling for EMBM has lagged behind the doctrine. The Electronic Warfare Planning and Management Tool (EWPMT) is the DoD's primary planning system for electromagnetic environment modeling and deconfliction. EWPMT allows EW officers and spectrum managers to model the RF environment, plan EA and EP operations, coordinate spectrum use, and visualize electromagnetic effects. EWPMT-X is the next-generation effort to modernize this capability, move toward a joint rather than Army-centric architecture, and support the kind of dynamic, real-time EMBM that JP 3-85 envisions.
The gap between where EMBM tooling is and where it needs to be is one of the reasons we built what we built at Empyrean Defense. Our EMSO capability surface is designed to provide operational EMBM at the tactical and operational level: real-time spectrum visualization, emitter tracking, RF propagation modeling, and correlation of electromagnetic activity with tracks and events from other sensor domains. We built it as a statement about where we think the problem is: doctrine is ahead of the tooling. JP 3-85 describes a commander who can see, understand, and act in their electromagnetic environment with the same fidelity as the ground, air, or maritime picture. The current toolchain does not deliver that, and the organizations that need it most, the tactical units and fixed-site operators, are the furthest from having it.
For the private sector, the spectrum management landscape looks different, but the problem is the same. The FCC regulates non-federal spectrum use while NTIA manages the federal spectrum. Licensed users have allocations via business licenses, Special Temporary Authority (STA) licensing, or other types such as OET Experimental licensing. Unlicensed users typically operate under Part 95 (Personal Radio Services), which covers license-by-rule services such as the Family Radio Service (FRS), Citizens Band (CB) Radio, Multi-Use Radio Service (MURS), and Radio Control Radio Service (RCRS).
If digging into the different Parts and Subparts of FCC regulation makes your head spin, the worst part is nobody at a multi-tenant site, a port, an airport, a stadium, or a refinery has a real-time picture of what is actually happening in the spectrum at any given moment. The interference report that takes three days to file and three weeks to investigate is not spectrum management; it is more akin to archaeology. If you have ever been at a facility and wondered why your SCADA telemetry or LoRa comms dropped, you had a storm of encrypted traffic on UHF, or your GPS died during a shift change, the answer is could certainly an unmanaged spectrum conflict that nobody saw coming because nobody was watching.
Emission Control: Control What You Reveal
Emission Control (EMCON) is the deliberate restriction or management of friendly electromagnetic emissions to reduce the probability of detection, exploitation, or adversarial targeting. If EA is attacking the adversary's use of the spectrum and EP is protecting your own use, EMCON is the discipline of not using the spectrum at all when the cost of emitting exceeds the benefit. In some doctrinal publications, it should be noted that EMCON is an explicit component of “passive” EP.
The concept is straightforward; every transmission is a detection opportunity. Every radar pulse, every radio call, every datalink exchange, every ADS-B broadcast, every cell phone registration on a new tower, every GPS ping, every Wi-Fi probe request is an electromagnetic event that an adversary with ES capability can detect, locate, characterize, and potentially target. EMCON accepts the operational cost of reduced communications, reduced active sensing, and reduced situational awareness in exchange for reduced electromagnetic signature.
EMCON is traditionally associated with naval operations because ships at sea are discrete electromagnetic sources in a low-clutter background. A destroyer radiating SPY-6 at full power is detectable at ranges that far exceed the radar's own detection capability against low-observable threats. The physics are straightforward: the radar transmits omnidirectionally (or at least across wide sectors), while the threat only needs to receive. The ES receiver has a significant range advantage over the radar that is illuminating it. This is why surface combatants practice EMCON conditions: full EMCON (all active emissions secured), partial EMCON (specific systems restricted, others allowed), and normal operations (radiate as needed).
EMCON is not just a Navy problem, and this is where modern operations make the concept more important and harder to execute. A ground unit in a contested environment carries an extraordinary number of unintentional emitters. Personal cell phones or unit-issued EUDs register with nearby towers and broadcast IMSI data. Fitness trackers transmit Bluetooth and GPS data. Vehicles can have several emitters, look no further than the Warfighter Information Network-Tactical (WIN-T) Solder Network Extension (SNE) for an example of that. IoT sensors in equipment and critical infrastructure emit easier to identify characteristics using LoRa or otherwise. Tactical radios, even when not transmitting voice, may still broadcast network management traffic such as Soldier Radio Waveform (SRW), or other tactical MANET data radios. Even the walkie-talkies or GMRS radios used in hospitals, oil fields, ports, or airports have identifiable signatures.
A canonical example of identifiable signatures degrading Operational Security (OPSEC) is fitness tracking applications; one notable example is the Strava application. In the 2018 article from The Guardian, Fitness tracking app Strava gives away location of secret US army bases, it details how secretive U.S. and coalition bases in Afghanistan, Syria, and even in the US were able to be fingerprinted based on that data. The scariest part was that the publicly aggregated Position Location Information (PLI) showed patterns of life for individual users, and mapped out housing and routes on these bases, some of which were not publicly disclosed. Despite this being public knowledge, Ukrainian special intelligence services (ostensibly GUR or SBU) were able to use the same data to target and assassinate Stanislav Rzhitsky, a former Russian Navy submarine commander. There are several other incidents and disclosures with this type of public fitness data used for targeting.
While it is also relevant to Digital Force Protection, having GPS-enabled devices such as fitness trackers, or even geolocation data on pictures or social media posts, completely undermine EMCON. For all we know, the units at the Army bases in 2018 practiced perfect EMCON, had their personal cellular devices left in the rear, but all the force protection measures we undermined by wanting to stay in shape and track personal milestones.
For critical infrastructure, fixed-site security, and law enforcement, EMCON translates into emission discipline. If your guard force carries personal cell phones on patrol, an adversary with a $200 wardriving setup and a directional antenna has the means to map patrol timing, routes, and manning levels from the Wi-Fi signature patterns alone. If your facility has IoT sensors that broadcast on predictable schedules, an adversary can baseline your operations by monitoring those emissions. If your executive protection detail uses radios without frequency coordination and emission discipline, you are broadcasting your principal's location and movement pattern.
