By Soumya Awasthi
The US-Israel war on Iran is being fought with missiles and drones, but some of the most consequential battles have remained invisible. The electromagnetic spectrum has emerged as a primary domain of strategic competition, operating beneath the threshold of declared hostilities while producing effects of profound operational consequence. This convergence of electronic warfare, cyber operations, and information dominance, executed deliberately below the threshold, represents what scholars of grey zone conflict have long theorised but rarely observed at this scale or level of sophistication.
This has profound implications for how all states must think about modern warfighting. When the United States and Israel launched Operation Epic Fury on 28 February 2026, the opening moves were not the B-2 bombers or the Tomahawk missiles. Rather, it was an invisible strike that defined the next phase of the conflict. Before the first strike aircraft crossed into Iranian airspace, the electromagnetic environment over Iran had already been systematically dismantled, with radars blinded, command-and-control links severed, and communications networks taken down. The kinetic campaign that followed was, in a very real sense, merely the visible layer of a battle that had already been decided in the spectrum.
This is not a footnote to the Iran conflict; it is among its central lessons. The convergence of kinetic, electronic, and cyber operations that has defined this war represents a significant evolution in how modern conflicts are fought, one that challenges long-held assumptions about military power, deterrence, and the vulnerability of civilian infrastructure. Understanding this convergence is not optional for any state that takes its own security seriously.
The US-Israel Campaign in the Electromagnetic Spectrum
The EA-18G Growler, the US Navy’s dedicated electronic warfare aircraft, was central to suppressing Iranian air defence radars and communications in the opening hours of Operation Epic Fury. Reportedly, the United States deployed stealth aircraft, including the B-2 Spirit bomber and F-35 fighters, alongside the dedicated EA-18G Growler, whose primary function is to jam enemy radar and communication systems. Space-based assets, including the US Space Force’s satellite constellation, provided real-time missile warning and intelligence support. The operational sequence was clear: suppress, blind, then strike.
Within hours of the strikes, Iran’s communications were severely degraded. Iran’s internet connectivity dropped to approximately 4 percent of normal traffic levels. Government services were disrupted, and state television satellite feeds were hijacked to broadcast pro-regime-change messages.
Critically, the Bade Saba Calendar, a simple religious app used by millions of Iranians, became the perfect vehicle for a sophisticated cyber-psychological operation. Israel compromised the application, and users received messages that read, in translation: “Help has arrived. Do not fear.” It was a pre-planned psychological operation executed in coordination with the kinetic campaign, suggesting months of prior access and preparation.
Previously, in June 2025, during Operation Rising Lion, Israel’s 5114th Spectrum Warfare Battalion used real-time electromagnetic spectrum manipulation to neutralise a substantial proportion of the drone threats launched against Israeli territory. Following that campaign, the IDF restructured its C4I directorate, formally establishing dedicated AI and Spectrum Divisions — an institutional acknowledgement that electronic warfare (EW) and artificial intelligence are now primary instruments of air defence rather than merely supplementary capabilities.
Iran’s Search for Asymmetric Advantage
Iran’s EW response has been constrained but not negligible. Its greatest success has come not in the air but at sea. The Strait of Hormuz, a 39-kilometre-wide chokepoint through which around 20 percent of the world’s oil moves, has witnessed sophisticated electronic interference affecting both military and commercial shipping since February 2026. According to open-source intelligence tracking, within 24 hours of the first US-Israeli strikes, more than 1,100 commercial ships in UAE, Qatari, Omani, and Iranian waters reported navigation failures. Onboard GPS systems placed vessels at airports, nuclear plants, and landlocked locations, a classic signature of active spoofing. By the end of the first week, Lloyd’s List Intelligence had logged 1,735 interference events affecting 655 vessels, with daily incidents nearly doubling.
