Nathan Mintz is the co-founder and CEO of CX2, an electronic warfare start up. Nathan spent 14 years as an EW and Radar systems engineer at Raytheon and Boeing before becoming founding CEO of directed energy company Epirus and Spartan Radar (recently acquired by John Deere). He has 10 U.S. patents, mostly in RF and EW systems.
Mark Trefgarne is the co-founder and President of CX2. Mark was Founder and CEO of Liverail, the world’s largest video ad exchange, which he grew from zero to an acquisition by Meta. At Meta, Mark was product director for AdTech Platforms, helping build their multi-billion off-O&O ads business.
The electromagnetic spectrum has become the decisive domain of modern warfare.
Just as control of the skies once determined military success or failure, our ability to achieve spectrum dominance will shape the outcomes of future conflicts.
Every U.S. and allied platform, especially drones and other remotely operated, unmanned systems, depends on radio signals to navigate, communicate, and strike. Yet these same signals are increasingly vulnerable. Adversaries recognize America’s reliance on radio connectivity and are investing heavily in electronic warfare designed to deny, degrade, and exploit it.
In the first half of this year alone, VCs poured $28 billion into defense tech. It is also the first time autonomous systems have their own line item in the Department of War’s annual budget request, which will amount to $13.4 billion for FY26. If these systems can be easily jammed, we’re just building expensive targets instead of giving U.S. forces the upper hand in the fight.
The lesson is clear: spectrum resilience must no longer be treated as an afterthought, but as a foundational design principle. To make these public and private investments in autonomy count, we must also build for the contested spectrum.
For decades, U.S. doctrine assumed reliable spectrum access. In conflicts such as Desert Storm, American superiority in GPS and precision-guided munitions transformed battlefield outcomes because the spectrum was uncontested. That assumption has evaporated. Today, adversaries are fielding powerful, long-range electronic warfare (EW) systems designed explicitly to target America’s advantage. Russia employs systems like Krasukha and Murmansk, capable of jamming communications and radars over hundreds of kilometers. China has established a dedicated Strategic Support Force tasked with integrating spectrum warfare into its broader military strategy.
The war in Ukraine demonstrates the consequences of operating without spectrum resilience. Russian EW has jammed GPS, disrupted drone communications, and spoofed navigation. Ukrainian forces lose more than 10,000 drones per month to these tactics, with attrition rates often five to ten times higher from electronic attacks than from kinetic shootdowns. The economics favor the defender: a jammer that costs tens of thousands of dollars can neutralize unmanned systems worth hundreds of thousands—or even millions—of dollars. And a single jammer can defeat hundreds of drones, in round after round of attacks.
On the ground, the effects are visible every day. Russian Silok and Pole-21 systems routinely disable Ukrainian quadcopters in frontline sectors, causing them to fall harmlessly from the sky. Short-range jammers mounted on armored vehicles create “protective bubbles” that frustrate Ukrainian loitering munitions before they can strike. In Kherson, Russian forces blanketed large swathes of territory with GPS interference so severe that even civilian airliners flying over the Black Sea registered signal loss. In Bakhmut, Ukrainian units reported losing entire drone fleets within hours when entering areas covered by Russian EW umbrellas.
Conversely, Ukrainian engineers have adapted by building their own ad hoc EW units, using modified Starlink terminals, open-source SDR (software-defined radio) software, and commercial radios to hunt for Russian control links, geolocate operators, and strike artillery positions based on detected emissions.
These are the real-time dynamics of spectrum warfare, played out across every mile of contested territory. Legacy EW systems like Rivet Joint, Athena and Guardrail are relics of the Cold War and lack the maneuverability, defensive systems and reliability to operate at the forward edge of the battle area for long periods in a near peer conflict.
This reality defines DDIL (Denied, Degraded, Intermittent, and Low-bandwidth) environments. In future conflicts, bandwidth will not be assumed, signals will be persistently contested, and connectivity will collapse without warning. Yet most legacy systems were designed for permissive conditions. Data links, ISR (intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance) feeds, and GPS guidance all presuppose reliable access. The result is brittleness at precisely the moment resilience is needed most.
