Ripples in the air, rupture in the ether

NATO is looking at new concepts, doctrine and technology to meet 21st century air survivability challenges. It sees stand-in jamming taking an increasingly important role as part of a wider suppression of enemy air defence (SEAD) toolbox.

Alarmed by the sprawling, multi-layered envelopes of Russian integrated air defence systems (IADS), and comprehending the complexities of the electromagnetic threat environment seen in Ukraine, NATO is seeking to become faster and smarter in the way it harnesses and fields new electronic warfare (EW) technologies. This comes as Russia hardens its hostility towards Western Europe, and continues to invest in screens of increasingly capable sensors and long-range effectors that extend IADS ‘threat bubbles’ well inside NATO territory. Russian forces are also making increasing use of global navigation satellite system (GNSS), automatic identification system (AIS) and radar jamming as they seek to interfere with navigation and surveillance systems, and degrade the accuracy – hence effectiveness – of precision-guided munitions (PGMs).

“The electromagnetic spectrum [EMS] is the key terrain,” a Royal Air Force (RAF) officer serving in the UK’s Air and Space Warfare Centre Electromagnetic Spectrum Operations cell told the AOC Europe 2025 conference in Rome in May this year. “As aviators, we cannot control the air unless we have control of the electromagnetic spectrum – fact. We face a large and growing problem set.”

 

It is also a highly dynamic area of warfare. The Ukraine war has shown that the EW innovation cycle can be measured in weeks, with rapid ‘spirals’ and ‘counter spirals’ that exploit easy-to-find commercial technologies, or may simply require a new waveform to achieve advantage: a concern among NATO EW practitioners is that traditional acquisition practices are simply not agile enough to keep pace with this pace of innovation, posing a risk that alliance forces cannot access – let alone dominate – an increasingly contested EMS.

Threat environment

Going back 15 years, when NATO nations were heavily committed to counter-insurgency operations in Afghanistan, the infrared (IR) homing man-portable air defence system (MANPADS) threat was foremost in the mind of the air platform protection community. While operations over Libya in 2011 jogged memories that the radio frequency (RF) threat had not disappeared, activity in the air survivability realm was overwhelmingly focused on defeating MANPADS that may have reached Taliban forces via Iran and Pakistan.

By 2020, the threat environment had metamorphosised. Potential adversaries – with Russia at the top of the list – were investing in highly integrated IADS that extended their surveillance volume and missile engagement zone (MEZ) well outside home borders. NATO planners and aircrew alike were confronted with the reality that any future operations would likely take place in heavily contested airspace against ‘Red’ forces exploiting multiple sensor modalities, frequency diversity, increased network-based resilience, and software-enabled adaptability.

Faced with this growing challenge, NATO sought to radically alter its approach to air survivability at both platform and mission levels. Subject matter experts within the NATO Air Force Armaments Group (NAFAG) promulgated a Next Generation Air Survivability (NGAS) framework designed to ensure that alliance air power could stay ahead of ‘Red’ in increasingly complex and contested air environments.

Acknowledging that the increasing diversity, capability and proliferation of threats, NGAS wrapped together several strands. For example, it enshrined a move away from a threat-specific focus, and instead sought to deliver more proactive and agile airborne electronic attack (AEA), SEAD and self-protect countermeasures solutions designed to defeat generic threat technologies. NGAS also emphasised greater use of model-based synthetic evaluation environments to overcome constraints affecting the scale and fidelity of live test events.

Equally important, NATO acknowledged the need to establish broader and deeper partnerships with industry so as to better cohere research and development investment with frontline priorities. Another imperative was to expand the ‘community of interest’ beyond traditional EW suppliers and into the disruptive realms of digitalisation, networking, data analytics and Artificial Intelligence (AI).

NATO SEAD 2030

A key part of NAFAG activity over the past decade has been exploring how the alliance – and particularly its European pillar – can recapitalise and rebalance SEAD capabilities. This plan, being pursued under an initiative known as NATO SEAD 2030, seeks to develop concepts and redress critical capability gaps within the alliance through targeted investments, new operating concepts, and exploitation of novel technologies and techniques.

At its heart, NATO SEAD 2030 reflects the fact that the alliance is today overly dependent on US assets. At the same time, it also recognises that most future SEAD operations will take place inside the MEZ. “That’s just a fact of life,” a defence scientific source close to the programme told ESD.

In his Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) paper Airborne Electromagnetic Warfare in NATO: A Critical European Capability Gap, Professor Justin Bronk, Senior Research Fellow for Airpower and Technology in RUSI’s Military Sciences research team, points out that “few European defence gaps are as stark as for certain key aspects of EW, such as AEA,” and goes on to suggest that this situation has developed “because the field has traditionally been seen as a niche where a few geeks or ‘boffins’ work behind the scenes to develop clever gizmos for specialist tasks”.

