Had there been any mute button in modern airpower, it would be given in the rear of a simple business plane. The EA-37B Compass Call of the U.S. Air Force has embarked on a European tour that exposes a long-standing-widely-misperceived-capability to those operators who would actually be required to employ it. The opening stop of a service-planned roadshow was at Ramstein Air Base in Germany as one of the aircraft landed there, and the Air Base was to be visited by further stops at Spangdahlem Air Base and RAF Mildenhall. In the case of U.S. Air Forces in Europe, spectacle is less important than familiarization: an aerial electronic attack platform to integrate jointly and coalition-wise and to operate at stand-off ranges capable of directing the fight without having to be within the most threatening air defenses.
The airframe will provide decision dominance in all areas in the future as it goes into operational service, according to Lt. Col. Ronnie Smith, the deputy division chief of future operations with the U.S. Air Forces in Europe.
The EA-37B is based on a deeply refined Gulfstream G550, where BAE Systems mission systems are incorporated by L3Harris. Practically, it is a sensor-and-effects package aimed at long-range electromagnetic warfare: interfering with communications, navigation, radar-based operations, as well as serving an intelligence mission of identifying and geolocating emitters. The combination is important since a system of distributed sensors, data links and shooters is forming a kill chain in modern forces; any compromise can cause delays, reroutes or workarounds throughout the network. The Air Force describes that impact as introducing confusion in the decision-making of the enemy, a result that remains operationally useful even when no component system is permanently brought out of commission.
Information superiority is one of the most significant features of victory in a conflict, according to Capt. Tyler Laska, an EA-37B pilot with the 41 st Electronic Combat Squadron. Each second of indecision we can introduce to the thought process of an opponent makes our men and women in the vanguard of all realms live longer.
The platform change is also a re-invention of the Compass Call enterprise per se. The EA-37B was developed as a successor to the EC-130H that was based on the C-130H airframe, which shifted the mission to a faster and higher altitude jet capable of providing a better range and field of view of spectrum effects over greater distances. The Air Force has 10 aircraft in the fleet as its new plan and transition is possible as the EC-130H inventory gets depleted. The external appearance of the jet itself is based on the G550 CAEW configuration, a hint that current airborne mission-capable aircraft often develop by simply modifying existing special-mission airframes, and then simply adding new software-based payloads to them.
Such a stand-off model, however, fails to eliminate a consistent gulf in the U.S. force structure: high-speed stand-in electronic attack which is able to escort strike packages into the most disputed airspace. The EF-111A Raven was retired by the Air Force in 1998 and since then, they have been using a limited number of F-16CM Wild Weasel units to suppress enemy air defenses and the Navy and Royal Australian Air Force have standalone EA-18G Growlers. The emphasis on stand-off and stand-in solutions in industry debates regarding podded jamming expansion, including the NextGeneration Jammer Mid-Band, has the consequence that the two types of jamming are the solution to different issues, and current campaigns tend to require one or both.
Interest in Europe is no longer hypothetical. Italy is signed to purchase two EA-37Bs, the first foreign user of the device and connecting the aircraft to a bigger G550-based special-mission fleet. The purchase solidifies a trend: electronic warfare is becoming an interoperability need, rather than a national capability in the niches, especially when the operations involved are based on common networks and common situational awareness.
What the EA-37B roadshow is all about, then, is not the arrival of one aircraft, but rather the establishment of spectrum effects as a normal planning variable to allied airmen. A system that allows one to bend the networks, without the need to bomb them directly, is now an iconic capability that coalition forces are required to study to use in concert.
