The earliest documented use of EW was during the
Second Boer War of 1899–1902. The British Army, when trying to relieve
Ladysmith,
under siege by the Boers, used a
searchlight to "bounce" Morse code signals off the clouds. The Boers immediately spotted this and used one of their own searchlights in an attempt to jam the British signals. This was graphically described by Winston Churchill in his book
London to Ladysmith via Pretoria. The very first military attempts at radio jamming were reportedly made during exercises by the Royal Navy in 1902, and by the US Navy in 1903. Nonetheless, the first documented radio jamming was reportedly a civil one. During the 1901
America's Cup, journalists from the American Wireless Telephone and Telegraph Co (AWT&T) used a code to report the leading ship while occupying the frequency, thus preventing other present journalists from reporting the cup's winner, thereby gaining a considerable lead over other journalists in their reporting. The first recorded wireless interception was performed by
HMS Diana in the Suez Canal in 1904, which was capable of recording Russian telecommunications. The first recorded attempt at wartime jamming happened during the
Russo-Japanese War of 1904-1905. On 8 March 1904, as the Japanese Navy was attempting a long-distance bombardment of Port Arthur using cruisers with a "spotter" destroyer that radioed them ballistic corrections. A Russian radio operator, hearing the presence of communications, used his
Spark-gap transmitter to attempt to drown out the communications, allegedly leading the Japanese to promptly retreat without having achieved their objectives. During May 1905, Russian Admiral
Zinovy Rozhestvensky was attempting to cross the Tsushima Strait to rejoin Vladivostok after having repaired some of his ships in Madagascar. The Russian Navy was spotted by the Japanese armed Merchantman . The captain of the Russian warship
Ural requested permission to disrupt the Japanese communications link by attempting to transmit a stronger radio signal, hoping to distort the Japanese signal at the receiving end. Rozhestvensky refused the advice and denied the
Ural permission to radio jam the enemy, as it could have signaled the position of the Russian Fleet. He also refused to send scouting ships for the same reason. Rozhestvensky, for various reasons (principally lack of ammo and lack of sailor training against a Japanese fleet that was both better equipped and battle-hardened), wanted to reach Vladivostok without a fight, and persisted in ordering radio silence even when it became evident that the Russian Fleet had been spotted and that the Japanese Fleet was closing in. While it is doubtful that jamming the Japanese would have changed the outcome of the
Battle of Tsushima that ensued, this hints at the fact that radio jamming was already a standard procedure by this time - as was wireless communication interception. During
World War II, the Allies and Axis Powers both extensively used EW, or what Winston Churchill referred to as the "
Battle of the Beams": as navigational radars were used to guide bombers to their targets and back to their base, the first application of EW in WWII was to interfere with the navigational radars.
Chaff was also introduced during WWII to confuse and defeat tracking radar systems. As battlefield communication and radar technology improved, so did electronic warfare, which played a major role in several military operations during the
Vietnam War. Aircraft on bombing runs and air-to-air missions often relied on EW to survive the battle, although many were defeated by Vietnamese ECCM. Electronic Warfare was used extensively during the
Gulf War, primarily by
USAF and
USN electronic attack aircraft such as the
EF-111A and
EA-6B to disrupt Iraq's large and capable
SAM and
GCI network. In 2007, an Israeli attack on a suspected Syrian nuclear site during
Operation Outside the Box (or
Operation Orchard) used electronic warfare systems to disrupt Syrian air defenses while Israeli jets crossed much of Syria, bombed their targets, and returned to Israel undeterred. The target was a suspected nuclear reactor under construction near the
Euphrates River, modeled after a North Korean reactor and supposedly financed with Iranian assistance. Some reports say This EW system is developed to conduct electronic reconnaissance and suppression of radio-frequency sources. In August 2015, the Swedish newspaper said its initial usage caused concern within NATO. A Russian blog described Borisoglebsk-2 thus: personnel display drone jammers and a downed Russian Grifon 12 drone in 2022. During the first two days of the
2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, Russian EW disrupted Ukraine's air defense radars and communications, severely disrupting Ukrainian ground-based air defense systems. Russian jamming was so effective it interfered with their own communications, so efforts were scaled back. This led to Ukrainian
SAMs regaining much of their effectiveness, which began inflicting significant losses on Russian aircraft by the start of March 2022. Rapid Russian advances at the start of the war prevented EW troops from properly supporting the advancing troops, but by late March and April 2022, extensive jamming infrastructure had been deployed. EW complexes were set up in
Donbas in concentrations of up to 10 complexes per of frontage. Electronic suppression of GPS and radio signals caused heavy losses of Ukrainian UAVs, depriving them of intelligence and precise artillery fire spotting. Small
quadcopters had an average life expectancy of around three flights, and larger fixed-wing UAVs like the
Bayraktar TB2 had a life expectancy of about six flights. By summer 2022, only some one-third of Ukrainian UAV missions could be said to have been successful, as EW had contributed to Ukraine losing 90% of the thousands of drones it had at the beginning of the invasion. Russian EW capacity to disrupt GPS signals is credited with the reduction in the success of Ukrainian usage of
HIMARS and
JDAM bombs. The failure of GPS guidance forces these weapons, in particular JDAMS, to use
inertial navigation system which reduces accuracy from around down to around . In October 2023,
The Economist reported that electronic warfare was in widespread use on front lines to impair small battlefield UAV activity, with Russia installing video feedback and control jammers on high-value equipment like tanks and artillery. By 11 March 2024, Ukraine reported it had destroyed a Russian Palantin EW system in Zaporizhzhia Oblast, which "suppress satellite radio navigation along the entire line of contact and in most parts of Ukraine, replacing the satellite radio navigation field (spoofing)". An estimated three Palantin systems have been hit (June 2022, February 2023, and March 2024).
Cognitive Electronic Warfare (CEW) Originating from digital EW, and as a continuation of software based modulation and demodulation, cognitive electronic warfare or cognitive electromagnetic warfare (CEW), is the use of
AI in electronic warfare systems. CEW is affecting all
electronic warfare subdivisions, and can improve situation-assessment (SA) and
ESM, through automatic detection and classification of new and unknown signals, signatures, and even
RCS. Cognitive electronic warfare systems can be used to collect
ESM data and assist augmenting, updating, and broadcasting (over
JTIDS), real time maps with electronic order of battle (EOB) and electronic identification (EID) data. As well as the ability to adapt in real time to changes in the electromagnetic spectrum, by using artificial intelligence algorithms to quickly generate optimal
EA, or
EP solutions. ==Popular culture==