The India United States bilateral exercise Yudh Abhyas kicked off in Alaska with brigade and field training elements that deliberately integrated electronic warfare, unmanned aerial systems, and conventional enablers into combined tactical flows. Opening activities at Fort Wainwright and the Yukon and Donnelly training areas set the tone: interoperability, cold‑weather sustainment, and multi‑domain force protection were prioritized by both sides.

Participant composition and training lines were conventional but relevant for EW practitioners. Indian troops from a Madras Regiment battalion trained alongside U.S. 1st Battalion, 5th Infantry Regiment elements from the 11th Airborne Division. Academic exchanges and subject matter working groups on UAS and counter UAS, information warfare, and communications were scheduled to run in parallel with live‑field evolutions. Official announcements specifically highlighted the integrated use of artillery, aviation, electronic warfare, and unmanned systems as exercise building blocks.

What the opening days make clear from a practical EW perspective:

  • Spectrum as an operational domain. Trainers emphasized spectrum planning as part of mission command and air‑ground integration. When EW assets are treated as routine force multipliers rather than ad hoc tools the exercise gains complexity but also realism. Expect deliberate frequency deconfliction briefs, emission control timelines, and preplanned jamming corridors to be part of maneuver planning.

  • Counter‑UAS layering over jamming. Public descriptions stress UAS and counter UAS lanes in the syllabus. That implies a layered approach combining passive detection, hard‑kill interception, and soft‑kill jamming or cyber defeat options during the field training exercise. Observers should watch for how doctrinal tradeoffs are made between area jamming (which risks degrading friendly ISR and comms) and localized defeat measures tied to point defenses.

  • Cold weather EW engineering is not just logistics. Arctic and subarctic training forces test antenna tuning, RF cabling, battery lifecycles, and sensor calibration under temperature stress. Those non‑sexy engineering issues materially change emitter detection ranges, link budgets, and sensor reliability. Expect iterative tuning of thresholds and reallocation of sensor nodes to maintain an integrated surveillance grid in the Yukon and Donnelly ranges.

  • Integration with artillery and aviation. The publicly stated plan to combine artillery live fire, aviation assets, and EW systems points to tactical experiments in coordinated suppression and precision fires under contested spectrum conditions. For example, EW suppression can be used to degrade enemy ISR while artillery and aviation exploit reduced enemy situational awareness. How each side mitigates collateral disruption to blue force datalinks will be a useful indicator of mature coexistence doctrine.

Tactical takeaways for EW and spectrum practitioners watching Yudh Abhyas in real time:

  1. Watch the working groups. The exercise includes workshops on UAS countermeasures and information warfare. These sessions are where doctrine, ROE, and technical integration get hashed out. Gains there will outlast specific field drills.

  2. Look for emission control (EMCON) protocols tied to heliborne operations. Heliborne insertions and casualty evacuation drills require tight EM management to avoid exposing aircraft datalinks and to protect small team comms from spoofing or SIGINT collection. Practical EMCON techniques used in these environments are directly transferable to expeditionary operations.

  3. Expect layered counter‑UAS: passive RF detection plus EO/IR cuing, layered with localized jamming and interceptor employment. Public descriptions suggest the exercise will validate combinations rather than favor a single tool. That reflects a broader shift in multinational thinking away from one‑size‑fits‑all jamming.

  4. Pay attention to cross‑platform datalink resilience. When EW is used in conjunction with fires and aviation, robust datalink design and redundant comms strategies become critical. Observed fixes such as frequency hopping, alternative relays, and mission‑level fallback plans are indicators of operational maturity.

A short policy and safety note for the civilian and hobbyist audiences who follow EW topics. Exercises that emphasize EW and counter‑UAS accelerate innovation and often drive commercial spinoffs in sensing and mitigation. That crossover has legitimate dual use benefits but also raises regulatory and safety questions about jamming hardware and spectrum interference. Stay within legal boundaries, do not experiment with transmitters that interfere with civil aviation or public safety bands, and treat any hands‑on EW work as an engineering effort requiring formal safety procedures.

Bottom line: The opening phase of Yudh Abhyas 2025 frames the exercise as a multi‑domain rehearsal where EW and counter‑UAS are core elements rather than adjunct capabilities. For practitioners and hobbyists the immediate lessons are about integration, environmental hardening, and the practical tradeoffs between area denial jamming and precision, layered counter‑UAS tactics. The rest of the exercise will be worth watching for concrete details on how those tradeoffs are resolved in live combined arms settings.