Metasurface-driven Electronic Warfare E-Book

Rafael Goncalves Licursi de Mello

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Wissenschaft und neue Technologien
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 668

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024

Beschreibung

Understand the metasurface revolution in electronic warfare

Electronic warfare (EW) ensures safe usage of the electromagnetic spectrum by one’s own forces while denying it to adversaries. Modern warfare is an extraordinarily fluid and dynamic activity, with numerous involved systems reconfigurable at the front or back ends. Metasurfaces, however, are artificially engineered surfaces that promise to take this dynamism to unprecedented levels by making platforms (aircraft, vessels, etc.) and the environment itself reconfigurable – a revolution that even major EW authorities have yet to fully comprehend.

Metasurface-driven Electronic Warfare outlines the parameters of this revolution and its transformative potential in the EW space. Beginning with a historical overview of EW dynamism, it then provides the electromagnetic basics to understand metasurfaces, their operation mechanisms, and capacity for shaping electromagnetic waves. A series of detailed studies of metasurface applications in EW makes this an indispensable guide to an increasingly dynamic battlefield.

Readers will also find:

• Clear cost-benefit analyses of metasurface substitutions in modern EW scenarios
• Detailed discussion of metasurface applications including stealth, electronic support, electronic attack, electronic protection, their use in drone swarms, smart environments, and more
• Simulations of EW scenarios with accompanying MATLAB codes and exercises

Metasurface-driven Electronic Warfare is ideal for EW analysts, specialists, and operators, as well as signals intelligence and electrical engineering researchers and students. Because it covers the essentials in both areas, the book is also appropriate to support graduate courses on metasurfaces or EW.

Leseprobe

IEEE Press445 Hoes LanePiscataway, NJ 08854

IEEE Press Editorial BoardSarah Spurgeon, Editor‐in‐Chief

Moeness Amin

Ekram Hossain

Desineni Subbaram Naidu

Jón Atli Benediktsson

Brian Johnson

Tony Q. S. Quek

Adam Drobot

Hai Li

Behzad Razavi

James Duncan

James Lyke

Thomas Robertazzi

Joydeep Mitra

Diomidis Spinellis

Metasurface‐Driven Electronic Warfare

Rafael Gonçalves Licursi de Mello

Ponteiro, France

Copyright © 2025 by The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. All rights reserved.

Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey.Published simultaneously in Canada.

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Library of Congress Cataloging‐in‐Publication DataNames: Licursi de Mello, Rafael Gonçalves, author.Title: Metasurface-driven electronic warfare / Rafael Gonçalves Licursi de Mello.Description: Hoboken, New Jersey : Wiley, [2025] | Includes bibliographical references and index.Identifiers: LCCN 2024042391 (print) | LCCN 2024042392 (ebook) | ISBN 9781394226672 (hardback) | ISBN 9781394226696 (adobe pdf) | ISBN 9781394226689 (epub)Subjects: LCSH: Metasurfaces. | Electronics in military engineering.Classification: LCC TK7871.15.M48 L53 2025 (print) | LCC TK7871.15.M48 (ebook) | DDC 623/.043–dc23/eng/20241030LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2024042391LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2024042392

Cover Design: WileyCover Image: © Olena.07/Shutterstock

About the Author

Dr. Rafael Gonçalves Licursi de Mello earned his PhD in Electronics from the Institut Polytechnique de Paris, with a focus on reconfigurable metasurfaces and multiband/wideband antennas. Experienced in both the hardware and software aspects of electronic warfare (EW), he has worked on metasurfaces, antennas, signal processing, and signals intelligence at various deep‐tech companies. He started his career as a pilot, radar operator, and EW officer in Maritime Patrol Aviation, where he conducted real EW missions and identified the needs for future scenarios.

Foreword

Arthur C. Clarke's third law states “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”

Rafael's description of metasurfaces is a prime example of this concept. He describes the electromagnetic properties and math that gives metamaterials and metasurfaces almost supernatural powers, including the ability to make an object invisible. These unusual properties caused quite a stir in academia because they seem to break some of the laws of Physics and moreover cannot be usually found in nature. It was only after the first real‐world demonstrations in the late 1990s that the concept was considered reasonable.

Many practical demonstrations of this magic came in the beginning of the 2000s. The absorptive properties of metasurfaces led to excitement among electronic warfare (EW) professionals as a method to accomplish stealth: a metasurface coating would dramatically reduce the radar cross section of an object.

Rafael shows in this book how to expand from this core passive‐absorption concept into other EW applications with reflective and transmissive features. The applications include active cancellation, electronic support (ES), electronic attack (EA), and electronic protection (EP). He also describes the simplicity, compactness, power efficiency, and low cost of metasurfaces, making them suitable for more settings, such as lightweight, cheap drones, where digital radio frequency memories (DRFM) are too large and expensive. Metasurfaces are even elected as a central element for commercial 6G systems for cheap, energy‐efficient, secure communications.

