Q3 2025 tightened the feedback loop between frontline needs and industry roadmaps. Three practical trends dominated: accelerated Ukrainian field innovation and procurement, European industry moves toward sovereign swarm and sensing stacks at DSEI, and counter-EW workarounds that reduce the effectiveness of traditional jamming techniques. I cover what changed, why it matters tactically, and what operators and engineers should watch next.

Ukraine: massing commodity EW and tailored countermeasures

Official reporting shows Ukraine pushed a large number of homegrown EW and SIGINT/ELINT systems into service in July and the first seven months of 2025, with nine new systems approved for operational use in July alone and roughly 80 systems authorized in the first seven months of the year. Much of this output is Ukrainian industry designed to meet very specific front-line requirements. The operational pattern is clear: iterative, inexpensive designs built for maintainability and rapid fielding are winning over complex, slow-to-produce systems.

Tactical implications

  • Distributed suppression. Small, mobile jammers and RF sensors are being deployed in larger numbers to create overlapping denial zones rather than relying on a single high-end platform. That changes how you plan routes, EW deconfliction, and redundant comms paths.
  • Signature management and resilience. Ukrainian programs emphasize anti-jam navigation, multi-sensor fusion for resilience, and drones with fallback modes to exploit degraded links. Expect more work on autonomous hold/return behaviors, low-latency inertial navigation augmentation, and line-of-sight optical or wired control as stopgaps.

DSEI 2025: industry bundling sensors, C2, and swarm control with EW resilience in mind

DSEI in London was a focal point for announcements that matter to spectrum dominance and contested operations. Two themes stood out: integration of swarm control with established battle-management suites, and vendors showcasing integrated sensor-to-shooter chains that explicitly claim resilience in contested electromagnetic environments.

A high-profile example is the Helsing and Systematic partnership announced at DSEI that integrates Helsing’s Altra swarm/mission-management software with Systematic’s SitaWare C4ISR suite. The pitch is practical: move more processing to the edge, compress the find-fix-finish cycle, and maintain human-on-the-loop control while operating in degraded RF conditions. That integration is designed to accelerate recce-strike cycles and reduce operator load, and the vendors positioned EW resilience as a core design constraint.

HENSOLDT and other sensor houses used DSEI to push tightly integrated sensor and spectrum products that can detect, classify, and hand off tracks into C2 faster than legacy stovepipes. HENSOLDT highlighted new modular sensor suites and emphasized software-defined approaches to EW and SIGINT so upgrades can be fielded without full hardware swaps. This trend narrows the time between detection and effect while making countermeasures more of a software problem than a hardware one.

Tactical implications

  • System-of-systems interoperability now matters as much as emitter performance. If you have fast, standardised messaging between edge sensors and battle-management tools, you can keep tempo even under partial jamming.
  • Expect more vendor emphasis on modularity, open interfaces, and field-swappable compute modules so EW capability can be iterated rapidly in response to new emitters.

Counter-jamming workarounds: wired and optical control reappears

Opposing forces are responding to robust RF denial by embracing alternatives that avoid RF paths entirely. Open reporting from September shows experiments and trials with fiber-optic tethered UAS and even tethered naval drones that use physical links to evade jamming. These solutions trade off the vulnerability to physical disruption against immunity to RF effects.

Tactical implications

  • Expect more mixed fleets. Radio-controlled platforms will coexist with tethered or wire-guided assets. Planners must consider physical anti-tamper measures, cable management in complex terrain, and new rules of engagement for kinetic mitigation of tethered threats.
  • EW alone will be insufficient. Combining kinetic, physical barrier, and cyber measures against tethered platforms will be required when they appear in an operational area.

Operational takeaways and practical recommendations

1) Assume spectrum denial will be layered and multi-modal. Plan comms and navigation with multiple fallbacks: hardened GNSS augmentation, inertial dead-reckoning with periodic RF or optical fixes, and low-data-rate spread-spectrum links if available.

2) Prioritise modularity in EW capability. Software-defined radios, containerised signal processing, and open APIs reduce upgrade cycles and allow tailored emitter libraries to be pushed to forward units faster.

3) Harden logistics for massed small EW systems. The move toward many small jammers and sensors shifts the bottleneck to batteries, spare RF front-ends, and antenna spares. Tactically, that means more distributed sustainment nodes and simple, standardized repair kits.

4) Prepare to counter non-RF solutions. Training and tactics must include detection and defeat of tethered/fiber-optic platforms. Simple physical counters are often the most effective when the electromagnetic spectrum is not available.

5) Observe legal and safety constraints. Many of the new EW tools operate in bands that are tightly regulated. Civilian hobbyists and researchers should avoid field experimentation that risks interference with safety-of-life services or draws legal liability.

What to watch next (near term)

  • Continued Ukrainian iterative fielding as combat feedback drives new EW variants. Official approvals and industry tie-ups suggest more capability will ship from local manufacturers.
  • Further productisation and integration plays at trade shows translating into procurement announcements among European allies. The Altra–SitaWare integration is a good example of this trajectory.
  • Proliferation of RF-immune control methods for UAS and naval drones, and the consequent need for non-EW counters. Tethered, fiber-optic, or optical line-of-sight control schemes are likely to appear more often in littoral and urban environments.

Bottom line

Q3 2025 reinforced an operational reality: the electromagnetic spectrum is contested everywhere and continuously. The practical response we saw was not one big leap but multiple smaller, pragmatic innovations end-to-end. For tacticians that means focusing on resilience, modular upgrades, and mixed-effect counters. For engineers it points to the highest leverage areas: low-latency edge processing, open integration standards, and rugged, field-replaceable RF hardware.