The operational tension in EMCON is real as shutting down emissions means shutting down capability. A ship in full EMCON cannot use its radar, cannot communicate, cannot datalink, and cannot provide BFT. A ground unit in EMCON loses networked fires, loses tactical chat, and loses medevac coordination. The decision to go to full EMCON is always a tradeoff between signature reduction and operational capability. That tradeoff is the commander's decision, but it can only be an informed decision if the commander understands the electromagnetic signature of the force, the adversary's ES capability, and the operational cost of each emission that gets secured. Without that understanding, EMCON is either never imposed because the cost seems too high or imposed as a blanket policy that degrades the force unnecessarily.
EMCON discipline is the cheapest form of EP, but it does require leadership, policy, training, and the willingness to accept operational friction in exchange for survivability. It is also, for most organizations, the hardest EMSO function to execute because it requires every individual, not just the EW officer or the spectrum manager, to understand that they are an electromagnetic emitter and to act accordingly.
Cyberspace Operations: Where Networks and the Spectrum Collide
The organizational lesson from Cyber Electromagnetic Activities (CEMA) is that the instinct to unify cyber and EMS operations was correct even if the execution could be awkward. The Army quickly learned that cyber operators and EW operators need different training, different tools, different authorities, and different planning timelines, but they absolutely need to be in the same room during planning and execution. JP 3-85 acknowledges this by including Cyberspace Operations (CO) as part of the broader EMSO coordination framework without collapsing them into a single discipline. The spectrum and the network are different things that can share the same wire, or more accurately, the same antenna.
JP 3-85 further acknowledges that the electromagnetic environment is not the same as cyberspace, but highlights that military systems often depend on both, which is true. A tactical mobile ad-hoc network (MANET) such as Soldier Radio Waveform (SRW) or Advanced Networking Wideband Waveform (ANW2) relies on the EMS to communicate radio-to-radio but the link layer protocols and data package transfers are inherently cyberspace-oriented. When you connect to these MANETs, SATCOM, and other networked Battle Management Command (BMC) or Collaborative Engagement Capability (CEC) systems, there is a wider attack surface that can be degraded and exploited in the cyber domain. The impact is wider still when you bring in sensor fusion and Command & Control (C2) suites that are cloud hosted, use Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems - some of them agentic - which cascades into wider attack surface with Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers, skills, and tool calls. At the risk of turning this into a security architecture blog, I will stop there, but our dependence on more data as a first-class citizen in warfighting makes us more vulnerable; this tradeoff is a recurring theme if you have not noticed.
As far as EMSO and JEMSO are concerned with actively assisting CO beyond the planning stages, there are a few examples called out by JP 3-85
- “Exploit capabilities to identify the antenna locations and EM waveforms supporting threat CO.”
- “Attack capabilities to facilitate cyberspace attack objectives by delivering autonomous or interactive executable CO payloads into targets.”
- “Management capabilities to ensure the CO activity is deconflicted with other military EMS activities in the \[Electromagnetic Operating Environment (EMOE)\].”
So, while cyber and electromagnetic domains have different physics, timelines, authorities, collection methods, and risk profiles, they share enough infrastructure and enough attack surface that you cannot plan one without considering the other. The Army's CEMA concept was already tracking that as we have covered in previous sections, and a lot of those learning went into the recommended CO-related reading from JP 3-85: JP 3-12 Cyberspace Operations. The listed operations are focused on this joint-domain continuum, it’s easy to imagine malicious payload deliver that goes along with an Electronic Attack package, such as replaying MANET packets over the air, or otherwise taking out enemy MANET infrastructure to degrade their cyber domain operations.
This relates back to Electronic Protection and Spectrum Management. If your unit or organization is using a Silvus Technologies StreamCaster 4200E on S-Band with Spectrum Dominance licenses, it is already hopping across the Federal S-Band (~2.2-2.4GHz). If you are running Empyrean Defense, ATAK Servers, Lattice, or some other SA/C2/JADC2 platform on it to coordinate and monitor CO’s the last thing you need is your Naval S-Band jammer in a coastal location degrading your mesh while trying to jam enemy S-Band AESA radars. That’s of course both hyper specific and hyperbolic, but, even if the operational space across the joint domains is not directly contiguous, you can still have impacts and cause cascading operational degradation.
The ultimate convergence surface between cyberspace and the EMS is physical. Every wireless network, whether it is Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, cellular, tactical MANET, satellite link, or industrial telemetry, exists simultaneously in cyberspace and in the electromagnetic spectrum. Like the example explained in the previous paragraph, a cyber-attack that traverses a wireless link is an EMS event, and an EA operation that jams a wireless network has cyber effects. An ES intercept of a wireless signal can produce both electromagnetic intelligence and cyber intelligence. The tool may be an SDR, and the target may be a network; the effect may be in both domains.
Software-defined radio has blurred this line further. An IMSI catcher, sometimes called a cell-site simulator or colloquially a Stingray, is a device that impersonates a cellular base station to force nearby phones to connect to it. The device operates in the electromagnetic spectrum (it transmits and receives cellular frequencies). The effect is cyber (it intercepts communications, extracts device identifiers, and can inject data). The intelligence product is both electromagnetic (emitter location, signal characteristics) and cyber (device fingerprints, network metadata, content). Law enforcement, intelligence services, and adversary military forces all use variants of this technology. The regulatory and legal frameworks for it vary wildly by jurisdiction, but the physics do not care about jurisdiction.
The vulnerability runs in the other direction too as many modern EW systems are software defined. Their threat libraries, mission data files, waveform parameters, and operating configurations are software artifacts stored in memory and loaded from removable media or networked repositories. A compromised mission data file in an airborne EW pod could cause the system to misidentify an enemy radar, fail to respond to a known waveform, or apply the wrong countermeasure. A firmware exploit in a ground-based jammer could disable it at the moment it is needed or, worse, cause it to radiate in a way that exposes the friendly force. Cyber vulnerability in EW systems is not theoretical. The 350th Spectrum Warfare Wing exists in part because the reprogramming pipeline, the process of updating threat data and countermeasure logic in EW systems, is a cyber-physical supply chain that must be protected, validated, and delivered at operational tempo.
