Nathan Mintz on CX2's Spectrum Imperative: electromagnetic warfare is the new contested domain

Summary

Nathan Mintz, co-founder of CX2, argues that the electromagnetic spectrum has become the defining contested domain of modern warfare, a claim codified in the company's new publication, The Spectrum Imperative, available at cx2.com. The core thesis is that as autonomous systems proliferate across land, sea, air, space, and cyber domains, every domain becomes dependent on spectrum access, making electromagnetic warfare the connective tissue of all future conflict.

The shift is stark relative to the post-9/11 era. For roughly twenty years of operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, U.S. forces enjoyed permissive spectrum access and near-total air superiority, removing any incentive to treat the spectrum as a contested resource. Ukraine has ended that assumption. Front lines there have been effectively frozen, with Mintz attributing the stalemate to what he calls electronic concertina wire, a layered environment of jamming, spoofing, and spectrum denial that blocks forward movement. By his estimate, 98% of current action in Ukraine involves autonomous or semi-autonomous systems, including drones, unmanned ground vehicles, and unmanned surface vessels.

Ukraine as a Live Laboratory

Ukrainian unmanned surface vessels (USVs) in the Black Sea represent the clearest operational success story. Mintz credits them with forcing the Russian Navy entirely out of Sevastopol and Crimea, pushing Russian assets to ports on the eastern Black Sea coast. The example illustrates how remotely operated systems, not fully autonomous ones, can shift maritime geography when spectrum conditions allow.

Operation Spiderweb is cited as evidence that the forward line of battle is now an obsolete concept. Drones launched from many kilometers behind front lines can strike strategic targets, dissolving the traditional distinction between front and rear.

Fiber-optic tethered drones, introduced first by Russia during the Kursk offensive, briefly accounted for roughly 30% of drones deployed at peak usage. Ukraine subsequently adopted the same approach. The appeal is straightforward: with no radio link to jam, electronic warfare countermeasures become irrelevant. But Mintz characterizes the technology as brittle. Physical obstacles like trees can snag tether lines, lines can be cut, and over water the fiber touches the surface and drags the drone down. For persistent surveillance with a power feed, tethered drones remain viable; as a general-purpose solution, particularly in a Pacific scenario, their utility is limited.

The Adaptation Tempo Problem

The most strategically significant lesson Mintz draws from Ukraine concerns the speed of the countermeasure cycle. Legacy acquisition assumed years between the introduction of new systems and adversary responses. In Ukraine, that loop has compressed to weeks or potentially days, accelerated by commercial software practices including CI/CD pipelines. Mintz views this fly-fix-fly tempo as the dominant paradigm shift that will carry directly into any Pacific contingency.

Allied Interoperability as a Strategic Requirement

The Spectrum Imperative explicitly addresses coalition warfare. CX2's position is that U.S. systems must be compatible with allied radio, sensor, and command-and-control architectures, not as a nice-to-have but as a core operational requirement. Mintz connects this to the broader argument, attributed to Palantir's Palmer Luckey, that the U.S. defense industry should function more as a global arms supplier working alongside allies than as the sole operator of American-designed systems. Mintz notes that in fourteen years at a traditional defense contractor, he retrieved his passport three times, once for his honeymoon. In five years in new defense, he has traveled internationally six or seven times, with four or five trips abroad in the past year alone, a rough proxy for how differently the newer generation of defense companies is engaging with the battlefield and with foreign partners.