May 19, 2026: The American army fails when it comes to ELINT/Electronic Intelligence. This is a self-imposed form of ineptitude that will result in American defeats when it comes to drone use in wartime. This has been obvious since the American forces abandoned the use of jamming equipment after the Cold War ended in 1991. American military leaders eliminated EW units and EWOs/ELectronic Warfare Officers attached to combat divisions, declaring that Air Force and Navy EW aircraft could substitute for the missing army EW units. All this made American ground combat units extremely vulnerable.

Efforts to develop drone interceptors were abandoned because the American legislature refused to fund these efforts. At the same time successful Ukrainian use of drone interceptors against Russian attacks succeeded. This was because Ukraine employed a mixture of jammers, ELINT, FPV/First Person View and continuous assembly of new drones and associated equipment.

The Ukrainians encouraged Americans to create EW units and train with them, while also integrating EW with division and brigade size units that could provide counter-drone expertise using trained drone and EW operators. That still hasn’t happened.

These problems are nothing new, five years ago American flag officers pointed out that their forces were woefully susceptible to Chinese and Russian EW munitions during wartime. Recent wargames accurately demonstrating these enemy capabilities finally got enough attention from senior commanders to make a serious effort to deal with the problem. Subsequent wargames showed that China could shut down most American satellite and ground-based electronic communications and make American forces much more vulnerable than expected. This was not a new problem. For over two decades similar realistic wargames demonstrated this growing vulnerability, but the senior military leadership did not respond realistically or even admit there was a problem. There was, and it’s been around for over half a century.

The Americans had long ignored the capabilities of enemy electronic weapons. This was common during the Cold War, when NATO and Soviet Union forces confronted each other along the Central European border. This border divided Western Europe from Russian occupied East Europe from the late 1940s until the late 1980s. While NATO air forces and navies took Russian electronic weapons seriously and often tested their aircraft to test their ability to handle Russian electronic jamming and other electronic weapons, the ground forces rarely tested, much less used these electronic weapons during training. NATO commanders may have ignored the problem but occasionally lower-ranking soldiers would accidently turn on their electronic jammers during a training exercise, causing chaos among American forces. Jammers were not supposed to be used during training because they would disrupt NATO communications and this problem was dismissed because a fix was always in the works. This seemed absurd to many NATO troops and commanders because it was known, from unclassified sources, that Russian troops trained to fight in a heavily jammed environment. That meant that Russian troops followed war plans that were not dependent on reliable electronic communications at all times, while their opponents tended to be unprepared. By the 1980s NATO forces finally took steps to deal with this problem and this bothered Russian commanders a great deal.

In the 21st century satellite surveillance and communications are crucial. China has taken the lead in developing methods for disrupting enemy access to these satellite resources and minimizing the damage done to Chinese satellite capabilities. The Chinese are also emulating the Cold War Russian forces and training to continue operating under conditions where communications and aerial/satellite surveillance is diminished or absent.

Recent American wargames accurately displayed these problems. Learning from the previous instances where these problems were dismissed, the wargame developers provided lots of documentation, most of it classified, to back up the wargame portrayal of the threat and its impact. Attention has been paid, but it remains to be seen if remedies will be found and applied in time. Another lesson learned during the Cold War was that you go to war with the forces you have, not the ones you are developing for use sometime in the future.

American forces will be at a tremendous and probably fatal disadvantage if a war with China over Taiwan in the next few years.