For the non-military practitioner, the cyber-EMS convergence manifests in ways that are already familiar. Wi-Fi de-authentication attacks are EMS events with cyber effects. Bluetooth-based tracking and exploitation tools operate in the spectrum. Rogue access points create both a cyber threat and an electromagnetic signature. SCADA systems that use wireless telemetry (900 MHz ISM, cellular, satellite) are simultaneously cyber-vulnerable in the Operational Technology (OT) context and EMS-visible. The critical infrastructure operator who compartmentalizes “cybersecurity” from “RF interference” is missing the fact that the attack surface is the same, and the adversary does not respect organizational boundaries.
Space Operations: The Spectrum Dependency Above Everything
I covered the space domain in depth in a previous blog, How the Space Domain Impacts Your Operations, but the EMS nexus deserves its own treatment here because space operations are almost entirely electromagnetic. Every satellite uplink, downlink, inter-satellite link, ground station command, telemetry stream, GPS/PNT signal, remote sensing payload, and every communications relay is an electromagnetic event. Space is a domain, but it operates through the spectrum. It is not like we can run a Transatlantic Telegraph Cable up into Low Earth Orbit, after all.
GPS (GNSS, Baidu, et al) is the most visible example. The Global Positioning System is a constellation of satellites broadcasting timing and positioning signals on L-band frequencies. Every military and civilian system that depends on GPS, and the list is staggeringly long: precision munitions, navigation, Joint Capabilities Release (JCR) blue force trackers, ADS-B, AIS timing, cellular network synchronization, financial transaction timestamping, power grid phase synchronization, is dependent on receiving those L-band signals cleanly. GPS jamming is the single most commonly observed EA effect in the world. It has been documented extensively around Kaliningrad affecting Baltic commercial aviation, in the Eastern Mediterranean near Khmeimim Air Base in Syria, across the Black Sea, and increasingly in the Western Pacific. GPS spoofing, the injection of false positioning signals to deceive receivers, has been documented affecting commercial shipping and aviation.
The military response includes M-code GPS, which provides an encrypted, more jam-resistant signal for military receivers, and anti-jam antenna systems such as the Controlled Reception Pattern Antenna (CRPA) and various null-steering designs. Still, the fundamental vulnerability remains: GPS is a weak signal arriving from 20,200 km altitude. A ground-based or airborne jammer operating at even modest power levels can overwhelm the GPS signal across a wide area. M-code may make jamming effects harder to achieve but does not make it impossible. The civilian infrastructure that depends on GPS timing, and that infrastructure is far more extensive than most people realize, has essentially no protection.
Beyond GPS, SATCOM links are EMS-dependent and EMS-vulnerable. Ground-based jammers can target satellite uplinks to disrupt command and control, ISR dissemination, or communications. Russia's R-330Zh Zhitel specifically targets SATCOM uplinks as part of its tactical EW mission. Space-based transponders can be saturated by directing enough power at the receiving antenna. The Starlink constellation has demonstrated meaningful resilience against jamming through its use of Ku/Ka-band frequencies, phased array beam steering, frequency hopping, and rapid software updates, but Starlink terminals are still EMS emitters that can be detected and geolocated by adversary ES. Every Starlink terminal on a Ukrainian front-line position is simultaneously a communications asset and an electromagnetic signature.
Where this also merges back into the cyber domain are when it comes to ground stations. These are fixed pieces of infrastructure with knowable uplinks and downlinks that can be disrupted or degraded, which opens both an EA target that achieves a counterspace effect. Degrading the ground station can prevent valuable SIGINT, ISR, and other data from being provided back to the joint force, which nullifies the advantage of space-based sensors. Likewise, this degrades the capability to push software or firmware updates, remotely control specialized space vehicles capable of kinetic counterspace or Rendezvous & Proximity Operations (CPOs), and otherwise. The cyber angle uses EMSO to find the target to potentially deliver packages, in our space blog we talked through the scant few events where cyber effects were used to impact the space domain, which inherently also has an EMSO angle.
The space weather dimension adds natural electromagnetic disruption to the picture. Coronal mass ejections and geomagnetic storms degrade HF propagation, induce errors in satellite electronics, expand the upper atmosphere to increase drag on LEO satellites, and can cause GPS accuracy degradation. From an EMSO perspective, a strong geomagnetic storm produces effects that are operationally indistinguishable from adversary EA: degraded comms, degraded navigation, degraded sensing. The source is different, but the planning response should be the same.
Ground-based directed energy weapons represent the cross-domain EMS threat from ground to space. Russia's Peresevet system is a ground-based high-energy laser assessed to be capable of dazzling satellite optical sensors from ground stations. This is an Electronic Attack conducted from the ground domain against space-based sensors, using directed electromagnetic energy. The targeting information for Peresevet comes from the same Space Situational Awareness (SSA) and Space Domain Awareness (SDA) apparatus that tracks every other object in orbit. The EMS is the medium, the weapon, and the vulnerability all at once.
For those who want the deeper treatment on SSA, SDA, TLEs, SGP4, orbital mechanics, and the space domain writ large, I covered all of that in the companion piece to this blog. The point here is narrower: space is not a separate problem from EMSO. It is an EMS-dependent domain whose every function rides on the spectrum. Losing EMS access in the space domain does not just affect space operators. It cascades into every domain that depends on space-based services, which in 2026 is every domain.
How the Electromagnetic Domain Manifests Across Other Domains
Every domain depends on the electromagnetic spectrum in some way. That sounds like a slogan until you start listing the dependencies: Radar, MASINT and SIGINT sensors, electronic warfare, combat networks, SCADA systems, cellular devices, satellite communications, and more. Even many cyber and information operations depend on spectrum access somewhere in the chain.
That is why EMSO is the cross-domain connective tissue and not just a boutique technical discipline. When the EMS is available, trusted, and protected, commanders and operational leaders can sense, decide, communicate, navigate, and (in case of the military) strike. When it is degraded, spoofed, jammed, mismanaged, or exposed, every other domain inherits the damage. The air picture becomes less reliable, ground units lose coordination, maritime forces lose track quality, space systems lose links, cyber operations lose access paths, and information operations gain or lose credibility based on what the sensors and networks appear to show.
