Report 037 · Defense Tech
Every counter-drone story is written from the drone's point of view: did the jammer stop it. There is a second question nobody asks in the brochure, and it is the one that ruined a lot of afternoons in Iraq. What else did that jammer stop? With NATO committing $40 billion to counter-drone gear, a Counter-IED officer on electronic fratricide.
A jammer is not a shield. That is the mental model almost everyone brings to it, including a lot of people who buy them: a bubble of protection around the vehicle, keeping bad signals out. It is the wrong picture, and the wrong picture is where the trouble starts.
A jammer is a transmitter. It works by flooding a slice of the radio spectrum with enough noise that a receiver tuned to that slice cannot pull a usable signal out of it. That is the entire mechanism. And a transmitter has no idea whose receiver it is hitting. It does not know that this antenna belongs to a triggerman and that one belongs to the medic in the second truck. It radiates, and every receiver inside its footprint, on the frequencies it covers, has a worse day than it would have had otherwise. When those receivers are yours, the profession calls it electronic fratricide.
I was a Counter-IED and electronic warfare officer, which means my working life was spent around Counter Radio-Controlled IED Electronic Warfare systems, CREW for short. They were bolted onto vehicles to deny the radio links that set off roadside bombs. They saved lives. They also, in the early years, did exactly what the physics predicts.
This is not a war story I am asking you to take on faith. It is documented. A 2011 Center for Public Integrity investigation into the counter-IED program found, in plain language, that "in some cases, the CREW jammers jammed the radio communications of the units they were trying to protect." The same reporting notes the jammers "also interfered with the electronic systems on vehicles, such as GPS devices, and the radio-control links to unarmed aerial vehicles," and cites a 2006 Congressional Research Service finding that some troops "had to choose between turning off their radios or turning off their jammers."
In some cases, the CREW jammers jammed the radio communications of the units they were trying to protect.
Read that choice again, because it is the whole subject in one sentence. Turn off the jammer and you may be driving over a radio-detonated bomb. Turn off the radio and you cannot call for help, coordinate, or report. Neither option is defense. Both are a bill someone did not budget for.
The government's own auditors documented the same class of problem. A 2009 Government Accountability Office review of counter-IED efforts, GAO-10-95, describes the CREW Vehicle Receiver/Jammer needing at least twenty configuration changes after contract award, among them one where, in GAO's words, "another change was needed to prevent the jammer from interfering with vehicle global positioning systems." A device fielded to protect the vehicle was degrading the vehicle's own navigation.
Here is the part the marketing never covers, because it is a physics problem rather than a quality problem. Jamming trades on three quantities, and you cannot maximize all of them.
The first is bandwidth. A narrow, precisely-targeted jammer only denies the frequency it sits on, which is polite to everyone else and useless the moment the threat hops somewhere new. So real systems go wide, sweeping or barraging across a band, and the wider you go the more of your own spectrum you are standing on. Everything modern that a unit depends on lives in that same crowded neighborhood: tactical radios, GPS at roughly 1.2 and 1.5 gigahertz, Wi-Fi and video downlinks around 2.4 and 5.8, cellular. A jammer broad enough to catch an unknown drone link is broad enough to catch several of those by accident.
The second is power. Radio energy falls off with distance, roughly as the inverse square in open air, which means the only reliable way to overwhelm a receiver a kilometer away is to be violently loud at one meter. Your own antennas are the ones at one meter. This is the near-far problem, and it is why the friendly system closest to the jammer is usually the first casualty, well before the threat notices anything.
The third is knowledge. A jammer can be selective only if it knows what to spare, and knowing what to spare requires a live, accurate picture of which friendly emitters are operating on which frequencies, where, and when. That picture is a staff product, not a hardware feature. It is exactly what spectrum management and deconfliction exist to produce, and it degrades the instant something unplanned shows up, which in combat is constantly.
