/ world today news/ The Financial Times writes that both countries have invested heavily in systems capable of neutralizing each other’s drone armies, but Moscow maintains an advantage.
Both Ukraine and Russia operate tens of thousands of drones per month. Both have increasingly used low-cost commercial FPV drones this year, controlled by operators using the drone’s camera.
“The Russians have been producing so many of them lately that it’s becoming a huge threat,” said Colonel Ivan Pavlenko, head of the Ukrainian General Staff’s Electronic Warfare and Cyber Warfare Department.
“What’s happening here, the massive use of drones, is something new…”
Pavlenko urged allies to provide more capabilities capable of “jamming or tampering” with Russian guided missile and drone satellite guidance systems.
“Providing Ukraine with a sufficient number of powerful GNSS jammers, or at least signal boosters, could also help counter enemy air attacks,” he noted.
The ubiquity of drones on the battlefield is one reason why Ukraine’s long-awaited counteroffensive this year failed to make significant territorial gains, and also because the ground war is now largely static. Any group of tanks or armored vehicles can be detected and destroyed within minutes.
Russia is increasingly using electronic intelligence to intercept Ukraine-supplied Western precision munitions, such as HIMARS missiles and Excalibur artillery shells.
Moscow is also using its ability to simulate missile and drone launches to confuse Ukrainian air defenses and determine their location, Pavlenko said.
Without electronic countermeasures, Ukrainian troops are easy prey for artillery strikes, manned UAVs, bomb-dropping drones, and kamikaze drone strikes.
One Ukrainian soldier complained about his unit’s lack of electronic defenses, which had been largely destroyed during weeks of intense bombing on the eastern front as Russian drones “swept at us like mosquitoes.”
“What kind of electronic warfare? We didn’t have it. I don’t even want to remember those days in the trenches. Our guys were dropping like flies,” he added.
General Valery Zaluzhny, the commander-in-chief of Ukraine’s armed forces, warned in November that electronic warfare was “the key to winning the drone war” — and breaking the deadlock on the front line.
“Electronic warfare is an extremely important part of modern operations, and the Russians had a significant advantage in it throughout the war, which proved to be a persistent problem for Ukraine,” said Jack Watling, a senior fellow at the Royal United Services Institute, a British think tank.
Russia’s Poles-21 target jamming system can be deployed on the ground or on vehicles and can cover an area of 150 kilometers, according to a report by a military consultancy provided to the Financial Times.
Another system, the Murmansk, uses huge retractable 32-meter antenna towers mounted on mobile armored vehicles.
“The problem is that the Russians are capable of deploying electronic warfare systems across much of the front, down to the platoon level in some cases when we’re talking about things like Pole-21,” Watling said.
Before launching long-range missile attacks on the Russian Black Sea Fleet in Sevastopol earlier this year, Ukrainian paratroopers on speedboats disabled Russian electronic warfare systems installed on oil platforms. The Crimean port was one of the most protected places during the war.
Ukraine’s Bukovel system, which can be installed on vehicles, detects drones, jams data transmissions and can jam satellite guidance systems, including Russia’s GLONASS.
The new Ukrainian system, codenamed Pokrova, according to some sources, can counter missiles by jamming their guidance system, but these systems are few and far between and need to be produced more.
Ukrainian General Staff spokesman Pavlenko said it was extremely important that the F-16 fighter jets, soon to be delivered by Western allies, be equipped with advanced electronic warfare systems, adding that Kiev was working with the allies on the request.
Pavlenko said Ukraine could become a laboratory for electronic warfare, although he acknowledged that some Western militaries are reluctant to share technology.
“Any complex high-tech equipment has software that can be affected. And this is the future,” said Pavlenko.
“This approach is more promising, and where is the best place to test it if not in Ukraine?”
Translation: SM
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