The domain that controls the spectrum does not automatically control the entire fight, but it controls the conditions under which modern forces fight, and that civilian organizations must operate under. EMS superiority does not make you invincible, but it does give you enough freedom of action to operate without prohibitive interference at a given time and place. Lose that freedom of action, and every “joint,” “networked,” “sensor-to-shooter,” or “all-domain” concept starts to break down.
Cyber and space are already covered above as EMSO-linked mission areas in JP 3-85; this section focuses instead on the operational domains where spectrum degradation becomes immediately visible to commanders, operators, and infrastructure defenders.
Air Domain: Airpower Is an EMS Dependency
The air domain may be the easiest place to see why EMSO matters, because nearly every modern airpower function depends on the electromagnetic spectrum. Every aircraft from a Cessna or a Piper to modern combat jets relies on radios and datalinks of some form to communicate and use certain navigational aids. Combat aircraft rely on radars to detect and track, and Identity Friend-or-Fore (IFF) systems to reduce fratricide risk. Mission systems and electronic warfare suites also rely on the EMS, as does navigational aids including terrain references, collaboration systems, and of course GNSS/PNT. Even the munitions on combat aircraft rely on the spectrum for weapons release, midcourse guidance, terminal guidance and correction depending on if they’re a guided missile or glide-path munition.
Suppression and Destruction of Enemy Air Defenses - SEAD and DEAD, respectively - are fundamentally EMSO missions. Beyond the interceptor Transport, Erector, and Launch (TEL), nearly every Integrated Air Defense System (IADS) is a network of acquisition radars, fire-control radars, passive sensors, command posts, communications links, decoys, emitters, and operators. Anti-radiation missiles such as HARM and AARGM turn radar emissions into targeting opportunities. The EA-18G Growler exists because airborne electronic attack is not a side quest; it is one of the ways strike packages survive against integrated air defenses. The F-35’s AN/ASQ-239 electronic warfare suite likewise illustrates how modern fighters are not merely kinetic platforms. BAE describes the AN/ASQ-239 as providing situational awareness, threat detection, analysis, response, countermeasure, and jamming options for the pilot.
Identification Friend or Foe is another air-domain EMS dependency people underappreciate. IFF is not a magic blue-force truth, but a complex interrogation-and-response system built on radio transmissions, cryptographic modes, timing, procedures, and disciplined employment. If IFF is jammed, misconfigured, spoofed, degraded, or not correlated with other sources, the risk is not merely administrative confusion. It is blue-on-blue risk, delayed engagements, missed intercept windows, and hesitation when seconds matter. While this was not due to Iranian Republican Guard Corps (IRGC) EW efforts, during Operation Epic Fury, a Kuwaiti F/A-18 had three blue-on-blue kills against American F-15E Strike Eagles due to IFF interoperability issues as a core cause.
Precision strike also rides on the spectrum, JDAM uses a GPS-aided inertial navigation system, and the Air Force describes JDAM guidance as facilitated through a tail-control system and GPS-aided INS. That does not mean GPS jamming instantly turns every precision weapon into a random dumb bomb; many systems retain inertial guidance, and effects depend on weapon design, target type, geometry, timing, and countermeasures. But real-world reporting from Ukraine showed Russian electronic warfare degraded the effectiveness of GPS-guided weapons such as Excalibur and other precision systems, forcing adaptation on both sides. Forcing a Small Diameter Ground-Launched Bomb (SDGLB) or a FAB-1500 UMPK into INS guidance versus PNT guidance can decrease the accuracy by 10s of meters which is the difference between a mission kill and making a large crater or hitting an unintended target.
Unmanned aircraft make the same point even more brutally. UAS depends on command links, telemetry, video downlinks, GNSS, onboard radios, transponders, and sometimes cellular or mesh networking. Counter-UAS is therefore inherently EMSO-heavy: detect the drone, classify the link, locate the operator, protect friendly systems, jam or take over control if authorized, defeat navigation, and preserve evidence. The air domain is not just aircraft flying through physical airspace. It is aircraft, weapons, sensors, and networks moving through an electromagnetic battlespace.
In a civilian-oriented context, the same types of impacts towards safety and situational awareness also exist. The most well-known and prevalent being GNSS degradation and spoofing of ADS-B, which can lead to Air Traffic Control (ATC) overload, deconfliction issues, and undermine airport operations. As I have written multiple times in this blog, ADS-B is a trust-based system that does not provide additional verification beyond ensuring that the packets are correct for the standard. While this type of spoofing attack is mostly seen in combat zones, it is not an extraordinarily specialized bit of tradecraft. This is why EMSO is all our problems, and spectrum awareness and big data analytics in pursuit of EMSO can help even the odds and minimize or mitigate these impacts.
Ground and Tactical Networks: The Fight Breaks When the Network Breaks
Ground combat looks physical because the consequences are physical: maneuver, fires, logistics, casualty evacuation, breaching, urban operations, and close combat. But the coordination layer underneath ground combat is electromagnetic. Tactical radios, MANET systems, satellite communications, Blue Force Tracking, UAS feeds, counter-IED systems, ground surveillance radars, GNSS receivers, ATAK-like systems, and vehicle networks all depend on the spectrum. When those links degrade, the ground force’s operational tempo is irrevocably impacted.
Tactical communication is the obvious starting point. SINCGARS, PRC-163, PRC-167, legacy JTRS-derived systems, commercial MANET radios, and coalition radio nets all operate in contested spectrum. A company commander may experience EMSO as something very basic: the platoon net is unreadable, the retrans site is down, the fires net is congested, the UAS video feed is intermittent, or the mesh network that worked during rehearsals collapses when the unit moves behind terrain. To the operator, it feels like a radio problem, and they want to choke their RTO out. To the commander, it is a command-and-control problem, though they may also want to strangle their RTO. To the adversary, it is an opportunity, and they will do worse than strangulation.
