Germany's permanent brigade in Lithuania will use electronic warfare capabilities to provide early warning of military activity in Kaliningrad and Belarus, the military's cyber chief said on Wednesday.

Source: Reuters

The brigade, due to be fully deployed next year, will also collect data on Russian and Belarusian military emitters and radar systems to update electronic-warfare databases used by German and allied forces, Vice Admiral Thomas Daum told Reuters at Paluknys Airfield. “If anything happens, these units will identify that,” he said. “We'll put (the data) into electronic warfare databases which will then inform all our systems if there is a new radar on the Belarusian side.”

“Not yet at war, but no longer peace”

Daum said Russian activities in parts of Europe had reached what he called “phase two, where the intent is to hurt” below the threshold of armed conflict. “The cyber-information domain is not yet at war, but it's no longer peace,” he said. An earlier phase, he said, had focused on covertly penetrating Western networks through cyber attacks and establishing footholds inside systems.

The German army is currently testing electronic-warfare systems in Lithuania, such as drone-detection tools, signal interceptors, jammers and sensors designed to relay battlefield data to remote analysts, Reuters reported. According to Bundeswehr reporting summarised by Reform.news, German electronic-intelligence specialists are already operating in Lithuania under the Vigilant Owl mission, with around 170 personnel from the 932nd Electronic Warfare Battalion deployed for the current phase, which runs from 23 October to 7 December 2026.

Source: Reform.news / Bundeswehr

New powers and a supplier flood

Germany's cabinet in August approved measures, which must still be approved in parliament, to grant intelligence services new powers to hack communications and disrupt foreign adversaries' operations, to counter what officials say is a growing threat from cyber and hybrid attacks.

Before the war in Ukraine, the German military could barely convince commercial companies to supply it with such systems, said Patrick Jeschke, who heads the Bundeswehr's cyber innovation hub; the challenge has now shifted to selecting the most promising technologies from a flood of proposals. “Over the last decades, we have not invested too much money into new capabilities. We've used what we had because we were focused on missions abroad, in Afghanistan and other places,” Daum said. “Now… there is a need to improve our capabilities.”

The Lithuania brigade is Germany's first permanent brigade stationed abroad since the Second World War era and sits on NATO's eastern flank, within monitoring range of Russia's Baltic exclave of Kaliningrad and of Belarus, Moscow's ally. Its electronic-warfare role adds a listening layer to the alliance's posture as European governments report rising hybrid and cyber activity below the threshold of open war.