Embedding resilience requires several core capabilities. Frequency agility allows platforms to shift bands and waveforms dynamically, evading interference. Mesh networking replaces vulnerable hub-and-spoke architectures, enabling units to reroute traffic around jammed nodes and maintain cohesion. AI-enabled autonomy ensures drones and munitions continue missions when operators are cut off, reducing the value of jamming. Spectrum sensing paired with adaptive countermeasures allows systems to classify interference and respond in real time. At CX2, we are engineering these capabilities into next-generation reconnaissance drones and munitions that seek radio frequency (RF) signatures, combining autonomy with resilient RF architectures to ensure our systems can fight through interference instead of being stopped by it.
But resilience alone is not enough. The same spectrum challenges that constrain our forces also present opportunities to detect and defeat the adversary. Electronic support (ES) measures can provide early warning of hostile drone activity, alerting frontline troops when RF signatures betray the presence of enemy UAVs. Geolocation of emitters becomes increasingly vital: by triangulating the signals of drone controllers and data links, forces can not only neutralize drones but also strike at the operators directing them. In Ukraine, small teams with portable SDR kits have successfully located Russian drone pilots, allowing artillery or special forces to target the humans behind the systems. This underscores how RF detection is no longer a back-end intelligence function, but a tactical necessity for squads in contact.
Electronic attack (EA) must likewise evolve. It can no longer be concentrated in a few large platforms, but distributed forward to the edge. America’s current EA systems (like the Growler or the Compass Call) are large scale, exquisite systems designed for an era of warfare where the key emitters that needed to be detected and defeated were large-scale, high-powered radar installations—not small, ubiquitous emitters like drone controllers. While upgrades like Next Gen Jammer and the EA-37B Compass Call replacements are in progress, they are extremely few in number and still suffer from the same issue of operating in a denied environment. Fundamentally, these systems were designed for legacy use cases and missions, like intelligence preparation of the battlefield and low-intensity conflict.
We must invest in personal jammers for troops, vehicle-mounted systems for maneuver units, and lightweight emitters for small formations that can deny adversary drones the ability to operate, protecting soldiers and critical assets. Ukraine’s Bukar and Nota portable jammers are early examples of this shift: backpack-sized systems designed to shield infantry from surveillance drones and first-person-view (FPV) kamikazes. These point toward a future in which every fighting vehicle and squad may need its own local EW shield, just as they carry body armor and small arms today. The spectrum thus becomes not just a vulnerability to defend, but a weapon to wield.
The strategic implications are profound. Spectrum denial allows adversaries with modest conventional forces to blunt U.S. technological superiority. More than 80 percent of U.S. precision-guided munitions rely on GPS; adversaries know this and are building strategies to disrupt them. A peer adversary capable of degrading theater-wide communications could fracture joint operations, paralyze command and control, and even undermine the credibility of U.S. deterrence. At the operational level, the effects cascade: ISR feeds vanish, GPS navigation falters, and air defense coordination is disrupted. Spectrum denial threatens to unravel the very fabric of joint warfare.
The Department of War must respond with urgency. Spectrum resilience should be treated as a core performance requirement for every program of record. New systems must be tested under realistic jamming and spoofing before they are fielded, not after. Training must also change. Too often, U.S. forces rehearse in permissive environments; contested spectrum conditions must become the standard for live exercises. Procurement should prioritize open architectures, rapid prototyping, and partnerships with innovative firms able to deliver faster than traditional cycles allow. Integration with initiatives such as Joint All-Domain Command and Control (JADC2) and AUKUS ensures resilience is embedded across allied forces, not siloed within U.S. systems alone.
The electromagnetic spectrum is no longer simply an enabler of military operations. It is the battlespace itself. Our adversaries are contesting it now, with lethal effect. To maintain freedom of action across all domains, the United States and our allies must embed resilience in every platform, network, and operational concept. Equally important is using the spectrum as an offensive weapon: detecting incursions, locating enemy operators, and denying adversaries their drones and data links.
By doing so, we secure spectrum superiority and decisive advantage in the wars to come.
Spectrum dominance will decide who sees, who acts, and who wins. For us at CX2, the imperative is clear: build for contested spectrum from the start, wield the spectrum as both shield and sword, and preserve the advantage for the United States and our allies.
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