Ukraine made this visible to a mass audience. Russian and Ukrainian forces have both used electronic warfare to jam drones, disrupt communications, spoof navigation, and attack the connective tissue of tactical operations. Reporting from the war describes a constant adaptation cycle of jamming, spoofing, drone disruption, and counter-countermeasures, with both sides rapidly fielding new EW systems and tactics. Systems such as Zhitel and Leer-3 are often discussed in this context because they represent the tactical reality of modern ground EW: communications, GNSS, and drone links are targets, not background utilities.
Mesh networks deserve special attention because they can create a false sense of resilience. Systems such as Silvus radios, Persistent Systems MPU5 networks, and even hobbyist or emergency-use systems like Meshtastic or Reticulum can be extremely useful, especially when infrastructure is absent or unreliable. But a mesh is not a magic shield against EMSO. It still rides frequencies, waveforms, antennas, power, routing assumptions, and node density. A jammer does not need to understand the unit’s whole concept of operations to degrade a mesh. It only needs to attack enough of the RF environment, enough of the routing fabric, or enough critical nodes to reduce throughput and trust.
Blue Force Tracking is another ground-domain dependency that matters because it directly affects fratricide risk. BFT-style systems depend on position, timing, satellite or terrestrial communications, and a command system that distributes friendly locations. If GNSS is degraded, SATCOM is jammed, or the network becomes stale, the map can become dangerously persuasive. A stale-friendly icon can be worse than no icon because it invites confidence. Ground commanders need to know not just where blue forces are, but how fresh, trusted, and resilient that information is. BFT expands beyond the military context; forestry and mining companies are using multimillion dollar systems with GPS and cellular based tracking for asset management. The companies who provide these machines may also have a keen interest in ensuring their systems are not used in sanctioned countries or combat zones. Attacking the hardware is one thing, but the other side is spoofing attacks that could potentially lead to remotely killing the equipment if they appear outside of a geofence for a sustained amount of time.
Counter-IED systems show the EA/EP cycle in ground combat better than almost anything else. CREW systems such as DUKE and Thor III were built to jam radio-controlled IED trigger mechanisms. That is a defensive electronic attack: using jamming to protect the force. But adversaries adapted with different triggers, command wires, pressure plates, altered frequencies, timing changes, and tactics that tried to work around the jammer. That cycle is EMSO in miniature. A capability creates a countermeasure; the countermeasure creates an adaptation, and the force that learns faster lives longer.
For the company commander, the “so what” is blunt: if your tactical network fails, your plan may fail with it. PACE plans, retrans planning, alternate routes for data, disciplined emissions, preplanned signals, degraded-mode rehearsals, and spectrum awareness are not commo nerd admin. They are how ground units keep fighting when the invisible layer of the battlefield turns hostile. This goes the same for forestry management, law enforcement, mutual assistance groups, and any other “on the ground” organization that relies on the spectrum for tracking, situational awareness, and coordination. If the P25 or DMR radios go down, or a law enforcement dispatch center is denied in the EMS environment, that loss of situational awareness cascades into potentially dangerous outcomes.
Maritime Domain: The Sea Is Wide, but the Spectrum Makes It Legible
Maritime operations depend on the electromagnetic spectrum because the ocean is too large, too dynamic, and too opaque to manage by eyesight alone. Ships use radar, AIS, satellite communications, HF/VHF/UHF radios, tactical datalinks, electronic support systems, navigation systems, weather systems, missile seekers, decoys, and combat-system networks. Ports use vessel traffic services, VHF marine communications, radar, AIS, cameras, private wireless systems, GNSS timing, and industrial control networks. The maritime domain may look like steel and water, but operationally it is held together by emissions.
AIS is the cleanest civilian example, and we’ve already spoken about it a lot. With EMSO, the distinction matters: sometimes the AIS transponder is lying, sometimes the GNSS input is corrupted, and sometimes online vessel-tracking data is manipulated after the fact. To the operator staring at a display, the result can look similar unless there is independent corroboration.
Naval combat compresses the same problem into seconds. A surface combatant’s survival against anti-ship missiles depends on radar detection, electronic support, combat-system correlation, decoys, jamming, hard-kill interceptors, and command decisions happening in a brutally short timeline. The AN/SLQ-32 family and SEWIP upgrades exist because shipboard EW is not optional. Nulka and other decoys exist because missile seekers are EMS-dependent and can be seduced, confused, or pulled away from the ship. AN/SPY-6, navigation radars, fire-control systems, electronic support measures, and datalinks all contribute to whether the ship sees the threat, classifies it correctly, and survives the engagement.
Submarines add a different lesson: sometimes the most important EMSO decision is whether to emit at all. Submarines can receive very low frequency communications, but transmitting, raising a mast, using active sensors, or exposing a communications path can become a survival decision. EMCON is not a vibe in the undersea fight, it can be a life-or-death decision. Every emission is a potential detection opportunity for an adversary’s electronic support, signals intelligence, radar, acoustic, or multi-INT system.
For ports, EMSO becomes a fixed-site security problem. Vessel traffic services, marine radio, radar, AIS, GNSS, private LTE, Wi-Fi, cameras, cranes, gate systems, and industrial telemetry all converge in a dense RF environment. Interference may be accidental, criminal, environmental, adversarial, or self-inflicted. The “so what” for the port authority is that maritime EMSO is not only about warships. It is about knowing whether the ships, sensors, communications, and timing systems that make the port legible are trustworthy when something starts to go wrong.
These problems - both militarily and on the civilian side of the house - will only become more pronounced as Unmanned Surface Vehicles (USVs) and Unmanned Subsurface Vehicles (USSVs) become more proliferated. Just look at UAS; we went from low endurance quadcopters not far removed for RC aircraft to a multibillion-dollar industry with increasingly complex, sophisticated, and in some cases lethal amounts of airframes. State-aligned and even non-state actors will very likely use USVs and USSVs to disrupt port operations, ferry points, cruise ship terminals, or even use it to facilitate wonton destruction or piracy. We see this in limited cases such as with the Houthi faction in Yemen (Ansarullah) using their “Toufan” series of USVs to disrupt international shipping. This paradigm shift will increase the demand of EMSO skillsets and other kinetic means for civilian port facilities, one day we will need a Safer Waters Act to go along with the Safer Skies Act.
