Russia is starting to make its superiority in electronic warfare count
hardware: tanks, fighter jets, missiles, air-defence batteries, artillery and vast quantities of munitions. But a less discussed weakness lies in electronic warfare (EW); something that Ukraine’s Western supporters have so far shown little interest in tackling.
Russia, says Seth Jones of the Centre for Strategic and International Studies, a think-tank in Washington, has for many years placed a “huge focus" on using its military-industrial complex to produce and develop an impressive range of EW capabilities to counter NATO’s highly networked systems. But Ukraine, according to its commander-in-chief, General Valery Zaluzhny, found itself at the beginning of the war with mainly Soviet-era EW systems.
Initially the discrepancy had only limited impact, but as relatively static lines of contact have emerged Russia has been able to position its formidable EW assets where they can have the greatest effect. Ukraine discovered in March that its Excalibur GPS-guided shells suddenly started going off-target, thanks to Russian jamming.
Something similar started happening to the JDAM-ER guided bombs that America had supplied to the Ukrainian air force, while Ukraine’s HIMARS-launched GMLRS long-range rockets also started missing their targets. In some areas, a majority of GMLRS rounds now go astray.
Even more worrying has been the increasing ability of Russian EW to counter the multitudes of cheap unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) that Ukraine has been using for everything from battlefield reconnaissance and communications to exploding on impact against targets such as tanks or command nodes. Ukraine has trained an army of some 10,000 drone pilots who are now constantly engaged in a cat-and-mouse game with increasingly adept Russian EW
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