In the early days of the invasion of Ukraine, experts were surprised at how poorly the Russian army’s electronic warfare units performed:
Expecting a walkover, Moscow may have thought they wouldn’t need to fully deploy electronic warfare systems. But Bryan Clark, a senior fellow at Hudson Institute, a US think tank, says another problem was that electronic warfare units couldn’t keep up with the rest of the troops.
“Russian systems are large unwieldy, vehicle-borne systems that are designed to be on the defensive,” he says. “And as a result, their electronic warfare systems weren’t very agile, they weren’t very fast and they weren’t very numerous.”
But Russia has learned from its mistakes, he says. Instead of using large equipment that can be easily spotted and destroyed, it is now increasingly relying on smaller, more mobile devices.
Bryan Clark says Russia has managed to deploy hundreds of mobile electronic warfare units along the front line in an attempt to slow down Ukraine’s counter-offensive. These range from GPS jammers to systems that suppress radar and prevent US aircraft identifying targets for Ukraine to attack.
Russian systems such as Zhitel and Pole-21 are proving to be particularly effective to jam GPS and other satellite links. They can disable drones that direct artillery fire and carry out kamikaze attacks on Russian troops.
Many of the sophisticated weapons provided to Ukraine by Nato countries are vulnerable to such jamming too because they use a GPS signal for navigation.
“Zhitel can jam a GPS signal within 30km of the jammer,” says Mr Clark. “For weapons like [US-made] JDAM bombs, which use just a GPS receiver to guide it to the target, that’s sufficient to lose its geolocation and go off target.”
The same applies to the guided rockets fired by the Himars multiple rocket system, which made a big contribution to Ukraine’s successful offensives last autumn.
“Russian systems are large unwieldy, vehicle-borne systems that are designed to be on the defensive,” he says.
But, but, but … CNN & NYT tell us that big bad Trump — sorry, I mean Putin — was the aggressor in the proxy war in the Ukraine. Strange that the “unprovoked aggressor” was building equipment mainly for defense. Could CNN & NYT be lying?
These range from GPS jammers to systems that suppress radar and prevent US aircraft identifying targets for Ukraine to attack.
That makes it sound like the US is a belligerent, actively involved in killing Russians. But Congress has not declared war on Russia, so killing Russians is terrorism. Does that make everyone in the US FedGov a war criminal?
The original mission was to force Ukraine to the negotiating table. That succeeded, and Russia and Ukraine initialed a ceasefire that essentially put the Minsk agreements into force. That done, Russia removed its troops near Kiev. The US immediately sent Johnson to Kiev to kill the deal. He did, and the real war then started.
The US will not allow a negotiated settlement, so the war will continue until Ukraine collapses. How Ukraine is divided up and by whom remains to be see.
War is the great teacher.
Gavin Longmuir: “Does that make everyone in the US FedGov a war criminal?”
lol