June 1st 2024

No One Can Stop Them All: A Limited Overview of Electronic Wafare in Ukraine

Summary

Electronic Warfare (EW) is constantly evolving. This requires constant revision or replacement on the battlefield. Drones and anti-drone EW are a game of cat and mouse. While advancements in electronic warfare don’t render current EW systems obsolete, it means that anything approaching consistent, overlapping fields of protection against all drone attacks is presently, impractical. That’s not say this will always be the case, but it’s a problem likely to be faced well into the future.

In A League of Its Own

Russian EW is widely regarded as the best, most advanced, and most adaptable in the world, this is by serious analysts not newspaper pundits and those with a need for bias-confirmation. This is especially in terms of anti-drone warfare. In late 2022, a major Chinese defense think tank issued a report that likely caused some in Western military circles to start taking notes. “The Russian army’s anti-drone combat capabilities are superior to those of the U.S. military.”(1) If Russia’s capabilities are superior to those of the U.S. military, it would be hard to argue that they will be surpassed by Ukraine in the foreseeable future.

Ukraine has proven a willing “beta tester” and proving ground for the Western MIC and “the techniques [of EW] have turned the war into a proxy laboratory.” The owner of Ukrainian drone manufacturer Piranha admits that Russia’s EW systems are ahead of Ukraines. Though, he optimistically appraises that Ukraine it will only take a while to catch up. The aforementioned time span should come with a caveat that the Russian MIC must halt all forward progress.

Before we tackle the threat of drones on the battlefield and how Russia has tackled that threat, it’s useful to see what else Russian EW systems are doing.

Much More than Drone Jammers

Last week a classified Ukrainian report was leaked to the Washington Post about major issues facing Western weapons systems in Ukraine. The news was largely overshadowed by news that Russia is increasingly able to jam the Starlink satellite, internet based, communications systems which Ukraine relies upon. The latter is another key field in EW, and in regards battlefield radio communications, “the life cycle of a radio in Ukraine is only about three months before it needs to be reprogrammed or swapped out as the Russians optimize their electronic warfare against it,” reports the New York times, quoting Daniel Patt, a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute.(3)

The leaked report indicate some of the most advanced Western weaponry is being picked off by Russian EW, “including Excalibur GPS-guided artillery shells and HIMARS.” And Swedish made, long range guided muntions have also been hampered by Russian EW.

A Ukrainian official speaking on terms of anonymity even told the paper that HIMARS had “become completely ineffective.” He also said that in January of this year, Ukraine began requesting an alternative to the overhyped HIMARS. Out of 3000 U.S. Excalibur shells fired were analyzed by military researcher through August of 2023. The findings were the “high precision” guided muntions ability to reach the designated target went from 50 percent when they were first deliver to only 7 percent during the Ukrainian Counter Offensive of 2023. This has forced Ukraine to use those standard “dumb” shells, which the West has proven incapable of delivering at a sustainable rate. The US has since stopped all deliver of Excalibur guided munitions due high cost and extreme failure rates. (4)

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Drones and Anti-Drone Electronic Warfare

Conventional Drones and conventional anti-drone countermeasures operate almost entirely over radio waves. Until recently, the technology to cover the broad spectrum of frequencies has been limited by practical necessity, in terms of cost and manpower required to monitor traffic. Still, Russia has managed to broadly assert dominance along the line of contact. But its proven difficult to do so while still maintaining your own drone presence has proved difficult and resulted in more than a few Russian drones crashing due to Russian anti-drone jamming.

Exploiting these complications, both sides use drone swarms to overwhelm anti-drone capabilities, each drone operating on a different frequency makes trying to stop them all at once a near impossibility. Still, Russia has done an exceptional job in harm reduction.

Two new models of Russian AI-assisted, portable, anti-drone EW systems—’Abzats” and ‘Gyurza’—provide the most recent examples of how Russia is solving this problem. They require no operator, can be controlled remotely, and are capable of jamming the entire spectrum of radio signals and differentiating between Russian and Ukrainian drones. (5) In other words, these are “game changers.” But proliferation of new systems take time, especially when other systems are likely still under contract. (6)

New Russian drone technology has the potential to negate the efficacy of known EW anti-drone systems. A fiber optic guided quadcopter drones called ‘Product 55’—manufactured by Kalashnikov subsidiary ZALA—is now being used on the battlefield. Since fiber optic communication cannot currently be detected, they can’t be jammed using conventional means. They don’t use radio signals, which is the major assumption of widely distributed, anti-drone systems. Ukraine now claims to have reverse-engineered and tested their own implementation of such fiber optic drones. (7)

Drone Footage in Context

One thing which remains largely undiscussed is the potential for overstatement of the impact of drones on the battlefield. Though they certainly have an impact, EUCOM commander, General Christopher Cavoli, recently cautioned against overdrawing conclusions. He makes particular reference to homemade and commercially available drones, which he says “are not very destructive.” (8) The Chinese Mavic 3 widely used by Ukrainian operators falls into this category.

It’s important to remember that the intent of circulating drone footage is to serve a narrative, and the footage provides a narrow, skewed, and curated view of the battlefield.

Footnotes

t.me/Slavyangrad | Nagasaki Nightmare 👋