Marines want to have Jammers Accessible on Every Plane

Sydney J. Freeberg Jr. released an article on Breaking Defense discussing how the marines are pushing to have Jammers available on every plane. Due to the surge in high tech threats from China and Russia, the Marine Corps are making a huge effort in order to allocate forces specifically for the role of jamming, deceiving, and hacking enemies.

Jammers are also known as electronic countermeasures. This is essentially an electronic device that is used in order to deceive tracking and detection systems such as radar and sonar devices. This also includes electronics devices such as infrared and lasers.

According to Freeberg, this includes attaching new jammers and sensors in all different types of armory. This includes drones, KC-130 transports, ground units, and tiltrotors. Not only this, but the Marine Corps plan to add an additional 1,000 to 3,000 more personnel from other departments of the Marine Corps. There are only 182,000 active duty troops that the Marine Corps has availability to use. In addition, the Marine Corps will be combining different disciplines into one, under the Information Warfare. This includes electronic warfare, offensive cyber warfare, psychological operations, and military deception. All of these will be done despite the very tight budget the Marine Corps has access to.

The US Army seems to be getting left behind they left electronic warfare capabilities in the 1990s whereas the Marine Corps decided to keep in that field. Here’s what Col. Jeffery Church, the director of EW on the Army’s Pentagon staff, has to say.

They’re ahead of us because the Marine Corps never got out of the electronic warfare business. So why doesn’t the Army just buy Marine Corps EW gear? There’s tremendous institutional inertia in the way.

Church then goes on and talks about the little differences in the two.

We always go back to this one, ‘well, their requirements are different from our requirements. Yeah, yeah, yeah. The spectrum works the same for the Marines as it does for the Army. The adversary’s capabilities are no different for the Marines than they are for the Army.