Information and Deception Effects: When EMSO Changes What People Believe
The electromagnetic spectrum is a medium for communication and sensing, and it also extends as a medium for deception, influence, and narrative control. EMSO effects can change what people believe about the world, not by arguing with them, but by manipulating the data that their systems, sensors, and networks present as truth. The most direct example is spoofing of broadcast safety systems. These are information effects delivered through electromagnetic mechanisms. The target is not a receiver. The target is a decision-maker's understanding of the battlespace.
GPS spoofing extends this principle to position and navigation. When a receiver is fed false GPS signals, the system using that receiver, whether it is an aircraft, a ship, a vehicle, a drone, or a timing reference, believes it is somewhere it is not or that the time is something it is not. The cascading effects are significant. An aircraft that believes it is on a safe approach path when it is offset by hundreds of meters. A ship that believes it is in a shipping lane when it is not. A UAS that triggers a return-to-home function based on a spoofed geofence violation. A financial trading system with a timing offset that invalidates transaction sequencing. These are information effects because they change the victim's model of reality without the victim knowing the model has been corrupted.
DRFM-based deception against radar is the military-grade version of the same concept. When a DRFM system captures a radar pulse, manipulates it, and retransmits it, the radar operator sees false targets, false ranges, false velocities, or false angles. The radar display does not say 'you are being deceived.' It shows tracks that look exactly like real tracks. The operator's situational awareness is corrupted at the sensor level, before human judgment even enters the loop. This is why multi-sensor correlation and sensor fusion matter. A single sensor can be deceived. Multiple sensors observing the same battlespace from different phenomenologies, radar plus EO/IR plus ES plus acoustic plus human reporting, make deception exponentially harder because the adversary must fool all of them simultaneously and consistently.
Broadcast media manipulation is the older version of this. During the Cold War, both sides invested in capabilities to jam, override, or hijack radio and television broadcasts for propaganda purposes. That capability has not disappeared. It has been augmented by the ability to disrupt internet and cellular infrastructure, manipulate social media amplification through bot networks that coordinate via wireless infrastructure, and degrade the communications channels that journalists and first responders depend on during a crisis. An adversary that can selectively jam cellular coverage in a target area while broadcasting emergency frequencies controls the information environment in that area without ever touching a computer network.
The Strava incident, which we covered in the EMCON section, is an unintentional information leak born from personal-device telemetry. The information effect was not deliberate deception, but an inadvertent disclosure. The mechanism began with devices collecting location and activity data, then became operationally sensitive when that data was aggregated and visualized at scale. An adversary did not need to break encryption, compromise a classified network, or recruit an agent to learn something useful. The users created the pattern themselves. An adversary who understood the emission patterns of personal devices at a military installation did not need to break encryption, compromise a network, or recruit an agent. They needed a subscription to a fitness app.
The takeaway for the EMSO practitioner is that information effects are not a separate category of warfare that happens to use the spectrum sometimes. They are an inherent property of electromagnetic operations. Every EA action has an information dimension. Jamming a broadcast creates a communications void that someone will fill. Spoofing a navigation signal creates a false reality that someone will act on. Intercepting an emission creates intelligence that someone will exploit. The electromagnetic spectrum is not just a pipe for moving data. It is a medium through which the adversary's perception of reality can be shaped, degraded, or replaced.
EMSO in Practice: The Adaptation Cycle Is the Fight
As you have probably ascertained by now, if not earlier, EMSO and its effects on all of us aren’t just some theoretical threads written in doctrinal publications. Ukraine has become the most visible modern case study for EMSO because drones, artillery, tactical radios, GNSS, satellite communications, jammers, spoofers, direction-finding systems, and commercial electronics are all colliding in the same battlespace. It is not a clean laboratory example, and it should not be treated as a perfect proxy for every future fight, but it shows the pace of adaptation better than any doctrine publication can.
The most important lesson from Ukraine is that the EA/EP cycle has compressed. A drone control link works until it is jammed. Operators shift frequency bands, change antennas, alter firmware, move to different video systems, add boosters, or switch to fiber-optic control. The opposing side adapts again. Drones that were useful when procured can become obsolete before they are even fielded at scale because the electromagnetic environment changes faster than the acquisition cycle. Recent reporting from Ukraine described thousands of drones becoming unusable not because they were physically damaged, but because their components and links had become outdated against rapidly evolving EW conditions.
The Baltic is a civilian warning light. Persistent GNSS interference near Kaliningrad has affected commercial aviation and maritime activity across the region, with open-source researchers and monitoring networks associating some jamming and spoofing activity with sites in Russia’s Kaliningrad exclave. Finnair even suspended flights to Tartu, Estonia in 2024 after GPS interference prevented approaches, with the airport shifting to ground-based navigation support before service resumed.
The maritime picture tells the same story. AIS manipulation and spoofing have been documented in and around the Black Sea, including cases where vessels broadcast false positions to obscure movements near Russian ports. USNI also reported that the tracking data of two NATO warships was falsified near a Russian-controlled Black Sea naval base while the ships were moored far away. Whether the mechanism is AIS falsification, GNSS spoofing, or manipulation of downstream vessel-tracking data, the operational effect is the same: the maritime picture becomes less trustworthy.
Starlink adds another lesson. Commercial satellite communications are now part of the EMSO fight. Starlink gave Ukrainian forces a resilient communications path, but terminals are still electromagnetic systems: they emit, receive, depend on timing and links, and can be detected, jammed, geolocated, or attacked through adjacent dependencies. Defense One reported as early as 2023 that Russian forces were learning to locate and jam Starlink links, while Ukrainian units adapted their terminal employment to reduce risk. Even highly adaptive commercial SATCOM becomes part of the EMS battlespace at the moment it supports operations.
