Wars of vulnerability

A paradox of military innovation is shaping conflicts across the globe. The more sophisticated and autonomous military technologies become, the greater the effort needed to develop a means of disabling them. Technology that neutralizes communications, radars and navigation systems has become as valuable as drones and AI warfare that already reduce human presence and decision-making in ground offensives, expanding the war environment to the electromagnetic spectrum and space. The vocabulary of this strategy has transcended beyond expert military circles and now permeates political discourse as a means of projecting power. In February 2026, shortly after American troops attacked Venezuela to capture its then dictator, Nicolás Maduro, US President Donald Trump boasted about a secret weapon, which he called the ‘discombobulator’. Judging from Trump’s elliptical remarks to soldiers at Fort Bragg, the weapon’s alleged ability to disrupt Chinese and Russian anti-aircraft radar systems played a crucial role in the operation’s success. Although the details of the weapon remain unclear, the framing of military power as the capacity to disable an adversary’s technological systems was central to the narrative. The disruption of communications and its reinvention have also been a defining feature of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine since February 2022. With Russia targeting Ukraine’s internet and telecommunications infrastructure, Starlink satellite internet, with its portable terminals well suited for drone operations, has emerged as a crucial component of Ukraine’s counter warfare. As a result, Starlink’s owner, Elon Musk, has gained significant power, being the sole person in control of either permitting or denying access, influencing the overall course of the war. While only one means of enabling drone warfare, satellite internet has a significant advantage in contemporary warfare: it enables navigation that operates independently of the electromagnetic spectrum. Drones that rely on radio-frequency communications are easier to neutralize as their signals can be jammed with existing technology. Simply producing large numbers of drones does not guarantee a military advantage if their navigation systems remain vulnerable to disruption. The pattern of seeking vulnerabilities in an enemy’s advanced communication and control systems does not consist of scattered examples of contemporary ingenuity, however. Rather it reaffirms a major shift in military thinking that originated with Cold War strategists, who framed and prepared for future conflicts as ‘wars of vulnerability’. Cold War technological imaginaries In the aftermath of the Gulf War, French philosopher Paul Virilio published his 1992 essay examining the rapid transformation of military technology during the first major post-Cold War campaign. Virilio examined a long list of newly deployed American capabilities, including computerized weapons, real-time intelligence and surveillance systems, and what he called ‘pure weapons’ designed to ‘paralyze the enemy’ without extensive bombardment. He argued that advances in military technology shifted strategic attention from geography to the electromagnetic spectrum, rendering traditional distinctions such as offense and defence, or front and rear action, increasingly obsolete. To capture the essence of this emerging American strategic doctrine, Virilio unexpectedly quoted a Soviet commander, attributing to Admiral Sergey Gorshkov the observation that ‘the winner of the next war will be the side that made the most of the electromagnetic spectrum.’ So, how did Soviet and American military imaginaries converge over the course of the Cold War? The Soviet navy was perhaps the military institution most intensely preoccupied with the future of warfare during the Cold War. It faced the challenge of modernizing what had long been regarded as Russia’s weakest military branch. Cadets at Russian naval academies traditionally began their study of modern naval warfare with the humiliation of the Russo-Japanese War; unlike their British or American counterparts, they had few stories of naval triumph to draw upon. Admiral Sergey Gorshkov, Commander-in-Chief of the Soviet Navy, devoted his long career to reversing this legacy. He secured political support first from Nikita Khrushchev and later from Leonid Brezhnev for an ambitious expansion of Soviet naval power overseas, compensating for the geopolitical limitations of a predominantly land-based empire. The establishment of a Soviet naval base in Egypt in 1955, intended as a permanent presence in the Mediterranean, exemplified this broader strategy. At the same time, the development of computer technologies allowed the Soviet navy to dream even bigger. Naval science embraced the language and visions of cybernetics. Former admiral Aksel Berg, the doyen of the field, promoted the use of computers and algorithms for the optimal control of naval units, a testing ground in support of the ultimate political goal – perfecting the communist planned economy and society. In this context, the navy established one of the first computational centres under the Ministry of Defence. Only during the last decade before the collapse of communism did it become apparent that the poor quality of domestic computer production could not fulfil the