A recent posting of a satellite image from the U.S. National Training Center raised a lot of eyebrows. The image reveals a heat map of a cluster of electromagnetic signals emitted from a battalion-sized unit participating in a large-scale training event. These signals were captured as part of the exercise. This picture showed what many of us already know: we have an electromagnetic emission discipline problem in our tactical units. This article in SIGNAL Magazine makes a call for a grand strategy to dominate the electro-magnetic spectrum, bake-in requirements to minimize signals in new platforms, mask in depth and develop continuous passive obfuscation tactics.
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Military Communicators 
What is old is new again. Remembering that the Japanese defeated the Russians at Toshima in 1904 using direction finding and traffic analysis, the Japanese hid the Pearl Harbor attack by going on complete radio silence, we fooled the Nazi’s as to the cross channel invasion of Europe in 1944 using dummy traffic, and the VC/NVA were doing this same stuff to us in Vietnam ((see my paper on Project Touchdown in Army Communicator), why are we surprised to learn that Command Posts have an electronic signature?? In the 1980’s the army even published a manual called Communications in an Electronic Warfare Environment in order to counter what was called Radio Electronic Combat. This publication stressed use of lowest possible power output, directional antennas, minimum essential traffic, burst alternate communications techniques etc. This was done because we knew that Soviet and Soviet trained forces intended to bring EW assets as close as 5KM to our forces. Apparently all this has been forgotten and our electronic signature has grown. Couple this with with wireless LANS and the use of unauthorized non-secure radios such as FRS, and all kinds of other emitters at our CP locations and the electronic signature just grows and grows and becomes an open invitation to our enemies. There things we can do about this we just aren’t doing them!!!!
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All great points. As technology advances, its time to dust off the lessons learned and adapt to new realities!
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