Why EW effects look different in a targeting cycle
Joint targeting doctrine (JP 3-60, Joint Targeting, 31 January 2013 edition) organizes the process into a six-phase joint targeting cycle: end state and commander's objectives, target development and prioritization, capabilities analysis, commander's decision and force assignment, mission planning and force execution, and assessment. Execution against emerging or time-sensitive targets is handled through the dynamic targeting steps of find, fix, track, target, engage, and assess (F2T2EA). A target is identified and nominated, approved through an engagement authority process, assigned to an effector, engaged, and assessed. Although doctrine calls for integrating lethal and nonlethal capabilities, its weaponeering practices are, as JP 3-60 describes them, more developed to support munitions than nonlethal actions. The practical effect is a cycle built around physical events with observable indicators: a destroyed vehicle, a damaged runway, an asset that stops appearing in subsequent ISR collection.
Electronic warfare operates differently in three specific ways.
Non-destructive EW effects are temporary. A jamming effect suppresses an adversary radar for the duration of the emission from a platform maintaining its position and power output. An electronic deception redirects an adversary sensor during the active engagement window. The effect ends when the platform repositions, when the adversary adapts, or when the EW resource is committed to a different task. There is no physical residue. (Directed-energy and other destructive forms of electromagnetic attack are the exception: JP 3-85 (22 May 2020) treats electromagnetic attack as a form of fires that can produce lethal effects. This section addresses the far more common non-destructive case.) This is not a deficiency; it is how EW works. But it means the assessment phase of the joint targeting cycle (and the assess step of F2T2EA)—which assumes a persistent, observable change in target state—does not directly map onto EW effects.
EW effect confirmation is probabilistic. With a kinetic strike, battle damage assessment works from observable indicators. With an EW effect, the adversary radar or communication link may have simply stopped emitting for another reason, or may have been suppressed only partially. Confirming that the effect was achieved requires either direct intelligence collection on the adversary's behavior or inference from correlated observations. That confirmation uncertainty is a design requirement for the targeting support systems representing the effect.
EW deconfliction is combinatorial, not exclusive. Kinetic fires targeting assumes mutual exclusivity: once a target is destroyed, it cannot be assigned again. EW effects are not mutually exclusive. Multiple EW platforms can simultaneously contribute to suppressing the same adversary emitter; a kinetic effector can strike a target that an EW effect has already suppressed; an EW effect on one frequency band may not address the adversary's backup emitter on another. The deconfliction logic for a mixed-effects engagement is fundamentally different from kinetic-only deconfliction, and commercially available targeting support tools built around the kinetic model were not designed to represent it.
The classification constraint
The more significant structural obstacle is classification. Most EW operations—particularly those involving specific waveforms, frequencies, electronic order of battle data, and exploitation techniques—are classified at levels that prevent their inclusion in common operational picture systems accessible to the full joint force.
The practical consequence: a fires coordinator working from a joint operations center may have full visibility on planned kinetic fires that have gone through the targeting cycle but no visibility on EW effects simultaneously planned or active in the same target area. From their picture, those effects are invisible. This creates real deconfliction risk. A kinetic strike planned without knowledge of an active EW operation may be timed in ways that complicate the EW platform's mission, or an EW effect may be terminated because the fires coordinator asked for something that the EW system's operator—in a separate classified channel—knows creates a conflict.
Joint doctrine on electromagnetic spectrum operations (JP 3-85, Joint Electromagnetic Spectrum Operations, 22 May 2020 edition) establishes the requirement for integrating EMS operations with joint fires and other warfighting functions. Public release copies of these publications are no longer posted on jcs.mil (the JCS site directs readers to the CAC-restricted JEL+ library), so they are cited here from the 2013 and 2020 editions. The practical implementation—how EW effects actually appear in systems accessible to fires coordinators without exposing classified technique information—is an active architecture problem that doctrine establishes the need for but does not resolve at the system design level.
DoD's own Electromagnetic Spectrum Superiority Strategy points the same way, calling for timely, decision-quality information at varying levels of classification. The information a fires coordinator actually needs is separable from the classified technique details. Knowing that an EW effect is active in a target area, its planned temporal window, its spatial footprint, and which platform owns it does not require revealing waveform parameters or exploitation methods. Designing that separation requires deliberate architecture decisions about what information lives at what classification level. Those decisions belong in the system architecture document, not in the judgment calls of individual operators managing two classification domains simultaneously at operational tempo.
Timescale mismatch
Deliberate targeting operates on a cycle of days. JP 3-30 (25 July 2019) describes the full joint air tasking cycle, from joint force commander guidance to the start of air tasking order execution, as commonly about 72 hours; time-sensitive targeting compresses that cycle to minutes in specific contexts, but the process still involves staff coordination across multiple nodes. The authorization chain for effects—engagement authority confirmation, rules of engagement check, collateral damage estimation—was designed around a deliberate tempo.
Most EW effects do not operate on deliberate timescales. A Growler crew, for example, may adapt emissions within seconds of a radar threat change; a ground-based jamming system countering an inbound UAS swarm may need to shift frequencies in under a minute. These adaptation decisions happen at the platform level because the threat does not wait for staff process. That is the right design. The problem is not making EW effects slower. The problem is representing those effects in the joint fires picture in a way that enables coordination without requiring the EW execution cycle to pause for staff authorization.
