Executive overview

This report consolidates publicly available pre-exercise material and recent JMRC activity to produce an operationally focused assessment and recommended priorities for a platoon-level electronic warfare exercise under the Spectrum Blitz rubric. Public reporting on a discrete, post-exercise AAR labeled “Spectrum Blitz 25” was limited at the time this analysis was compiled. The material below synthesizes what regional JMRC activity and DoD messaging reveal about intent, likely training lines, technical risks, and immediate recommendations for units running or supporting the event.

Purpose and scope

Spectrum Blitz-style events are organized to expose small-unit echelons to contested electromagnetic environments, validate EW TTPs, and integrate EW effects with maneuver, ISR, and counter-UAS measures at the platoon and company level. Expect assessment lanes to exercise detection, geolocation, emissions control, basic RF deception, and both hard and soft mitigation of hostile sensors. These events are designed to replicate degraded commercial RF services, contested local SATCOM or datalink availability, and the presence of low-cost UAS threat vectors that must be integrated into the EW picture.

Indicative recent activity informing assumptions

In late March the JMRC hosted demonstrations and a modernization forum that explicitly included electronic warfare, UAS, and C-UAS systems in partnership events with national RF authorities and regional police. Those events confirm a push to embed active spectrum effects into training at scale and to align training infrastructure with emerging policy and technical constraints. This institutional context makes it likely that Spectrum Blitz 25 will prioritize live, repeatable training in an actively managed spectrum environment rather than purely synthetic contesting.

Likely training objectives and evaluation metrics

  • Sensor to shooter timeline. Measure end-to-end detection, classification, and engagement timelines for EW-enabled nodes supporting maneuver. Successful lanes will show reduced detection-to-engagement latency and correct attribution of emissions.
  • Electromagnetic situational awareness. Evaluate platoons on signal baseline-building, identifying anomalous emitters, and reporting actionable geolocation. Expect play to validate handheld and vehicle-mounted spectrum mapping tools and comms discipline.
  • Integration with C-UAS. Test detection, tracking, and defeat chains where EW is the primary cueing mechanism for hard-kill or soft-denial counter-UAS responses. Expect emphasis on rules-of-engagement and collateral-emissions mitigation.
  • Spectrum deconfliction and safety. Measure safe employment of non-kinetic effects inside controlled airspace and populated frequency bands; expect coordination with national/regional RF authorities where civilian systems could be impacted.

Technical profile to expect (equipment and methods)

At a platoon-level event the technical baseline will be pragmatic: small, transportable SIGINT/EW receivers, short-range jammers or denial suites, directional antennas for geolocation, RF mapping tablets, and integrated datalinks to pass EW cues up the chain. Expect use of small UAS both as targets and as ISR nodes to exercise multi-domain cueing. Emphasis will be on low-latency correlations rather than high-end long-range standoff jamming. These tradeoffs reflect training needs to make EW organic and tactically useful to small maneuver units.

Operational risks and recurring failure modes

  • Comms discipline breakdown. Units frequently fail to maintain emissions control under stress; transmit profiles then reveal friendly locations and nullify EW advantages. Training must enforce strict emission profiles and fallback comms.
  • Poor signal baseline. Without a prior RF map, teams struggle to separate benign civilian emitters from adversary signatures. Pre-run spectrum surveys and a shared baseline database are low-cost mitigations.
  • Cue-to-engage frictions. EW detection often lacks immediate hard-kill options. Exercises that do not validate the cue-to-engage link will leave EW teams competent at detection but without operational effect.
  • Legal and safety gaps. Field jamming near civilian infrastructure can create regulatory violations and unintended outages. Expect the JMRC and national RF authorities to mandate mitigation measures and observe limits.

Tactical recommendations for units attending or supporting Spectrum Blitz events

1) Harden emissions discipline. Train SQUAD/PLT level hot and cold start procedures so that unintended emissions are minimized during movement and target approach. Develop pre-planned comms windows and short-burst encrypted comms patterns.

2) Build and share the RF baseline. Before high-intensity lanes, sweep the local spectrum with portable receivers, log civilian backbone emitters, and publish a short-form baseline packet to all teams. Simple CSV exports of center frequency, bandwidth, and likely owner are sufficient.

3) Prioritize low-latency cueing paths. Exercise and instrument the data flow between the EW operator, the platoon leader, and the shooter or C-UAS node. Record timestamps and map bottlenecks.

4) Integrate small UAS as both sensors and targets. Use them to validate localization and to exercise layered defeat sequences where EW is the initial soft kill.

5) Document collateral-risk procedures. Assign a safety officer to manage spectrum use approvals, and rehearse emergency stop procedures for any jamming or denial equipment. Coordinate with local RF authorities early and in writing.

Measuring success and writing a useful AAR

A useful after-action report should go beyond checklists. Recommended sections: objectives vs outcomes, detailed timeline with timestamps for each cue-to-action, annotated RF heatmaps from participants, equipment fault logs, legal/regulatory incidents and mitigations, and a concise set of TTPs adopted. Collecting objective telemetry for at least the five most critical events per lane will allow quantification of performance improvements on subsequent iterations.

Policy and civil spillover considerations

Exercises that involve active spectrum effects have two downstream impacts. First, they accelerate operator familiarity with EW methods that tend to diffuse into law enforcement and industry. Second, if not properly contained, they risk unintended outages of civilian services. Training organizers must maintain transparent lines with national radio-frequency authorities and publish sanitized guidance for civilian experimenters and hobbyists to avoid dangerous replication attempts. Recent JMRC partnership activity indicates this coordination is being prioritized.

Conclusions and immediate actions

  • Expect the operational focus to remain pragmatic: detect, localize, and integrate EW cues into existing kill chains. Training gains will come fastest where units practice emissions control and cue-to-engage timelines.
  • Prioritize data collection. An AAR that lacks timestamped telemetry yields only anecdote. Insist on structured data capture for spectrum events.
  • Formalize civilian coordination. Any facility running active denial or jamming must have a clear written interface with local RF authorities and a documented safety kill switch.

Final note on reporting availability

At the time this consolidated assessment was prepared public, unit-level, and JMRC messaging in late March show an explicit push to normalize EW and C-UAS training at Hohenfels and to fold spectrum effects into broader exercise modernization work. That context informs the expectations and recommended lines above. If a formal, public Spectrum Blitz 25 AAR becomes available, it should be compared against the recommended metrics in this report and the raw telemetry annex used to validate lessons learned.