Importantly, metasurfaces add another layer of dynamism to EW systems, at the physical layer. In a cognitive EW system, we use artificial intelligence (AI) to control all aspects of the EW loop: ES, EP, and EA in a closed‐loop, interactive setting. Using feedback from the environment, machine learning models can choose how to reconfigure the underlying EW system. Metasurfaces enhance the cognitive EW's ability to accomplish mission objectives.

Moreover, we are seeing increased blending of EW applications across military and civilian settings. Jamming of police radios and drone incursions at airports have the same characteristics that appear in traditionally military EW problem spaces. Military systems must leverage the commercial advancements in metasurfaces, especially 6G, at the speed of relevance.

EW has determined the winners of wars. Since the first long‐distance RF transmission in 1899, EW has been a part of war. The ability to manage the electromagnetic spectrum–communications or radar–determines the outcomes of future battles. Each subsequent technology advance has changed the nature of warfare. During the Russo‐Japanese War of 1904–1905, the Russians wanted to jam the Japanese signals; denied permission to perform the jamming, the Japanese won the decisive Battle of Tsushima, ending the war in Japan's favor. By World War II, EW surveillance and jamming was a core battlefield domain. The Ukraine war has seen continuous use of EW and swarming drone technology. Metasurfaces can and will be another leap forward.

—Karen Z. Haigh, author of Cognitive Electronic Warfare: An Artificial Intelligence Approach, 2021.

Preface

Writing Metasurface‐Driven Electronic Warfare was harder than I expected but more rewarding than I could have imagined. But why did I do it?

Tons of papers about metasurfaces for defense exist in the open literature. However, each of them focuses on a very specific problem. Putting it differently, an organization of the many potentials unlocked by the whole plethora of existing metasurfaces in the EW space was lacking.

What allowed me to go through this hard process was, besides extensive academic research, a clear vision of the next configuration of EW. To this end, the deeply technical roles I performed in the industry was of utmost importance, as well as my operational experience in the maritime patrol aviation.

Many interpretations exist for the EW activity. One of them, EW consists of a cat‐and‐mouse game where opponents innovate as fast as they can to ensure their safe usage of the electromagnetic spectrum while denying it to adversaries. Although this perspective is highly adaptable to increasingly complex scenarios, this dynamic is not a privilege of EW in defense. In essence, the EW game is nothing but another manifestation of the three fundamental interactions described by Clausewitz a couple of centuries ago in his masterpiece On War: more specifically, the conflict escalation reasoning, the reciprocal fear of annihilation, and the full exploitation of peoples' military capacity, defined by their tangible means and will.

After a 20th‐century full of large‐scale conflicts, the cat‐and‐mouse EW game is still manifesting such interactions. The relentless implementation of deep technologies, like AI, lightweight drones, and many others, is creating an increasingly dynamic theater of operation. This book anticipates how metasurfaces will add to the dynamism.

EW is an extremely interdisciplinary activity. One challenge in writing this book was to accommodate all the main reader profiles. Generally, every individual able to understand engineering concepts can follow the book. Chapter 1 provides readers of all profiles with the big picture of the EW dynamism and the advent of metasurfaces. Chapters 2 and 3 equip nonexperts with everything they need to understand the working principles of metasurfaces. Chapters 4–8 discuss metasurface applications in stealth, ES, EA, and EP. Although the described use cases are many, most are just clear examples of the applicability of the technology today. As it will become obvious to the reader as they go through these chapters, the exotic capabilities that metasurfaces provide will soon unlock many new ways of doing EW. Chapter 9 is where we gather some of them per the latest trends.

I thank people who directly or indirectly contributed to this book. Mentioning everyone would be impossible. Nonetheless, I can’t let two of them go unnoticed. About a decade ago, Professor José Edimar Barbosa Oliveira conveyed to me his unequalled enthusiasm in developing research of excellence in EW. More recently, Dr. Karen Zita Haigh also inspired me with her capacity in organizing a complex domain, AI in EW.

In conclusion, having worked with both software and hardware parts of the EW problem, I often get questions about which one is more important. Actually, I tend to see EW forces as octopuses whose brains are composed of software but whose tentacles are manifested through hardware. In the upcoming scenario, AI will be what empowers their brains, and metasurfaces what extend their tentacles – or increase their number. True, we want to develop the smartest octopuses but who can also act over many, strong, agile, long tentacles. Thus, software and hardware are different, interdependent instances of a same problem to which we should prepare right now – the EW of the future:

Victory smiles upon those who anticipate the change in the character of war, not upon those who wait to adapt themselves after the changes occur.

—Giulio Douhet, air power theorist.

About the Companion Website

This book is accompanied by a companion website:

www.wiley.com/go/licursidemello/metasurfacedrivenelectronicwarfare1 

The website includes:

MATLAB codes.