Electronic warfare

Russia's GPS-jamming surge has propagated into European civilian airspace

Russian electronic-warfare operations targeted at Ukraine have spilled into commercial aviation across northern Europe. Russia's jamming and spoofing operations in the Nordic, Baltic, and Arctic regions have increased 5-10x in the past three years, traced to militarised facilities in Kaliningrad and the Kola Peninsula. Approximately 40% of European air traffic now experiences GNSS interference. Finland's Traficom logged 421 GPS-interference reports in January and February 2026 alone, against 1,704 for full-year 2025 - a step-change in incident rate. The structural consequence is that NATO and EU civil-aviation regulators are coordinating an EW response that was not on the agenda 18 months ago: hardened GNSS receivers, terrestrial backup navigation (eLoran, Galileo PRS), and EW-resistant approach procedures. This is the first time the West has faced a category that affects civilian infrastructure at scale without kinetic engagement.

State of the art (2026)

Electronic warfare has moved from a niche enabler to a front-line necessity. The USAF's EA-37B Compass Call flew its first known combat sorties in spring 2026 over the Iran theatre (Operation Epic Fury), with five of a planned ten jets delivered and L3Harris as prime. At the other end of the cycle, Anduril unveiled its tripod-mounted Pulsar and lightweight Pulsar-L at the World Defense Show in Riyadh in early 2026 - software-defined, autonomy-class counter-drone jamming already in USAF and USMC hands. The defining tension is cadence: primes ship platform-integrated EW on decade timelines while new-defence ships software-defined nodes in months. Russian jamming spilling into European civil airspace is forcing a NATO and EU regulatory response.

Cognitive EW splits into prime and new-defence layers

The EW industrial base is bifurcating. The traditional prime layer - L3Harris (EA-37B Compass Call, USAF nearly doubling planned fleet with $3B+ projected over the next five years; replacement of the aging EC-130H), BAE Systems, Raytheon (Next Generation Jammer for F/A-18 and F-35), Northrop Grumman (Stand-in Attack Weapon SiAW; AARGM-ER) - holds platform-integrated EW capability that requires major aircraft retrofits and decade-scale programmes. The new-defence layer is led by Anduril's Pulsar - a 360-degree, tripod-mounted, AI-driven RF detection and jamming node debuted at the 2026 World Defense Show in Riyadh, paired with Roadrunner-M counter-drone systems in a $250M contract for 500+ units. The new-defence layer ships in months not decades, runs on autonomy-class compute, and is sized to the actual small-drone-and-FPV-counter problem the front lines face. The competitive question for 2026-2028 is whether the new-defence layer absorbs the counter-drone EW segment outright and leaves primes to platform-integrated stand-in jamming.

Ukrainian-style indigenous EW disrupts the contractor monopoly on cognitive EW

Ukrainian engineering teams have developed MILELRS radio control systems paired with MILBETA firmware - indigenous adaptations of civilian ELRS and Betaflight stacks - that provide real-time jamming diagnostics, manual and dynamic frequency reconfiguration, redundant RF chains, automatic channel switching, and multi-receiver integration. These have proven remarkably resistant to Russian jamming and demonstrate that cognitive-EW capability can originate from the field rather than only from defence primes. The structural read for Western procurement is that the autonomy-and-software-defined approach to EW (Anduril Pulsar, Saronic, Shield AI EW modules) is matched on the other side by field-improvised software-defined-radio capability. Both compress the time-to-deployment cycle that legacy EW procurement assumed.