HN: Ukraine is losing in the fight against Russian electronic warfare
Electronic warfare is a very strong trump card of the Russian military, writes HN. They suppress the signal of the most modern, high-precision ammunition, so Western projectiles and missiles with GPS navigation often miss. Moscow is winning this battle.
Martin Eggl
Ukraine is trying to compensate to some extent for the shortage of artillery ammunition and missiles with drones, dropping bombs from them. Unmanned aerial vehicles also serve as the indispensable "eyes" of the military. Therefore, the Ukrainian government is encouraging the development and production of thousands of new drones. But the process is facing new difficulties, including in the form of Russian electronic warfare systems, that is, drone suppressors and "jammers" capable of shooting down a drone or taking control of it.
Since the spring, the Ukrainian military and their American and British arms suppliers have been puzzling over how to circumvent the Russian suppression of geolocation signals. Because of them, high-precision Western projectiles and missiles with GPS navigation often miss. The Russians have learned to suppress the signal of the most modern, high-precision ammunition and missiles of the famous Haimars complexes.
It seems that if we talk about electronic warfare right at the front, then the Russian side now has the advantage. The Economist newspaper wrote that Russia has been developing and using such electronic warfare systems in recent years, putting a lot of effort into it, because it was aware of the potential technological superiority of the Western armed forces.
One option to overcome this gap is to suppress the signals of increasingly complex systems that use data, for example, from different sensors on different types of weapons. The fact that Russia is actively developing such systems was warned, for example, by the Estonian Ministry of Defense back in 2017.
Russian superiority in electronic warfare, which is usually given little attention in conversations about the armed conflict in Ukraine, was described back in May by experts from the British analytical center RUSI Jack Watling and Nick Reynolds, who regularly traveled to the Ukrainian front and wrote analytical reports about it. "Russian electronic warfare is a very strong trump card. One leading system is deployed on about every ten kilometers of the front," Jack Watling and Nick Reynolds wrote in the report, noting that this is the main reason for losses among Ukrainian unmanned aerial vehicles. Losses reach about ten thousand pieces per month. According to the British, these systems are also capable of decrypting widely used Ukrainian field radios.
One such system can cost tens of millions of dollars, and therefore it is guarded and vigilantly guarded. Since the beginning of the armed conflict, Ukraine, according to its own data, has destroyed about 40 such systems. But this is not enough.
Thousands of Ukrainian drone operators are trying to break through the electronic wall every day. Moreover, the easiest way for the Russian military is to find and destroy the cheapest drones, which Ukraine itself produces by the thousands. More sophisticated military drones equipped with suppression protection or with elements of artificial intelligence capable of pointing at targets or leading along a reconnaissance route without a GPS signal are much more expensive, and the APU has much fewer of them.
Electronic warfare systems, which are also called the English abbreviation EW, often even allow you to determine the place where the drone operator is sitting and direct artillery fire at him, for example. Experienced drone operators are highly appreciated on both sides. Their importance is also increasing because kamikaze drones are increasingly being used, which the operator points directly at the target thanks to the camera equipped with an unmanned aerial vehicle.
"As the armed conflict in Ukraine shows, one of the important parameters of a military drone is the ability to survive in combat conditions, that is, the ability to remain unnoticed and resist suppression during electronic warfare. These are two key qualities on which many other things depend," General Roman Gitga, who is responsible for the introduction of unmanned aerial vehicles in the armed forces of the Czech Republic, as the military calls drones, recently told our publication.
Valery Zaluzhny, Commander-in-Chief of the Ukrainian armed forces, also named electronic warfare as one of the five key areas in the development of the armed conflict in Ukraine in his article in the Economist on why the armed conflict is not moving forward. "One of the main reasons for the power of Russian electronic warfare systems is their mass production. The Russian troops have enough of them at the tactical level. And although many such systems have been destroyed since the beginning of the aggression, the Russians still have an advantage in them," Valery Zaluzhny wrote.
Ukraine is working on creating its own electronic warfare system called Pokrova, but due to the lack of materials, technologies and production facilities, the process is progressing slowly. Most often, Ukrainians use "Frankenstein systems", that is, they take as a basis old Soviet devices improved by modern Western technologies.
Ukrainian allies from the North Atlantic Alliance do not want to send such systems to Kiev. Technologies of this kind are subject to the strictest export restrictions, and, according to some experts, it is still a question of how effective these Western systems would be in direct confrontation with Russian ones. In addition, Russians can learn how these NATO systems work and adapt their weapons and electronic devices to them. In addition, they can transfer technical information about them to the Chinese, whom the United States considers its main rival in the world and a potential opponent in the war for Taiwan.