cybernetic dreams that had haunted the Soviet military imagination in the 1960s and 1970s. Besides the promises of technological modernization and naval expansion, there was a third and ultimately decisive factor that shaped Sergey Gorshkov’s view: he witnessed how the most advanced military technology in world history had failed to help the American army win the Vietnam War. Soon after his American counterparts withdrew from Vietnam in humiliation, Gorshkov published a book in English titled The Sea Power of the State. The technologically backward and strategically weaker state now dared to address the American military establishment on equal terms. A significant part of the book examines the history of the Russian imperial navy, criticizing the strategic failure to rely predominantly on land forces while neglecting the shipbuilding technologies necessary to compete in global maritime trade and naval warfare. Gorshkov saw his own time as a rare historical opportunity for the Soviet fleet to turn the tide. His hope lay in technology too but for naval prowess. Gorshkov argued that maritime forces increasingly relied on radio electronics and that future developments would lead to the automation of ship systems and weapons control. According to him, this tendency would shape a growing range of weapons systems across all branches of the military and ultimately contribute to the overall balance of battlefield forces. ‘Superiority in the field of development of military radio electronics is becoming one of the essential conditions for military superiority over an enemy,’ reads Gorshkov’s prediction in a chapter dedicated to the future of warfare. In the next sentence, he introduces the important notion of ‘vulnerability’: ‘However, while raising the combat potential of forces and weapons, radio electronics at the same time is making the systems of means of control more vulnerable to the action of the enemy.’ He expounds that this was not merely an abstract proposition using the Vietnam War as an example of a conflict in which combatants introduced weapons designed to disrupt electronic signals. Gorshkov was outlining the contours of future wars by emphasizing the dynamic relationship between technological development and vulnerability. But was this his original idea? Radar jamming precedents Rather than introducing the concept, Gorshkov had recognized the potential of an already existing trend. Six years before his book was published, a team of Soviet naval engineers had already discussed the principles of the emerging discipline of ‘radioelectronic combat’. Their writing explains the central tension between technological development and vulnerability via a formulation that would later become a foundational axiom: ‘While increasing the combat capabilities of forces and weapons, radio electronics at the same time makes systems of control more vulnerable to enemy influence.’ To explain what disrupting communications meant in practice, the Soviets cited the book Principles of Electronic Warfare. Published in 1961, it was one of the first comprehensive studies of electronic warfare, co-authored by engineers and mathematicians affiliated with the Convair division of General Dynamics Corporation, a company with a history of producing Second World War bombers and which remains a major American producer of advanced military equipment. The book was published as part of a series on space technology designed to provide space engineers with existing knowledge of conflicts in the electromagnetic spectrum. The authors focused on the strategic uses of ‘jamming’, a method of transmitting noise on an enemy’s radar or radio communication frequencies, making it impossible to obtain reliable information from the battlefield. Drawing on Claude Shannon’s information theory conceptual apparatus of ‘signal’ and ‘noise,’ they stressed that the main problem of electronic warfare engineers was to develop tools capable of distinguishing useful information from the battlefield from enemy attacks involving deliberately transmitted ‘noise.’ As the American technical experts explained, completely ‘noiseless channels’ rarely exist, and the goal of electronic warfare is to deprive the enemy of the full capabilities of its systems by deliberately adding noise that overwhelms communication frequencies, rendering weapons control unreliable. The authors predicted that such dynamics would introduce a new dimension of war with notions of ‘radiation’ and ‘detection’ serving as equivalents of the classical concepts of ‘offense’ and ‘defence.’ The book focuses on more abstract philosophies, strategies, and predictions concerning the future of electronic warfare involving space satellites. For security reasons, the authors omitted descriptions of specific weapons. Nevertheless, Soviet naval experts grasped the book’s significance, and it found its way into specialized libraries after crossing the Iron Curtain, most probably through intelligence networks. What is distinctive about the Soviet reading in this case is its focus on ‘vulnerability’. While Americans imagined the contours of advanced equipment for wars in the electromagnetic spectrum and space, the Soviets chose to focus instead on the conclusion that even the most advanced weapons had an inherent weakness – a condition ripe for future electronic clashes. It is unsurprising that Soviet military borrowed from Western sources. The idea of seeking vulnerabilities in an enemy’s advanced use of technology long predates the Cold War and was developed alongside modern radar technology itself during the Second World War. American historian and philosopher of science Peter Galison argues that the history of radar was intimately linked with the military ‘ontology of the enemy’. Galison examines the case of a team led by the mathematician Norbert Wiener that developed antiaircraft radar systems designed to destroy Nazi aircraft by predicting the trajectories set by enemy pilots. Radar technology thus became part of broader efforts to gather feedback about the behaviour of ‘man-machine enemies’. At the same time, wartime scientists explored ways of interfering with radar navigation systems. Since the Nazi air force relied on radio-based navigation for night-time operations and attacks even in poor weather, the British responded by jamming enemy frequencies and developing techniques to mislead hostile pilots by transmitting false target coordinates. In his memoir, British physicist Reginald Victor Jones, one of the leading scientists in the ‘battle of the beams’, describes the invention of radar jamming techniques as emerging from a synergy between military and civilian technologies. Jones explains the logic of jamming through an analogy with loudspeakers and microphones: ‘The effect would be rather like that which occurs in public address systems where the noise from the loudspeakers impinges on the original microphone, and is therefore picked up and relayed back to the loudspeakers again. The effect on the ground station would be to make it think that the aircraft was at a false distance.’ The powerful BBC television transmitter at Alexandra Palace was subsequently incorporated into the system for jamming enemy radio beams and protecting London from Nazi bombers. Electronic warfare one-upmanship Although deliberate disruption of military communications can be traced back to the Second World War, the Cold War introduced a significant shift. Whereas wartime interference with enemy equipment helped win battles through ingenuity, trial and error, and innovation, the post-war period witnessed the systematic institutionalization of a new discipline, known in the US as ‘electronic warfare’ and in the Soviet Union as ‘radioelectronic combat’. This development was not only a response to the growing automation of warfare systems and its increasing reliance on radar control but also reflected a political commitment to invest in a new warfare dimension, which ultimately contributed to the emergence of a shared military convention across Cold War rivalries. Wars of vulnerability exemplified how technology shaped politics and how politics, in return, shaped technology, its uses and the ways it was imagined. Such techno-political visions of electronic warfare developed simultaneously through military intelligence. US naval officers closely monitored military trends among their Soviet counterparts and reported that their adversaries were preparing for wars in ‘the fourth dimension’, warning that the electromagnetic spectrum should be added to the classical three dimensions of warfare: land, sea and air. American naval officers feared that despite their military’s lead in post-war electronic warfare, the Soviets had proved capable of learning from American innovation and experience. This assessment let them to conclude that NATO had to be prepared for considerable Soviet advances in ‘multifaceted’ electronic warfare. Such concerns were well founded. As historian of intelligence Christopher Andrew concludes, the Eastern bloc achieved asymmetric success in the field of scientific and technological intelligence over the course of the ideological conflict because the Soviet Union had an enormous amount to learn from the US defence industry, which proved easier to penetrate than the US federal government. This provides an important context for understanding how Soviet naval science had moved well beyond abstract discussions of the principles of electronic warfare. Engineers from the Soviet fleet received intelligence on specific American electronic warfare technologies, which, in turn, generated new anxieties about NATO’s capacity for innovation. The materiality of existing US naval technology underpinned Soviet strategic thinking. A Soviet naval study entitled ‘How the NATO Fleet Is Preparing for a Radioelectronic War’, for instance, outlines key jamming technologies tested by Western militaries in the 1970s. All of these systems exploited noise interference as a weapon in electromagnetic conflict. Soviet naval engineers monitored how US naval research devoted particular attention to hydroacoustics, for instance. In the official journal of the Soviet Navy, they systematically analysed the technical equipment developed under the American Jezebel programme, which used sonobuoys to detect submarines through underwater acoustics. The Soviet navy likewise described NATO electronic warfare systems, citing specific examples such as the AN/SLQ-17, a shipborne jamming transmitter designed to overwhelm enemy communication frequencies. More sophisticated systems, such as the AN/ULQ-5, were intended to distort enemy radar by generating false information about the location of naval targets. The latter