Iran also targeted data centres in the Gulf, including Amazon Web Services (AWS) facilities in Bahrain. These were not military installations, raising questions about the resilience, sovereignty, and security of digital infrastructure. Since 2011, Iran has steadily invested in GPS spoofing and jamming infrastructure to offset the United States’ advantages in air- and space-based EW capabilities. The effects rippled outward: energy prices spiked, insurance rates for Gulf shipping increased, and several major carriers diverted routes, adding time and cost to global supply chains.
Iran also attempted to disrupt Starlink terminals by using 7787 military-grade “kill switch” GPS jammers, slowing internet performance across the country and demonstrating that Iranian EW planners were thinking creatively within their constraints. In the cyber domain, Iran-aligned groups launched distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) campaigns, website defacements, and data-wiping operations against US targets and entities across Gulf countries. The most significant incident so far has been the March 2026 attack by the Iranian hacker group Handala on Stryker Corporation, a major US medical technology firm, which disrupted global operations and resulted in the exfiltration of large volumes of sensitive data.
Implications for Warfighting
The current hostilities demonstrate that EW is no longer a support function; it is among the primary enablers and force multipliers of modern combat. The US-Israel coalition’s decision to begin the campaign by dismantling Iran’s electromagnetic environment before firing a single kinetic weapon was not merely a tactical choice but a doctrinal statement. Control of the spectrum precedes control of the sky, the sea, and the ground. Any military that cannot contest the spectrum at the outset of a conflict will fight blindly, as Iran has largely been forced to do.
Second, asymmetric EW is a genuine equaliser, albeit within limits. Iran’s GPS spoofing campaign demonstrated that a state without air superiority or space-based EW assets can still impose high tactical and strategic costs through targeted electromagnetic disruption of civilian systems. The disruption of shipping traffic and the effective closure of the world’s most critical oil lane are not trivial achievements. However, once the IRGC cyber headquarters was destroyed in a kinetic strike, Iran’s ability to centralise and coordinate EW operations was severely degraded. Therefore, no matter how effective asymmetric EW capabilities are, they remain vulnerable to kinetic dominance.
Third, the civilian-military divide in EW has largely dissipated. Interconnected digital infrastructure — including data centres, navigation systems, power grids, hospitals, and communications networks — is a civilian asset first and a military target second. Collective hacktivist umbrellas such as the Cyber Islamic Resistance illustrate how boundaries between civilian and military spheres have blurred, bringing collusion between state and non-state actors to the forefront.
Populations bearing the costs of EW warfare through fuel shortages, flight disruptions, and cascading supply-chain failures have become indirect casualties of the conflict. Countries that fail to take cognisance of these new realities in their policymaking risk operating under a dangerous illusion.
Rethinking Security in the Age of Electromagnetic Warfare
The Iran conflict makes one thing distinctly clear: states that cannot protect their electromagnetic environment, navigation systems, communications, or critical data infrastructure are strategically vulnerable in ways that no degree of conventional military investment can compensate for. This is not a problem unique to states in the Middle East. It is a challenge for every nation that operates GPS-dependent infrastructure, relies on commercial cloud computing, or has not yet invested in GNSS-independent navigation backup systems.
For India, this lesson is reinforced by the experiences of the Galwan Valley conflict in 2020 and Operation Sindoor in 2025, which demonstrated the battlefield effectiveness of India’s indigenous EW systems. However, the Iran conflict shows that the next frontier is not the battlefield itself but spectrum dominance — controlling data centres, communications, and command-and-control systems before moving towards kinetic build-up.
Further, civilian infrastructure is now a primary target rather than collateral damage. India’s coastline, Indian Ocean shipping lanes, and GNSS-dependent aviation and energy systems face similar vulnerabilities from adversaries such as China, which possesses considerably more sophisticated EW capabilities than Iran. Understanding this shift — from non-kinetic to kinetic operations, and the growing collusion between state actors and hacktivist or other non-state actors — is vital for building the doctrine, infrastructure, and institutions needed to respond to the security challenges of the decade ahead.
- About the author: Soumya Awasthi is a Fellow with the Centre for Security, Strategy and Technology at the Observer Research Foundation.
- Source: This article was published by the Observer Research Foundation.