Bronk’s analysis, published in March 2025, advocates targeted investment in stand-in electronic attack (EA) technology as one measure to mitigate current risks in the electromagnetic domain. In particular, he recommends an increase in funding for the “development of stand-in EA capabilities using relatively cheap uncrewed autonomous systems that can loiter for significant periods over hostile territory”, and the procurement “of more expensive traditional air-launched stand-in EA capabilities”.

EA is used to generate effects that disrupt or disable an adversary’s ability to use the electromagnetic spectrum for surveillance, fire control/targeting, and communications. SEAD is a specific application that seeks to degrade – through noise and deception jamming – the ability of an IADS to detect and track inbound strike packages; and to deny or attrit resources to engage them in a coordinated air defence action.

Stand-in jamming, as a specific EA subset, is a support electronic countermeasures technique where the jammer payload is deployed in close proximity to the hostile radar(s), and within the lethal engagement envelope of associated surface-to-air missiles, to provide screening for other assets penetrating the IADS envelope. Given the extremely hostile threat environment, which would place manned aircraft at unacceptable risk, the delivery of the EA package typically demands the use of a small, low-cost powered aerial vehicle or missile able to penetrate deep inside the MEZ.

Like other forms of EA, a stand-in jammer functions as a force enabler by jamming or deceiving acquisition, tracking, and fire control radars. However, its engagement geometry – with the stand-in platform and its payload positioned much closer to the hostile radar than the inbound strike package – means the stand-in EA payload requires much less power than an escort jammer to achieve a jamming-to-signal ratio sufficient to provide screening for following platforms.

 

There is also time advantage because the radar wave front will hit the stand-in platform well before the defended platform. Another advantage, highlighted by Bronk in his RUSI paper, is that, as side-lobe detection and rejection techniques improve on Russian and Chinese radars, stand-in EA offers a much better chance of maintaining alignment with the main lobe of a threat radar.

A number of different stand-in jamming use cases have been identified. One is to ‘clear a path” by flying ahead of a strike package so as to deliver protection while penetrating through a threat system engagement envelope. A second seeks to create a ‘window’ or ‘wormhole’ by using an EA-configured air vehicle to fly a racetrack loiter pattern and provide persistent jamming coverage. And a third use case foresees stand-in jammers and expendable decoys employed to provoke a reaction such that radars associated with an IADS reveal their disposition, and/or missiles are expended for no return.

What is important to remember is that stand-in jammers should perform as part of a broad and carefully choreographed SEAD construct. This demands that tactics and effects are planned and coordinated force-wide so as to maximise the survivability of individual assets: for example, integrating stand-in jammers into a collaborative strike network offers the potential to maximise synergies with kinetic weapons, and/or re-plan in-flight so as to adapt or reprioritise EA effects should the mission plan change or new threats reveal.

High/low mix

Conflict in Ukraine – where the contest for control of the EMS is being fought daily – has given additional impetus to the NATO SEAD 2030 effort. It has also given NATO capability managers much food for thought as they reflect on how the Ukrainian armed forces have been able to integrate low-cost non-kinetic effects as part of their strike planning.

This is SEAD, but with two twists for the modern age: first, whereas SEAD has historically been about improving platform survivability, the onus is now switching towards protecting the effector to ensure it can reach its target; second, rather than relying on powerful stand-off jammers, and/or EA capabilities hosted by penetrating aircraft, low-cost decoys are being fielded to present compelling false targets, and so force nugatory expenditure of expensive surface-to-air missiles, while stand-in jammers are used to deliver affordable disruptive EA effects.

The NAFAG – through Aerospace Capability Group 3 Sub-Group 2 (ACG3/SG2) – was already looking at the merits of these low-cost effects. While stand-in jammers do not constitute an outright replacement for more ‘high-end’ EA capabilities, nor will they be used in isolation – they do offer advantages with respect to their cost, mass, diversity of effect, and reduced time to scale and field. Accordingly, the alliance is now looking at how it develops a ‘high/low’ mix of complementary SEAD capabilities matched to the threat environment.

 

Drawing on studies, modelling and experimental capability development performed in support of NATO’s SEAD 2030 initiative, ACG3/SG2 officials briefing at AOC Europe 2025 were unequivocal in their view that there was now an overwhelming body of evidence supporting the introduction of stand-in jammers as part of a broader ‘blended’ SEAD ‘toolbox’. Informed by this work, and the lessons of Ukraine, the NAFAG now wants to start accelerating the acquisition of capability.

