January 23, 2021:
The U.S. Army is upgrading its tactical radios used by combat units to include new software that makes these radios more difficult to jam or locate. The army was responding to new jamming capabilities demonstrated by Russia and China, two countries that have been particularly eager to develop EW (Electronic Warfare) tools that could shut down or otherwise disrupt enemy (mainly Western) radio equipment. These latest upgrades were made possible by the earlier decision to adopt commercial radio technology to obtain new capabilities, rather than trying to develop the same tech just for the military. As a result, military radios have become cheaper, easier to upgrade and more competitive when it comes to dealing with problems like new jamming technologies and techniques. The new upgrades are based on testing existing radios against numerous new or anticipated enemy jamming techniques while noting and ranking the vulnerabilities. Because of the adoption of software based digital radios over the last decade these upgrades rarely require new hardware and are very inexpensive to implement.