Security concerns involving the People’s Republic of China, and worries over the strategic direction of the Trump administration, may serve to deepen electronic warfare collaboration in Asia-Pacific.
“In the Asia-Pacific region, there is no collective security organisation like that in Europe,” wrote Lieutenant General (Retired) Jun Nagashima, a senior research advisor at the Nakasone Peace Institute. Nagashima was writing in a Chatham House publication entitled Security and the Frontier: UK-Japan Perspectives on Cyberspace, Outer Space, the Arctic and Electronic Warfare published in 2021. Chatham House is an international affairs think-tank based in London. The Nakasone Peace Institute performs similar research work, and is based in Tokyo.
He argued that, “Because of history, politics and regional characteristics, it is not realistic to establish a new NATO-type military organisation to cope with emerging risks and threats.” Nagashima has a point. The North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) defensive grouping is a collection of 32 democracies in Europe and North America. All these nations pledge to come to the aid of each other if they are attacked under Article 5 of the Atlantic Treaty. The treaty is effectively NATO’s constitution.
The US and China
While governments in the Asia-Pacific region cover a wider spectrum of political hues, they all arguably share the same security challenge in the form of a strategically assertive China. China’s government has made no secret of its desire for territorial aggrandisement. It has claims on islands in the South China and East China seas. Taiwan, which China sees as an inalienable part of the mainland, remains a running sore for the regime as it considers the invasion and occupation of the country.
To further complicate matters, as of 20 January, the USA will have a new president. Reading Donald Trump’s foreign policy intentions can be akin to gazing at tea leaves. On the one hand, Trump invited Chinese leader Xi Jinping to his inauguration. An article published in Foreign Affairs on 17 December 2024, written by Deputy Editor James Palmer, speculated that he probably would not. Palmer wrote that Xi “knows that his attendance would be read as supplication, and he has no interest in playing along”.
In late November 2024, Trump threatened to impose 10% tariffs on Chinese imports to the USA straight off the bat. The president-elect said the move was retaliation against what he implied was a lackadaisical approach by the Chinese authorities to crack down on fentanyl smuggling. The US National Center for Drug Abuse said 3.8% of America’s adult population is addicted to opioids like fentanyl. This figure equates to more than ten million people. On the campaign trail, Trump threatened China with 60% tariffs, these being a key device to support his “America First” approach to economics. This policy stresses reducing the country’s trade deficit with China, while shoring up jobs and production at home. According to analytical firm statista.com, the USA maintained a trade deficit with China amounting to $279.4 billion in 2023.
A changing threat-scape
Trump has been similarly mercurial regarding defence and security alliances in Asia-Pacific. Since World War II, the USA has effectively been the security guarantor in the region, and this makes perfect strategic sense. The US economy depends on the smooth flow of global maritime trade. Disruption to sea lines of communication caused by conflict in the region could be catastrophic domestically for the USA. Nonetheless, Trump arguably sees security relationships in the region as more transactional. Last October, he asserted during an interview at the Economic Club of Chicago that South Korea should pay $10 billion annually to have American troops on its soil.
The campaign trail saw Trump strike a similarly hawkish tone, arguing that Taiwan should pay for US protection. The 1979 Taiwan Relations Act pledges that the US government will “maintain the capacity of the United States to resist any resort to force or other forms of coercion that would jeopardise the security, or social or economic system, of the people on Taiwan”. Trump’s comments appear to put this commitment in doubt.
The Asia-Pacific’s “threat-scape” and the unpredictability of Trump could act as important drivers for deepening regional security cooperation, especially regarding electronic warfare (EW). Traditionally, EW can be a tricky area for bilateral and multilateral cooperation. Ironically, EW is acknowledged to have first been used by the Russian Navy to jam Imperial Japanese Navy (IJN) radio communications during the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-05. Russian naval jamming hampered IJN naval gunfire control during the siege of Port Arthur on the northern coast of modern-day China.
Countries can be cautious over the extent to which they share EW expertise, technology and data. Details regarding the characteristics of hostile radars, radios and communications networks are often closely guarded secrets. The sophisticated jamming waveforms used to attack these targets are likewise highly classified. Technologies applicable to the EW fight are often zealously guarded by the nations who develop them. Even close allies like the Five Eyes nations of Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and USA sometimes limit their EW cooperation.
Nonetheless, regional initiatives are showing that some levels of electronic warfare cooperation are not only possible, but essential. China is making significant investments in the People’s Liberation Army’s (PLA) electromagnetic capabilities. The US Department of Defense’s (DoD) Military and Security Developments Involving the People’s Republic of China 2024 Annual Report to Congress underscores this reality.
The aforementioned report noted that China is continuing its investments in advanced ground-based air defence and fire control/ground-controlled interception radars to protect its airspace. To put matters into perspective, the report stated that China’s integrated air defence system (IADS) has early-warning radars that provide coverage of up to 300 nautical miles (555km) beyond its coastline. The networking of China’s IADS is deepening. Radio links between command-and-control centres, combat aircraft and ground-based air defence units are multiplying to improve redundancy: the more radio links that are present, the more targets an aggressor is forced to try and jam. Cabled fibre-optic links, which are very difficult to locate and attack since they do not emit radio frequency (RF) energy, further complicate this task.
As the same report noted, investment is flowing into avantgarde technologies like quantum radar. Space is insufficient here to discuss quantum radar in detail but, broadly speaking, it uses photons (as opposed to electrons) to detect, identify and track targets. The technology is still in its infancy, but China’s direction of travel in this regard is clear.