The lesson for EMSO testing and threat simulation is blunt: static assumptions die quickly. It is not enough to ask whether a radio, drone, radar, or datalink works in a clean environment. The useful question is whether it keeps working when GPS is degraded, the control link is jammed, the video downlink is noisy, nearby friendly emitters are misconfigured, the adversary is listening, and operators are forced into degraded procedures. Ukraine shows that the units that adapt fastest win more of the spectrum fight. The Baltic and Black Sea show that civilian systems are not insulated from the same dynamics. The future of EMSO is not only better jammers or better radios. It is faster sensing, faster testing, faster reconfiguration, and faster command decisions when the spectrum stops behaving.
What You Can Do About It
EMSO is one of those problems that feels like it belongs to someone else until it lands on you. If the previous sixteen thousand words have done their job, the "someone else" illusion should be gone. What follows is not a capability brief or a procurement recommendation. It is a set of actions, ordered from free to funded, that any organization with spectrum dependencies can take to improve its posture. Some of these are afternoon projects. Some are institutional changes. All of them are cheaper than finding out during a crisis that your comms, sensors, navigation, or networks were more fragile than you assumed.
Understand Your Spectrum Dependencies
Before you can protect, manage, or fight in the electromagnetic environment, you need to know what you depend on. This sounds obvious, and it is, but most organizations have never done it. The exercise is simple: take a whiteboard, list every operational function that matters (communications, navigation, sensing, tracking, control, coordination, timing), and trace each one back to the spectrum resource it rides on. What frequency? What protocol? What antenna? What power? What backups?
The output is a dependency map. It will show you where your single points of failure are. The tactical radio net that has one frequency and no alternate, UAS fleets that cannot operate without GPS, SCADA telemetry that runs on a single 900 MHz ISM channel shared with half the industrial park. It goes further than this, it is also understanding the various failure modes. You have an impact, and then what happens? How many members in your MANET until you encounter link degradation or black holes? Does your automatic failover from VoIP on the mesh go back to your regular comms? If your S-Band MANET receiver drops out do you fallover to Starlink or Viasat automatically?
For military units, this exercise maps directly to the communications and spectrum annex of the operations order. For law enforcement, it feeds into communications interoperability planning. For critical infrastructure operators, it is the foundation of a spectrum resilience assessment that your regulator may not require yet, but your risk model should. The dependency map does not cost anything. It costs an afternoon, a whiteboard, and the willingness to ask "what breaks if this goes away?" for every electromagnetic system you operate.
The uncomfortable finding is usually not that a single critical system lacks a backup. It is that multiple systems share the same underlying dependency, typically GPS timing or a single SATCOM path, and nobody realized it because the systems were procured, installed, and managed by different teams.
Build Passive EMS Awareness
You cannot manage, protect, or troubleshoot an electromagnetic environment you cannot see. The good news is that seeing it has never been cheaper. The easiest bit of spectrum awareness is installing Network Survey into an old Android device and buying an RTL-SDRv4 dongle off Amazon with a handful of wideband antennas. If you wanted to have the ontology built for you, you can use Empyrean’s EMSO and Digital Force Protection modules, or you can accomplish a basic survey and inventory with a bit of Rust or Python and an hour of work.
This is not SIGINT, at least nothing beyond the Collection phase of the intelligence cycle, but you will be looking at your own operating environment: what is transmitting, on what frequencies, at what power levels, and whether anything has changed since yesterday. That baseline awareness is the difference between "unexplained interference" and "new emitter detected on our operating frequency."
Scale up slightly and real capability emerges. KrakenSDR is a 5-channel coherent RTL-SDR array that runs roughly $500 and provides passive direction finding. It can geolocate emitters, output bearings on a map, and integrate into broader sensor architectures. Empyrean Skywatch is our first-party RTL-SDR integration that feeds wideband spectrum data into the Decision Dominance Engine for correlation against tracks and events from other sensor domains. These are not laboratory curiosities. They are operationally useful ES tools at price points accessible to a port authority, a law enforcement agency, a range safety office, or a private security operation.
You can scale this even further into a Silvus Technologies FASST, a Per Vices or Ettus SDR which can support scanning several terahertz of spectrum and unlock differentiated digital signal process, AoA, or TDOA workflows as you learned in an earlier section. While it may be a bit uncouth of us to recommend buying hobbyist kit, awareness is the single most important mechanism to understand what is expected, and getting started is easier when it’s cheap for most organizations.
Passive spectrum monitoring of your own operating environment is the electromagnetic equivalent of looking out the window. The organizations that do it will catch interference, identify rogue emitters, baseline their RF environment, and detect anomalies before those anomalies become operational failures. The organizations that do not will continue filing interference reports after the fact and wondering why things stopped working.
Plan for Degraded Operations
Another important EMSO preparation is not a piece of equipment, but a plan. It is a plan for what happens when the spectrum stops cooperating. Degraded operations planning starts with a question the dependency map should have answered: for each critical function that rides on the spectrum, what is the fallback when that spectrum access is denied, degraded, or untrustworthy?
The military framework is PACE: Primary, Alternate, Contingency, Emergency. The primary communications path might be a tactical MANET. The alternate might be HF. The contingency might be SATCOM. The emergency might be visual signals, runners, or prearranged actions triggered by time or event. The same logic applies to navigation (primary: GPS; alternate: INS; contingency: terrain reference; emergency: map and compass), to sensing (primary: radar; alternate: EO/IR; contingency: acoustic; emergency: human observation), and to every other spectrum-dependent function.
Every private sector organization with spectrum dependencies should have a version of this. If your dispatch center's P25 trunking system goes down, what is the fallback? If your port AIS feed becomes unreliable, how do you verify vessel positions? If your facility's cellular coverage is degraded during a major incident, how do first responders coordinate? If your UAS fleet loses GPS, what is the recovery procedure? The plan does not need to be elaborate. It needs to exist, it needs to be trained, and it needs to be rehearsed under conditions that simulate the degradation. However, a PACE plan that lives in a binder and has never been exercised is little more than wishful thinking.
Coordinate Spectrum Use
The single most common source of electromagnetic interference in military exercises, multi-agency operations, and multi-tenant facilities is not an adversary. It is friendly forces and co-located systems operating on conflicting frequencies because nobody coordinated.
