The installations are not theoretical
CSIS satellite analysis of China's Spratly Islands shows EW infrastructure that is operational and expanding. At least six paved antenna sites at Mischief Reef with monopole antennas. Two new radomes at Subi Reef providing overlapping ISR coverage. Five vehicle-mounted jammers connected to fixed antenna arrays. A roofed shelter constructed in 2025 at Subi Reef housing mobile EW units.
These systems can jam communications, disrupt radar systems including AN/SPY-1 on Aegis cruisers and E-2C Hawkeye coordination links, and geolocate foreign forces operating in the area. Huazhong University researchers have reportedly developed 6G weapon systems targeting radar like the AN/APG-85 in the F-35. China deployed its first mobile 5G military base station supporting 10,000 users within 3km at 10 Gbit/s.
The International Federation of Air Line Pilots has issued warnings about Chinese warships conducting GPS jamming across the South China Sea, Philippine Sea, eastern Indian Ocean, and northwest of Australia. This is not an intelligence estimate about future capability. It is a factual description of what is already operating.
Russian EW in Ukraine validated the doctrine
Russian electronic warfare in Ukraine has reduced GPS-guided weapon effectiveness by up to 90% and cut drone hit rates in half. The R-330Zh Zhitel jams GPS, SATCOM, and cellular to 25km range. The Krasukha-4 jams LEO surveillance satellites and ground-based radars at 150-300km. Ukrainian forces have destroyed at least 23 Zhitel systems since February 2022, which means Russia kept deploying them because the capability they provide justifies the losses.
Russian EW has caused near-daily GNSS interference in the Kirkenes area of Norway, with January 2025 marking the first GPS spoofing detected within Norwegian territory. The spillover effects of tactical EW into allied civilian infrastructure demonstrate the scale at which these systems operate.
The operational lesson: GPS-guided precision weapons become unreliable in the presence of competent EW. Satellite communications become intermittent or denied. Cellular networks become compromised or jammed. Any system architecture that assumes reliable access to cloud infrastructure through these link types will fail when it matters most.
What this means for cloud-dependent AI
A cloud-dependent ISR system in the South China Sea has to send sensor data from the tactical node, across a contested electromagnetic environment, to a cloud endpoint, receive AI inference results, and transmit them back to the operator. Every link in that chain is a target for the EW installations that are already built and operating.
Jam the SATCOM uplink and the cloud AI goes dark. Degrade the link quality and inference latency goes from milliseconds to seconds to timeout. Spoof the GPS and the system loses confidence in its own position data. The AI capability, which was the entire value proposition of the system, disappears precisely when the operator needs it most: when a near-peer adversary is actively contesting the battlespace.
War on the Rocks analysis from April 2025 concluded that legacy doctrine 'assumes complete EMS dominance,' which is untenable against peer competitors. Military forces have become 'entirely dependent on the electromagnetic spectrum' for every function from communications to weapons guidance. Any AI system that shares that dependency inherits that vulnerability.
The only architecture that survives first contact
The January 2026 DoD AI Strategy is explicit: AI must operate 'on-board, in real time, and often without any sort of connectivity or centralized compute resources.' That is not aspirational language. It is a direct response to the threat environment described above.
EdgeLance is built for this environment. Every node runs a full inference stack locally. Object detection, threat analysis, transcription, and segmentation execute on the device without any network dependency. The compute policy engine defaults to local processing and treats cloud resources as an augmentation when available, not a requirement.
EdgeLance Mesh routes across seven link types. If the adversary jams WiFi, traffic shifts to LoRa. If SATCOM is degraded, alerts route through satellite phone. If all links fail, each node continues operating independently and syncs when any path recovers. Stealth mode suppresses all RF emissions when electromagnetic silence is required.
Cloud AI works in garrison and in permissive environments. Local AI works everywhere, including the environments where the joint force is most likely to fight. That is not a feature comparison. It is a survivability comparison. And in the South China Sea, the survivability question is already being answered by the antenna arrays on Mischief Reef.