Some U.S. Weapons Stymied by Russian Jamming in Ukraine
Some U.S. Weapons Stymied by Russian Jamming in Ukraine
Two classified Ukrainian reports show that some U.S. precision-guided weapons are vulnerable to electronic warfare, an element in Ukraine’s recent battlefield setbacks.
Some American-made, precision-guided weapons supplied to Ukraine have proved ineffective on the battlefield, their accuracy badly diminished by Russian jamming efforts, according to Ukrainian commanders and a Ukrainian military research project.
The projectiles performed well when first introduced to the battlefield, but lost effectiveness as Russian forces adapted their defenses, two confidential Ukrainian reports found. The problem prompted the Ukrainian military to stop using the weapons, two artillery commanders said.
The reports, first revealed by The Washington Post, focus on the American-made Excalibur, a 155-millimeter guided artillery shell, and the Ground Launched Small Diameter Bomb or GLSDB. One of the reports was shown to The New York Times by people familiar with the research. The second report was described but not shown to a reporter. The individuals asked not to be identified because the reports contain classified military information.
This is excellent stress testing for NATO weapons. It sucks for the Ukrainians that they have to be the testing ground, but it's better than wargames to iron out the kinks.
How long before the shells are modified to home in on the interference? It would have to be distributed quite a bit to keep it from being a target.
There are anti-radiation weapons, like HARM, but GPS isn't some super-strong signal. A jammer can be a long way from the target, out of range of the weapons that are trying to hit the target.
Just to add to this, because it's fascinating. GPS satellites signals are about as strong as radiation from a light bulb, 20000km away. The signal that arrives on earth is 20db weaker than the noise floor, so background noise is a lot stronger than the signal is.
The way it works is that the background noise is random and the signal is repeated many times a second, so you can split the signal and add it together. The random background noise averages out and you're left with a strong signal. But due to this, it's enough to have a very weak signal that adds non random noise on the correct frequency for it to just break.
And actually what I desribed above is just the first layer of a GPS signal, it gets a lot more complicated with signals within signals, it's pretty crazy how well it works. this is an amazing write uo on how the signal actually works, in case anyone is interested
This is the best summary I could come up with:
The systems blast out so much interference that they drown out the GPS signal that guides the Excalibur’s targeting software, said Thomas Withington, an associate fellow at the London-based Royal United Services Institute and a specialist in electronic warfare.
The data in the reports corroborates comments made by Ukrainian military officials in recent months, including the former army chief Gen. Valery Zaluzhny who said that some Western projectiles had afforded Ukraine significant superiority against the Russian forces, but only for a short period of time.
Ukrainian officials and military analysts have described similar problems with the Joint Direct Attack Munition kit called JDAM and shells used with the High Mobility Artillery Rocket System, known as HIMARS, both of which rely on GPS.
An official from the U.S. Department of Defense press operations office, who asked not to be named, in accordance with military protocol, said in an electronic message that America had supplied more than 7,000 precision-guided 155-millimeter rounds to Ukraine since February 2022, but added that he could not give more specific information.
The researchers collected data on the usage of nearly 3,000 Excalibur shells that were fired from December 2022 through August 2023 by American-supplied M777 howitzers on the front lines in Kherson in the south, Kharkiv in the northeast and Bakhmut in the eastern Donetsk region.
Ukrainian forces have concentrated on knocking out fixed Russian radars and other jamming equipment, in particular in the Crimean Peninsula, which has then allowed them to hit targets like command posts and supply depots deep behind enemy lines, Mr. Withington said.
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