Put those together and the conclusion is uncomfortable but honest: some amount of self-interference is not a defect in a jammer, it is the cost of operating one. The engineering question is never whether you will pay it. It is how much, who decides, and whether anyone told the people it will land on.
On July 7, 2026, NATO announced at its Summit Defence Industry Forum that "over 40 billion dollars will be invested in counter-drone capabilities over the next five years," alongside a plan to "train five times as many drone operators by the end of 2027" and to stand up a counter-drone marketplace ensuring systems are "NATO-tested, NATO-compatible, and available for purchase."
I want to be careful here, because this is a good and necessary investment. I have argued in this publication that million-dollar interceptors cannot be the answer to twenty-thousand-dollar drones, and cheap electronic attack is a large part of the honest alternative. The concern is not that NATO is buying jammers. It is the shape of the buy.
Forty billion dollars of counter-drone capability does not arrive as a dozen carefully sited installations run by spectrum specialists. It arrives as thousands of emitters distributed down to vehicles, squads, fixed sites, and airfields, bought through a marketplace optimized for speed and compatibility, and operated largely by people whose job title is not electronic warfare. That is precisely the pattern that produced electronic fratricide the first time. The CREW problem was never that the engineers were foolish. It was that a large number of powerful transmitters got pushed to the lowest echelon faster than the expertise and the deconfliction process could follow.
The units learning this in real time seem to understand it. Writing in Small Wars Journal in May 2026 on how Ukraine has distributed electronic warfare to the tactical level, Captain Daine Van de Wall observes that "Ukrainian UAS teams preparing to support an offensive operation must first conduct deliberate spectrum analysis to determine which frequencies are being jammed and reconfigure their UAS and communications equipment accordingly." His conclusion is that "spectrum awareness is a core skill for all Ukrainian tactical leaders," and that every leader must understand "what operates in the spectrum around them, how to minimize their own signature, and how to read shifts in the EW environment as tactical indicators." Note what that implies. If you have to survey the spectrum before every operation to find out what is jammed, some of what is jamming you is on your side.
If you are evaluating a counter-drone system, whether for a brigade or a data center or a stadium, the datasheet will tell you effective range and which bands it covers. Neither number answers the thing you need to know. Four better questions:
What else lives in the bands you are about to deny? Inventory your own dependencies first, including the boring ones. Site radios, building Wi-Fi, telemetry, the GPS timing reference that half your infrastructure quietly uses for synchronization. You cannot deconflict a spectrum you have never surveyed.
Is the response reactive or continuous? A system that detects first and transmits only at a specific threat, on a specific frequency, for a specific few seconds, causes a fraction of the collateral interference of one that barrages a band continuously. It is also harder to build and easier to defeat. That is a real tradeoff, and it should be made deliberately rather than discovered later.
Who owns the deconfliction, and do they have authority? Someone has to hold the frequency picture and be able to tell an operator to turn a system off. If that role does not exist on your org chart, your deconfliction plan is hope.
What happens when it fails? Assume the jammer degrades your own comms at the worst moment. What is the fallback: a different band, wired links, a runner? The units that came through the CREW era in one piece were the ones with an answer that did not depend on the spectrum.
Electronic warfare is one of the few domains where your weapon and your vulnerability are the same physical thing. The energy you put into the air to deny the enemy is the same energy your own receivers have to live inside. Nobody markets a jammer that way, because "this device will also degrade some of your systems some of the time" is a hard line to put on a brochure, even though it is true of every jammer ever built, including the good ones.
So when the next wave of counter-drone systems arrives, and it is arriving now, do not just ask whether it stops the drone. Ask what it costs you to run it. In the counter-IED fight we learned that answer the expensive way, one convoy at a time, and it is written down for anyone who cares to read it. The gear is new. The physics has not moved.
U.S. Army combat veteran (Counter-IED / Electronic Warfare), peer-reviewed researcher in microwave spectroscopy, and founder & CEO of Shroombiosis. Consults on laboratory operations, AI, and supplement formulation.