Europe is rushing to field radar jammers and stand-in electronic attack capabilities. The drivers are simple and operationally obvious. Combat in Ukraine has made the electromagnetic environment a frontline consumable. Adversary jamming and the proliferation of low cost loitering munitions and drones have exposed gaps in allied airspace access and platform survivability, prompting rapid procurement, new multinational initiatives, and a push to put attritable jammers on airborne drones and launched effects.
This is not a hobbyist fad. Industry has already delivered purpose built stand-in jamming payloads that trade endurance and reusability for high radiated power and sophisticated deception techniques. Leonardo’s BriteStorm, publicly introduced in October 2024, is a low size, weight and power stand-in jammer built around DRFM and miniature technique generators. It is explicitly designed for UAVs and expendable launched effects to create confusion in enemy radar pictures or to mask friendly strike packages.
On the larger end, European prime contractors are moving more capable airborne jammers toward flight testing and integration. HENSOLDT’s Kalaetron Attack family is an AESA and DRFM based airborne electronic attack suite that targets modern air defence radars in escort, stand-off, and stand-in roles. These represent two ends of the capability spectrum: attritable, distributed jammers that can be massed and higher end, platform-integrated systems that provide enduring escort protection. Both are important, but they require different procurement, training, and doctrine paths.
Politically and operationally the rush is coordinated. At the Ramstein-format contact group meeting in April 2025, Germany led the establishment of a new electronic warfare coalition focused on procurement, training and doctrine development to support Ukraine and to mature partner capabilities. That move formalizes what had already been happening: national procurement spikes, industry accelerations, and an effort to harmonize deliveries and training across allied forces.
That context explains why governments are prioritizing jammers now. Jammers are tactically attractive because they can blunt sensor and weapon effectiveness without kinetic escalation. They can also be fielded faster than new airframes. But operational attractiveness is not the same thing as strategic safety or technical maturity. There are three core pitfalls I see that too many procurement programs under stress are likely to overlook.
1) Spectrum deconfliction and civilian risk. Powerful wideband jammers do not respect theater boundaries. When you put stand-in jammers into a crowded European airspace you risk disrupting civil radar, GNSS signals, and wireless infrastructure. Without strict coordination and geofencing, you create accidental outages that cascade into aviation safety incidents and civilian harm. Any nation buying jammers must simultaneously invest in airspace management, ROE that include electromagnetic safety protocols, and tools to localize and shut down emissions rapidly.
2) Tactics, training, and doctrine lag hardware. Jamming is not a plug and play capability. Effective employment requires integrated planning with SIGINT, EW support teams, flight operations, and cyber/space resilience measures. Massing attritable jammers changes signature management, C2 structures, and fratricide risk. Nations must invest in exercise time that includes contested-spectrum scenarios, not just acceptance trials.
3) The cat and mouse is not solved by more emitters. DRFM deception and pulse-level jamming will complicate legacy radars, but adversaries respond with frequency agility, active counter-countermeasures, and sensor fusion across passive electro optical, infrared, and multi static networks. Buying jammers without parallel investments in EW sensing, SIGINT, PNT resilience, and deception detection will produce marginal gains and brittle capability. HENSOLDT and others are already bundling integrated ESM and threat libraries with jammers for that reason.
Operational recommendations for European militaries follow from these pitfalls. First, prioritize integrated procurement packages that include training, spectrum management, and SIGINT tie-ins. Second, require that attritable jammers carry safe-fails and geofencing locks to prevent accidental interference with civil infrastructure. Third, build EW interoperability profiles inside NATO and EU procurement vehicles so that allied effects can be combined without unintended mutual interference. Finally, fund resilience measures such as robust multi-constellation PNT, autonomous navigation fallbacks, and hardened datalinks.
From an industrial perspective the rush is healthy because it drives rapid iteration and a move to software defined EW architectures. But industrial speed must be matched with supply chain scrutiny. DRFM modules, GaN transmitters, and high‑speed digital processors are all now bottleneck items. Europe should coordinate secure sourcing and consider onshoring critical components where possible, while keeping export control regimes sensible to avoid fragmenting the support base for Ukraine and partner nations. The European Defence Agency and the European Defence Fund have recognized EW as a priority area for cooperative development and that must continue with practical, interoperable projects rather than one-off national buys.
In short, Europe’s radar jammers rush is operationally understandable and strategically necessary. It is also messy. Procuring jammers without investing in doctrine, spectrum governance, PNT resilience and multinational deconfliction risks turning a useful asymmetric tool into a liability. If European governments treat EW as a systems problem rather than a single-weapon problem the rush will produce a credible layer of electromagnetic protection. If they treat it as a checkbox on a capability list the results will be expensive, brittle, and dangerous to civil society and coalition operations alike.