For military forces, the JRFL and JEMSOC coordination process exist precisely for this reason, so use them. If your unit is deploying EW, comms, radar, UAS, and sensor systems into a joint or coalition environment, every emitter needs to be in the spectrum plan before the operation starts. If it is not, you are the interference source that someone else's ES system will detect, and the confusion you create may look exactly like adversary EA.
For the private sector, the equivalent is proactive spectrum coordination at multi-tenant sites. Ports, airports, stadiums, refineries, military installations with contractor systems, event venues, and any facility where multiple organizations operate RF equipment in proximity should have a spectrum coordination process. This does not require a JEMSOC. It requires someone to own the problem: inventory the emitters, identify conflicts, assign frequencies or time slots, and monitor interference. The FCC's licensing and coordination processes are designed for national-level allocation, not for the real-time deconfliction of a port with forty organizations running radios, radars, telemetry, Wi-Fi, cellular, and IoT on overlapping frequencies.
Simulate Before You Deploy
If you are deploying communications, sensors, effectors, or electronic warfare systems into a contested or congested electromagnetic environment, you should model that environment before you get there. RF propagation modeling, jammer placement analysis, spectrum deconfliction verification, and sensor performance estimation under degraded conditions are not luxuries. They are the difference between a plan that survives first contact with the spectrum and one that discovers its blind spots during execution.
The questions that matter are not "does this radio work?" but "does this radio work when a Krasukha-4 is operating at 40 kilometers, when three friendly systems are transmitting on adjacent frequencies, when terrain masks the retrans site, and when the humidity is 90% at sea level?" The answer to the first question is always yes. The answer to the second question depends on modeling the electromagnetic environment with enough physics fidelity to produce useful predictions.
This is what Empyrean Defense's Wargaming and Simulation Cyber Range was built to do. The simulation engine models RF propagation, EA and EP effects, sensor detection envelopes under contested conditions, and EMS-dependent system performance across every integration in the platform. It runs the same physics stack as our operational Decision Dominance Engine, which means the simulation environment and the operational environment use identical models. The question you answer in simulation, "will my radar see the target through this jammer's coverage?", is answered by the same math that runs in the operational system.
We are not the only organization that does electromagnetic environment modeling. EWPMT and EWPMT-X serve the DoD planning community. Commercial tools exist for RF propagation analysis. The point is not which tool you use. The point is that deploying spectrum-dependent systems into a contested environment without modeling that environment first is the electromagnetic equivalent of sending a convoy through unclear terrain. You might get through. You might not. The organizations that model first will know which outcome is more likely.
Integrate EMS Into Your Operational Picture
The final step is the hardest: treating the electromagnetic environment as a first-class layer of your operational picture, not as a specialist overlay that only the EW officer sees.
Every modern operational picture, military or civilian, is a fusion product. It combines tracks from radar, reports from sensors, positions from GPS, communications status, weather, terrain, logistics, and threat assessments into a picture that commanders use to make decisions. The electromagnetic environment is conspicuously absent from most of those pictures. Commanders see where the aircraft are but not what frequencies they are using. They see where the ships are but not whether AIS is trustworthy. They see where the ground units are but not whether the mesh network connecting them is healthy. They see threat tracks but not the electronic order of battle that produced the detection.
Electromagnetic Battle Management, as we described earlier, is the COP for the EMS. Real-time visualization of who is transmitting, on what frequencies, at what power, from where, and whether those emissions are friendly, neutral, hostile, or unidentified. Correlation of electromagnetic activity with tracks and events from other domains. Visualization of EA effects, EP status, spectrum allocation, and EMCON posture. Integration of ES feeds from everything, exquisite military receivers down to a $500 KrakenSDR.
That integration is one of the core capabilities of the Empyrean Defense platform. The EMSO surface sits alongside Maritime Intelligence, Air Intelligence, Space Situational Awareness, and the broader Common Operational Picture because the electromagnetic domain is not a side panel. It is the connective tissue that determines whether everything else on the COP is trustworthy.
Final Thoughts
We started with a telegraph line strung between Washington and Baltimore in 1844 and ended up in a world where a $20,000 drone and a $200 SDR can create operational effects that would have required a division's worth of EW assets a generation ago. The trajectory is clear: the electromagnetic spectrum has gone from a communications medium to a warfighting domain to a cross-domain operational environment that touches everything and belongs to no one at the tactical level.
The naming evolution tells the story. Electronic Warfare was a specialty, and a good one, built by signals professionals who understood radio, radar, and the physics of propagation. CEMA tried to reconcile cyber and spectrum effects and discovered that good instincts do not automatically produce clean doctrine. EMSO, via JP 3-85, elevated the spectrum from enabler to operational environment and gave the joint force a framework that finally matches the reality of modern operations. JEMSO made it a coordination problem, because if everyone uses the spectrum and no one coordinates, the result is not just inefficiency but fratricide, exposure, and decision collapse.
But doctrine only matters if it reaches the people who need it. The JEMSOC exists at the JTF level. The 350th Spectrum Warfare Wing exists at the enterprise level. The EMSO CFT exists at the Pentagon level. The company commander whose radios just went dead exists at the edge, and so does the port authority operator whose AIS feed became unreliable, and so does the airfield defender whose radar picture degraded during a shift change, and so does the energy company whose SCADA telemetry dropped for reasons nobody can explain. Those are the people who experience EMSO as a problem, not doctrine. And those are the people who need the tools, the training, the planning, and the awareness to do something about it before the spectrum decides for them.
The spectrum does not care about your org chart, your budget cycle, your clearance level, or your job title. If you emit, you are visible. If you receive, you are vulnerable. If you depend on the spectrum and have not planned for its denial, you are brittle. The tools to see, understand, and act in the electromagnetic environment exist today at every price point from $35 to enterprise scale. The physics are public domain, the doctrine is unclassified, which leaves the only remaining variable: you. It is up to you and your organization whether you decide that the electromagnetic domain is your problem, or whether you wait for it to prove that it is.
Stay Dangerous.