The PLA also maintains a dedicated combatant command, the Information Support Force, which specialises in strategic, operational and tactical communications. Furthermore, the report states that China’s significant investment into civilian telecommunications infrastructure, including communications satellites, has clear military benefits. China currently possesses 60 communications satellites, four of which are dedicated to military use.
Quantum technologies are also receiving support. Quantum encryption, where photons are used to carry traffic, is of great interest to the PLA. Without going into technical specifics here, quantum encryption promises unprecedented levels of communications security. Advanced communications and sensors also form a key tenet of the PLA’s multi-domain precision warfare (MDPW) concept. MDPW has much in common with the US DoD’s multi-domain operations (MDO) philosophy. MDPW, like MDO, emphasises the inter- and intra-force connectivity of all military assets such as personnel, platforms, weapons, sensors, networks, bases and capabilities. The goal of these two concepts is to facilitate better-quality decision-making at a faster pace than one’s adversary.
MDO and MDPW hark back to the famous OODA (observe, orient, decide, act) loop devised in the 1960s by the US strategist John Boyd. Both approaches to war harness the theory that whoever navigates the OODA loop quickest with the best-quality decision-making will prevail in any fight.
Enhancing cooperation
Citing the UK’s ongoing tensions with Russia, as underscored by the latter’s occupation of parts of Ukraine, Nagashima asserted that “Japan and the UK each face increased [electromagnetic spectrum] threats, both geographically and strategically”. The two countries are technological heavyweights, but middle-sized powers, so EW cooperation does make sense.
What should cooperative EW efforts concentrate on? The author recommends exploiting the analytical power offered by advances in artificial intelligence (AI). The electromagnetic spectrum is a complex place. Before a hostile radar, radio or communications network can be attacked, signals from these systems must be found. RF engineers go to great lengths to reduce the chances that the radar and radio signals that militaries depend on will be discovered. Signals are designed to blend into the prevailing electromagnetic noise that envelops our planet using low-probability of detection/interception (LPD/I) techniques.
To further complicate matters, the spectrum continually hosts billions of users around the world. The global growth of cellular communications over the past 30 years has done little to ease congestion in the spectrum. The ability of human cognition to find a signal protected by LPD/I techniques in the ether in a particular locale may have already been reached. AI could hold promise in helping the age-old EW challenge of teasing out a signal of interest from the morass of noise. Moreover, once the signal is detected, these same techniques could help analyse the signal to determine its identity, origin and the information it is carrying. Mirroring science and technology research trajectories in China, quantum technology is an area in which Nagashima feels the UK and Japan could collaborate.
The bedrock of this UK-Japan EW collaboration was laid in 2017 during a bilateral summit where both nations agreed to enhance dual-use technology collaboration. Technologies like AI and quantum will not only be applicable to the military sphere, as they potentially offer vast benefits for the civilian world too. An article published by the US National Cancer Institute noted that the number-crunching prowess of AI could hugely benefit cancer screening and treatment. AI has clear potential in helping to analyse the torrents of data generated by drug trials. As noted in an article entitled “Quantum, the Indispensable Ally of Modern Medicine”, published by the Institut Polytechnique de Paris (Paris Polytechnic Institute), quantum technology continues to play a key role in medicine, enabling everything from magnetic resonance imaging to positron emission topography.
In fact, Nagashima argued that British and Japanese engineers and scientists should, in some cases, prioritise innovation in the civilian sector “to quickly demonstrate the effectiveness of fast-moving civilian advanced technologies”. By doing so, this “could aid the speed at which these new technologies are implemented within defence equipment”.
Future directions
The example cited by Nagashima is bilateral, with both Japan and the UK promising to work together to mutually strengthen their EW capabilities. Yet international collaboration and cooperation in the Asia-Pacific region regarding electronic warfare could deepen further. The region is home to several multilateral groupings, all of which have China’s strategic posture as a core concern. The Quadrilateral Security Dialogue, better known as the Quad, groups together Australia, India, Japan and the USA. As with the UK-Japan relationship, all Quad members have vibrant science and technology sectors.
AUKUS combines Australia, the UK and USA. This latter grouping is already forging ahead with multilateral EW cooperation. In December 2024, the US DoD revealed that AUKUS was implementing a dedicated EW data-sharing framework. Reports stated that the framework would take three months to activate. It has a remit to develop methods by which EW data can be shared amongst the AUKUS membership. As noted above, nations, even the closest allies, can struggle to share such information. The goal, the reports continued, is to help AUKUS members easily share EW information across the sea, land, air, space and cyberspace domains. Easing the flow of such information is vital to helping realise MDO ambitions.
As Nagashima noted, Asia-Pacific lacks a NATO-like alliance and may not receive one anytime soon. However, this does not need to prevent cooperation in the EW sector. The efforts of the UK and Japan, and AUKUS, could provide a template by which other nations in the region could collaborate in this sphere.
Involving the USA in such initiatives will pay dividends. Groupings like AUKUS and the Quad will let the US defence community benefit from EW-related innovation shared by other members, and vice versa. Pooling EW research and development (R&D), where possible, will help lower everyone’s R&D costs, while helping to develop dual-use technologies of relevance to the civilian sector. Such strategic win-win situations can only benefit all concerned.
by Dr. Thomas Withington
