There are a couple of interesting articles (here and Portable Network Generates EW Attack Weapons in Aviation week(paid subscription required)about the increasing use of civilian tech in military electronic warfare equipment.

“The Chinese, like many countries without billions to spend on defense, are figuring out how to leverage all that commercial technology into their military capabilities,” says Rance Walleston, BAE Systems’ director of information operations initiative and information warfare. “We’ve spent a lot of time looking at Chinese technologies. They’re not building many unique devices. Their integrated air defense system [IADS] uses commercial standards,” such as GSM and voice over Internet protocols (VOIP).

The Syrian raid—which involved air-to-ground and network-to-network electronic invasion of a Russian-built IADS—is convincing some that custom-built, highly specialized and expensive air defenses with long development times are decreasing in deterrent value. In fact, they have become victims of their own uniqueness. Because they were hard to develop and field, they aren’t often modified. That gives electronic warriors the time to conduct analysis and build countermeasures.

We also discover that:

“The government historically procured single-use systems to go after signal X or Y,” Sinkiewicz says. “Now that’s unaffordable, and what they want is a multifunction capability with the same architecture and hardware that can go after many types of signals.”

I’m sure that some of the free market types would like to use this as an argument for the inherent superiority of the free market over government funded systems, but I would argue that the defense procurement infrastructure is among the most incompetent and corrupt segments of our governments, and that using this will not get good policy.

In fact, the Privatization of essential government services in the military (KBR/Halliburton, Blackwater, Triple Canopy, etc.) has proved to be an unmitigated disaster too.

The solution is to put adults in charge of the Military Industrial Complex, because we are currently reaping the consequences of not doing so for the past 60 years.