That requires a data model for effects that handles two things the kinetic model does not: temporal states (planned, active, suspended, concluded) that update continuously at platform tempo without requiring a new authorization action for each update, and a representation of resource availability that tells a fires coordinator whether a given EW asset is committed elsewhere, without exposing the details of that commitment. The architecture that satisfies both requirements is solvable but requires explicit design. In Spartan X's assessment, this requirement is rarely stated explicitly in publicly available JADC2 program descriptions; program offices should check whether their own specifications state it.
Where programs are working on this
The Air Force's Advanced Battle Management System is the Department of the Air Force's contribution to DoD's JADC2 effort (GAO-23-105495, January 2023). As of GAO's January 2023 review, the Air Force had defined two ABMS efforts (Capability Release 1 and cloud-based command and control) but, in GAO's words, had "not delivered any capabilities to date." Its multi-domain demonstrations are a natural place to look for lessons on representing non-kinetic effects, but public reporting reviewed for this article does not document how EW effects were represented in them.
Bold Quest, the Joint Staff-sponsored Coalition Capability Demonstration and Assessment series, which aims to improve coalition interoperability and information sharing for identifying and engaging targets, is the natural venue for testing this in a multinational setting, where classification constraints are more acute because allied partners operate under different releasability rules. Programs should check whether recent Bold Quest iterations included EW-fires coordination objectives before assuming lessons exist.
The Army's Multi-Domain Task Forces are described by the Congressional Research Service as theater-level maneuver elements "designed to synchronize precision effects and precision fires in all domains," and include a Multi-Domain Effects Battalion (CRS IF11797, updated May 2026). The same report notes a planned command that would share fires, space, electronic warfare, cyber and intelligence capabilities across the theater, which makes the unit-level data connection between EW and fires a live design question.
What program offices need to specify
Programs that describe EW integration as a future increment are deferring three design problems that are harder to retrofit than to build in from the start.
An effects representation model for temporary, probabilistic effects. Targeting support systems represent effects as scheduled events with binary outcomes. An EW effects model needs to represent temporal duration, update continuously as platform state changes, and communicate confidence in whether the effect is being achieved—particularly against an adaptive adversary that may be responding. That model is a data architecture decision affecting every system component that represents effects. It cannot be added to an existing targeting system without touching the data layer those components share.
A classification separation architecture. The information a fires coordinator needs—effect active, temporal window, area, owning platform—is separable from the technique details that must remain in classified channels. Designing that separation requires explicit decisions about which attributes live in a joint effects layer versus service-specific command channels. Those decisions belong in the architecture document, and they need to be made early enough that both the fires coordination system and the EW command channel are built to exchange the same structured data. Ad hoc coordination procedures between separate systems produce the kind of friction that kills combined-arms timing under operational stress.
Training scenarios that include EW effects as inputs to fires coordination decisions. Operations center training that presents only kinetic fires coordination produces operators who understand kinetic fires coordination. If EW effects are part of the operational picture, the operations center needs people trained on scenarios where EW asset availability, timing, and effectiveness are variables in the fires decision—including the cases where the EW effect is terminated early, where the adversary adapts, and where the planned EW window does not cover the kinetic strike window. This is an exercise design requirement, not a live-system requirement, and it is cheap to address early.
What changes this assessment
These requirements apply in full to programs operating in contested, multi-domain environments where EW is part of a coordinated joint effects plan.
A program explicitly scoped to kinetic fires only, with EW handled through separate command channels and no requirement to present EW effects in the fires coordinator's picture, does not need the effects representation or classification architecture described here. It does need documented coordination procedures between its operators and the parallel EW command channel. That is a workable design choice if it is deliberate—it is not workable if it is the product of an assumption that someone else will solve the integration problem.
A program operating in a permissive environment where EW is primarily platform self-protection rather than an active joint targeting effect faces a simpler integration requirement. The timescale and classification constraints described here are significant when EW is part of the deliberate fires plan; they are much smaller when the EW element is only protecting the platforms executing the kinetic strike.
Sources and further reading
- JP 3-60, Joint Targeting (31 January 2013 public edition) — Joint Chiefs of Staff; defines the joint targeting cycle and the F2T2EA dynamic targeting steps. Public release copies are no longer posted on jcs.mil.
- JP 3-85, Joint Electromagnetic Spectrum Operations (22 May 2020) — Joint Chiefs of Staff; treats electromagnetic attack as a form of fires and addresses its integration through the joint targeting coordination board.
- JP 3-30, Joint Air Operations (25 July 2019) — Joint Chiefs of Staff; describes the joint air tasking cycle and the standard 72-hour cycle.
- DoD Electromagnetic Spectrum Superiority Strategy (signed September 2020; released October 2020) — DoD framework for competitive EMS operations, including decision-quality information at varying levels of classification and cognitive EW development.
- GAO-23-105495, Battle Management: DOD and Air Force Continue to Define Joint Command and Control Efforts — GAO, January 2023; describes ABMS as the Air Force's contribution to JADC2.
- GAO-21-64 — GAO, December 2020; its report on DoD's EMS superiority efforts, which dates the strategy to September 2020.
- CRS IF11797, The Army's Multi-Domain Task Force — Congressional Research Service, updated May 2026.
Spartan X works on AI systems designed for contested, DDIL environments—the conditions where EW integration matters most. The architecture problems the EW-JADC2 gap represents—effects data models that handle uncertainty and continuous state updates, multi-layer systems that operate across classification boundaries, and AI infrastructure that maintains useful output when network conditions degrade—are the same problems Spartan X addresses for edge AI, C2 infrastructure, and multi-model verification. The fires coordination problem and the AI assurance problem share an underlying structure: both require systems that remain operationally useful when conditions do not match the nominal design case.