Accordingly, ACG3/SG2 has commenced work to establish a Capability Code for stand-in jamming. “This will articulate the entirety of the NATO need,” an official close to the process told the AOC Europe 2025 audience. “It will begin with the problem statement, followed up by a ‘kill-web’ analysis to understand and prioritise those aspects of the threat environment which EW will play into.

“The next phase recognises that stand-in jamming will likely be a complex matrix of exquisite, survivable and attritable crewed and uncrewed platforms across all domains. That will need standardisation and connection to enable the full military capability they could provide.

“Finally, NATO needs a route to enable the development, assurance and interoperability of these techniques that it plans to use in the future battlespace, and ensure that it is agile enough to stay ahead of the fast development cycle that we’re currently seeing in Russia and Ukraine.”

Stand-in and deliver

The US Air Force started to field a stand-in jammer, in the shape of Raytheon’s ADM-160C Miniature Air-launched Decoy-Jammer (MALD-J), in 2012. An adaptation of MALD-J, designated MALD-N, has also entered US Navy service.

European air arms have yet to bring a similar capability onto the frontline, although that is not to say that the science behind stand-in jamming has been ignored by air forces, defence science organisations and industry. Indeed, UK work in this area goes back more than two decades: this has included a series of concept demonstration activities, and development of a sovereign EA payload suitable for integration in the MALD vehicle.

 

A UK industry source speaking to ESD explained: “This is not a new area. But go back to the early 2000 and the focus of investment in air survivability was defeating the MANPADS threat. Fast jet protection against RF threats was not foremost in everyone’s mind.”

That has all changed. A stand-in jamming variant – SPEAR-EW – of MBDA’s SPEAR mini cruise missile continues maturation under so-called Rapid Design Phase funding. SPEAR-EW re-uses the turbojet-powered SPEAR air vehicle but introduces a Leonardo DRFM jammer payload and additional fuel in place of the warhead and seeker package of the standard missile.

In a separate development, the service has fast-tracked the introduction of a novel affordable stand-in EA capability to meet an Urgent Capability Requirement for a low-cost stand-in jammer. The StormShroud Autonomous Collaborative Platform – which pairs the Tekever AR3 tactical uncrewed air system with Leonardo UK’s BriteStorm stand-in jammer payload – was developed in less than a year with support from the RAF’s Rapid Capability Office, the Air and Space Warfare Centre, Dstl, and the Catalyst team in the Defence Equipment and Support organisation. BriteStorm leverages the miniaturised DRFM technology already embodied in the BriteCloud expendable active decoy.

For its part, Germany has declared an intent to incorporate a stand-in jamming capability as part of its broader Luftgestätze Wirkung im Elektromagnetischen Spektrum (luWES) programme. Embracing a ‘system of systems’ vision, luWES – translating to ‘Airborne Effects in the Electromagnetic Spectrum’ is intended to provide the Luftwaffe with a networked and cloud-enabled AEA capability able to deliver stand-off, escort and stand-in effects.

Hensoldt has performed development of a miniaturised EA payload, exploiting technology from its Kaeletron EW product family, suitable for the stand-in jamming role. MBDA Deutschland meanwhile is developing the RCM² (remote carrier multi-domain multi-role effector) airborne delivery vehicle.

Capability Code

The Stand-In Jammer Capability Code, expected to be finalised by the end of this year, will help NATO air arms development their procurement plans. In advance of this, NAFAG officials have already made clear the importance of a high/low mix that will deliver a diverse and disruptive set of EA effects.

“We are talking about a range of different platform and payload types,” ESD was told. “So on the one hand you will have quite sophisticated autonomous collaborative platforms with wideband payloads. Some of these mid-to-high end solutions are already in development.

“But there should also be a focus on the low end…those attritable and expendable systems that can be fielded in much larger numbers. There is a whole lot of work [going on] right now to identify the effects mix.

“We’re looking at how we cement the high/low mix into the NATO and industry lexicon. So that means how we blend exquisite platforms with low-cost attritable and expendable platforms. It means innovating new capabilities, and exploring how traditional and non-traditional EW suppliers can support this.”

There are two further imperatives to consider. First, the importance of standardised interfaces and communications, reflecting an ambition to enable payloads to be ‘mixed and matched’ across different platform types.

Second, the need for both speed and agility in the acquisition cycle. This demands that industry can ramp up to deliver at scale and pace, but at the same time ensure that stand-in jamming solutions can adapt and ‘spiral’ to keep pace with a fast-evolving threat.

Achieving this means adopting the same rapid prototyping and ‘fail fast’ mentality employed to accelerate deliveries of war materiel into Ukraine. “We must change the procurement cycle [in] order for us to complete in the live and rapidly changing electromagnetic spectrum,” said a NATO source. “It’s all about how we make sure we can deliver those agile capabilities into the battlespace.”

Richard Scott