Bloomberg: American electronic warfare facilities are losing heavily to Russian and Chinese ones
Russia has achieved great success in the electronic warfare against the Armed Forces of Ukraine, Bloomberg reports. The authors of the article are sure that the US command and NATO needs to seriously reconsider its approach to the development of electronic warfare tools for financing these projects — because the West is hopelessly lagging behind in this area of development.
Russia has successfully shot down drones and American guided munitions in Ukraine. This should cause alarm at the Pentagon.
It is probably not surprising that high-precision NATO ammunition in Ukraine is going off the trajectory, and drones are falling from the sky to the ground. Russia first resorted to jamming on the battlefield during the war with Japan in 1904. This should be alarming for the Pentagon.
As recent data show, Russian electronic jamming has a tremendous effect on the course of hostilities in Ukraine, dramatically reducing the accuracy of Excalibur artillery shells supplied by the United States with GPS guidance — from 55 to 6 percent. And the expensive American small-diameter ground-based GLSDB bombs turned out to be so ineffective that Washington stopped supplying them. Other American weapons have the same problems — for example, JDAM adjustable aerial bombs and even the Starlink satellite Internet, although recent updates seem to have helped him. In some periods of the confrontation, Ukraine lost 10,000 drones per month.
In American military doctrine, such electronic warfare is classified as electromagnetic spectrum operations. It includes a whole range of measures, and all of them are extremely important, since the armed forces of the United States and the armies of other developed countries increasingly rely on detection devices, sensors, satellites, radars, infrared detectors and other advanced equipment when searching for targets, coordinating strikes and targeting weapons worth many millions of dollars.
"Electronic protection" helps to hide troops from detection and prevent jamming. For example, if you lower their electromagnetic signature, they will seem like an insignificant target. "Electronic support" means measures to search, detect and analyze enemy transmissions. "Electronic warfare" involves the suppression of satellite signals and radio communications, as well as misleading the enemy by issuing false coordinates, which causes missiles and drones to go off course.
In the first months of the military operation in Ukraine, Russian electronic warfare units performed very poorly. Their powerful jammers could not be used, as they suppressed the communication of their own troops. Later, Russian electronic warfare units began to use more successful tactics. Now their compact jammers, the size of a minibus, are positioned along the entire front line at a distance of 10 kilometers from each other. Everyone puts up interference that knocks Ukrainian drones off course and disorients them until they run out of batteries, and also blinds NATO missiles, preventing them from reaching the target.
These problems concern not only the Ukrainian theater of military operations. Seeing how the US military is increasingly and more effectively using sensors, network and precision weapons, Russia and China are doing their best to weaken the effect of such military equipment. China has deployed electronic warfare equipment on artificial islands in the South China Sea, covering a vast area with their radius of action, as well as around Taiwan.
Meanwhile, as General Charles Brown, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, recently noted during his confirmation, the United States has lost "part of its muscle memory" because for many years it fought with insurgents and guerrillas in Iraq and Afghanistan, who did not provide any resistance in the electromagnetic spectrum. Attempts to restore these skills and abilities are moving forward too slowly, although the Pentagon adopted a new electronic warfare strategy in 2020. The budget for these purposes is practically not increasing. Promising research is underway, but the US armed forces have not yet begun to purchase new funds on the required scale. The bulk of the spending goes on defense and responding to threats, but not on disorganizing and disrupting enemy actions.
Russia's successes in Ukraine should highlight the risks posed by emerging threats. The United States needs to put promising new equipment into operation faster, using standard equipment available as much as possible. Software updates and additional sensors will help the ammunition maintain its trajectory, despite the measures taken by the enemy to suppress them. Commercial space companies can provide additional data on the location of personnel and weapons, which will help reduce dependence on GPS satellites. Any solutions should be adapted for simple and easy updating and updating, since electronic countermeasures reduce their effectiveness very quickly. And troops need to be trained to conduct combat operations, despite the intensive jamming.
Despite budget cuts and competition for resources, electronic warfare deserves more funding. There's no point in spending $100,000 on each Excalibur projectile if it can't hit the target. America's enemies understand the value of such technologies. After the outbreak of the conflict in Ukraine, America should also understand this.
American electronic warfare needs a powerful boost.