examples testify to the success of scientific and technological intelligence, which provided the Soviet Navy with up-to-date information on advanced US weapons and their production. At the same time, the fact that such intelligence did not remain confined to the offices of national security experts but circulated freely through a journal designed for Warsaw Pact military academies demonstrated how electronic warfare had reached the status of a mainstream military discipline. Soviet naval engineers occasionally publicized their own innovations in communications technology to a broad audience. In 1970, the illustrated popular magazine Ogonek published a photograph of the ship Cosmonaut Vladimir Komarov as a showcase for cutting-edge communications systems. Enormous spherical radomes, installed to protect the vessel’s complex antennas from sea storms, gave it a futuristic appearance. Celebrating advances in Soviet communications technology, an official from the Ministry of Communications used the image of this unusual ship to illustrate an article praising satellite connectivity. The vessel even contained a studio equipped for space communications during experimental ocean voyages far from Soviet shores. This propaganda image leads us to a story about how nature and geopolitics shaped communications within the Soviet space programme. The ship’s impressive antenna equipment obscured the fact that geopolitical constraints had, in fact, prompted its creation. Felix Meschansky, the leading Soviet specialist in space radio communication, recalls the origins of the problem in an oral history interview with historian Slava Gerovitch: ‘In the late 1960s, we faced a problem. The most efficient location for space antennas is the Earth’s equator. The Soviet territory is much farther north, and this limits the area of the sky open to observation. After the Cuban Missile Crisis, we could not install our antennas in Cuba; our relations with China were not good, so we could not place the antennas there either. Then the decision was made to build a special antenna-carrying ship. The first such ship was Cosmonaut Komarov.’ Such natural disadvantages and geopolitical constraints led to Soviet investment in technologies for ‘deep space communication’ through sea-based antenna complexes. These, in turn, resulted in the first experimental onboard stations used to control Soviet and, respectively, track American space probes. Combat controlled from space Innovation in space satellite technology has also shaped debates in electronic warfare. Experts in the field describe ‘the conquest of space’ as ‘the newest dimension for the conduct of warfare’. From their perspective, the motivation for further innovation was practical: the search for an alternative to the electromagnetic spectrum, conducive to reliable communications, resistant to adversary interference. As early as the 1960s, satellite technology inspired the first speculations about future ‘space combat’. Military engineers recognized satellites as a potential solution to the two persistent problems of the limited and unreliable high-frequency spectrum: atmospheric noise and jamming. In the field of electronic warfare, a pressing question emerged: Can satellite communications also be jammed? Even before any practical experience with space interference existed, electronic warfare experts presented mathematical models of possible satellite-jammer configurations, according to which ‘there seems to be nothing inherent in the satellite system that provides immunity from jamming.’ Such cautious observations were overshadowed by a fascination for cutting-edge innovation, but they have become increasingly relevant today, now that satellite infrastructure offers a significant advantage of greater precision over noisy radio communications. Viewed in the broader context of the historical development of military thought, attacks on or attempts to undermine satellite infrastructure designated as the ‘enemy’ are far from unexpected. Following the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, knowledge of electronic warfare had extended well beyond the domain of its early proponents in the navy. All branches of the armed forces recognized the discipline as strategically important. The end of the Cold War did not bring an end to electronic warfare. The field continues to flourish, adapting to a more complex warfare environment in which electronic and digital communications coexist and face increasing attacks. Although the technologies have changed, the strategic objective has remained remarkably consistent. The Cold War framing of technological vulnerability demonstrates that American and Soviet navies did not find a straightforward solution to the paradox that even the most advanced vessel could be neutralized through a successful attack targeting communications on the open seas. But they understood that this paradox of innovation not only gives potential leverage to technologically backward units but also unleashes a constant urge to broaden the dimensions of war beyond land, sea and air – the three realms that have absorbed destructive wars for millennia. The early military expansion into the arenas of the electromagnetic spectrum and space reveals that ground-breaking technological developments are closely linked to the political imagination of future wars.