THE NEXT WAR: Russia Steadily Cultivating Electronic Warfare While U.S., NATO Lag Behind.

The nearly two-decade American-led campaign against insurgent groups that use relatively unsophisticated weaponry has forced the United States to deprioritize investment in this realm. Defense officials eyeing Russian offensives in Ukraine and Syria are now concerned that the U.S. military has lost its edge in countering and waging electronic warfare against near-peer adversaries.

“[NATO does] not exercise to put forces into an EMS-contested battle space, the Russians do, and they feel they’re making advances in this area that gives them an injection of confidence,” Roger McDermott, a senior research fellow in war studies at King’s College London, said Monday at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, D.C.

The Kremlin most recently demonstrated its electronic warfare capabilities earlier this month when Russian military hackers used cyberware to take out several armed drones that attacked two of its military bases in western Syria.

In Ukraine, Russia has deployed an array of hybrid tools to deny Kiev the use of information space, including advanced jamming technologies to shutdown government communications and cyber attacks against critical infrastructure.

We should be better at this stuff, so I can’t help but wonder how quickly we could catch up with bounties paid to US-based hacker groups.