Satellite-guided glide bombs were “miracle weapons” for the Russians, traveling 25 miles or farther under pop-out wings, facing practically no countermeasures.
That has changed. Now the Ukrainians not only have countermeasures — some of these countermeasures appear to be extremely effective.
“Previously, the enemy used glide bombs with high accuracy to attack objects in the territory of regional centers such as Kharkiv and Zaporizhzhia,” Narek Kazarian, whose 10-person Night Watch team in Ukraine develops electronic warfare systems, told Forbes.
Night Watch’s new Lima jammer is partly responsible for the recent degradation of Russian glide bombing, Kazarian claimed.
Lima isn’t a traditional jammer that simply blasts radio noise toward the enemy. “We use digital interference,” Kazarian explained. It’s “a combination of jamming, spoofing and information cyber attack on the navigation receiver.”
[…]
“All high-value targets are guaranteed to be covered by [electronic warfare],” Fighterbomber claimed. It might take eight or even 16 glide bombs to reliably hit one target, the channel added. And while the glide bombs are inexpensive for a precision munition — each costing around $25,000 — the Sukhoi jets that lob them two or four at a time aren’t cheap.
Launching four jets to maybe hit one target is risky and inefficient for an air force that has just a thousand or so modern jets, and has already lost 120 of them in action in Ukraine.
The intensive Ukrainian jamming has also grounded many of Russia’s drones. Night Watch’s earliest efforts focused on forcing down Shahed attack drones that routinely strike Ukrainian cities.
Radio jamming has effectively accomplished what the Ukrainian air force largely failed to accomplish with its expensive, vulnerable S-300, Patriot and SAMP/T surface-to-air missile batteries, which can hit Russian jets from scores of miles away but were always too few in number to fully protect the front line and safeguard Ukrainian cities
And now are fewer due to being indeed vulnerable to missile strikes and/or not having the right ammunition.
https://simplicius76.substack.com/p/anatomy-of-mim-104-patriot-destruction
Speaking of which, those direct hit AA missiles (PAC-3) obviously could work well against slow tough targets (ground attack planes, helicopters), but were they ever useful against anything else?
These days, anything with “told by Forbes” (substitute any old media name) should be the reason to stop wasting time reading.
The Ukrainian war has caused an extremely rapid evolution in weaponry and tactics, and America’s military is decidedly obsolete. By now Russia probably has a three or four generation lead in all weapons categories. We still have successfully tested a hypersonic weapon, while Russia and China, and possibly Iran, have.
Our MIC is simply too corrupt, too incompetent, and too disloyal to be of any use.
Ozornik says:
Why? It’s there for a reason.
Bob Sykes says:
Yes, but not all groundbreaking. UAV continue what started in the Second Nagorno-Karabakh War.
https://www.isegoria.net/2024/10/the-armenians-basked-in-the-glories-of-their-past-victories-and-prepared-for-a-repeat-of-the-first-war/
For strike missiles, that’s the first opportunity to seriously field-test the last decades of development.
America’s military is not as much obsolete, as in its current form not made for a serious war at all.
Presumably because those who decided it figured there will be nothing as big as Vietnam again, and (after the fall of USSR) no Final Showdown in sight. So the only capabilities not atrophied are those useful for a low-intensity safari vs. goat herders with rusty AKs, IEDs and bigger balls than brains. Enough troops with passable to good morale for this, too. And the rest could be done via local proxies, economic means (strangling and bribery) or good old proselytism. For a while this doctrine actually worked well enough. Now this time ended, it’s Big Bloc kriegstanz all over again, except one bloc enters it with the pants down.
Ukraine stopped the first Russian blitzkrieg with anti tank missiles that struck from above. It didn’t take very long for the Russians to copy that. As Bob Sykes said, military technology is evolving very fast there. Ukraine with the full military resources of the West maintains a lead, but the advantages don’t last.
Michael van der Riet says:
Um, what «first Russian blitzkrieg»?
Aren’t top-attack ATGM produced from 1985 (Bofors RBS 56 BILL)?