Troy Phillips, Business Development Director for EWS discusses why a coherent CEMA strategy and Multi-Domain Integration are a necessity for mitigating current and emerging threats.

Background



Dave Ruddock, the CTO at EWS recently wrote a blog about the evolving technical landscape and how the fast-paced ongoing technical revolution provides both the operational community and industry with many challenges. These challenges are of particular interest when they provide technical innovation for the development of improvised threats. Of course, they also provide industry with the opportunity to deliver thought leadership and innovation in order to protect and enable those who conduct operations and need the ability to manoeuvre. Increasingly, manoeuvre will be directly linked to information dominance.

There is no doubt that the range of technology available to those who wish to commit acts of terrorism has never been better. If you are a terrorist, technology like the Internet of Things (IoT) in particular is great at creating a myriad of perfect switches designed for commercial use but also perfectly suited to use in improvised threats, such as IEDs and drones. Those of a younger generation than me expect a fully enabled life and routinely gadgets that achieve this are becoming an integral part of our life – only last week I saw a Zigbee for sale in Aldi – how did that happen?

The roll out of 5G, 6G, WiFi 6 etc. etc. just assists with the functionality and usability of these switches and adds to the challenge faced by those of us who spend our life trying to defeat or mitigate threats. The switches are supported by ever better networks, data rates and connectability.

EW Solutions blog by Troy Phillips opens the  discussion about CEMA and multi domain operations.  It is a discussion that has long been ignored in favour of the headline procurement projects such as F35, Aircraft Carriers and Sky Guardian.  However, in the context of contemporary warfare we ignore this area at our peril.  When information advantage is the goal for all modern militaries, surely we should be investing in the skills and capability that make this possible through the denial for degradation of an opponent's information system or the advancement of our own.