Ukraine plinking a Russian GPS-jammer with a GPS-guided bomb. Ukrainian drones blowing up Russian drone-jammers. Ukraine’s cruise missiles striking Russian air-defense sites whose missions include, you guessed it, shooting down cruise missiles.
Russia’s 23-month wider war on Ukraine has seen a lot of ironic, darkly-hilarious clashes. The latest was also one of the quickest between setup and punchline.
On Tuesday morning, Russian media announced the deployment, to Ukraine, of Russian forces’ latest high-tech counterbattery radar. A few hours later in southern Ukraine, the Ukrainians blew it up … with artillery rockets.
The irony deepens. In theory, a Russian Yastreb-AV radar would help to protect Russian troops from Ukraine’s American-made High-Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems launchers—its HIMARS. Now guess what the Ukrainians used to destroy that first Yastreb-AV.
That’s right: HIMARS.
I was a counter battery radar operator. The systems I used 20 years ago had these neat things called electronic counter measures. I guess russia never got the message that it’s not a smart idea to radiate in a zone with anti-radiation missiles.
This wasn’t a seeker missile, it was GPS guided. If the Russian machine had been fully set up then they probably would have blocked it, however Ukraine got to it before they were ready.
That makes it even worse. Why didn’t they set up at night and throw up some camo netting? There are ways to lessen the chances your radar is blown up is all I’m saying. The ruzzians are morons exhibit #4,832.
Edit:
This was tucked away at the bottom of the article:
So they probably did radiate at the wrong time and paid for it.
From the video it seems they were spotted by drones on the way to the deployment site and were under drone surveillance during setup, during which artillery hit.
I have a hard time imagining that the observation drones are that sneaky, so I’d guess it’s another issue of poor battlefield command structure forcing the compromised position
Drones are cheap and thus everywhere in the battlefield. It costs more $$$ to show a drone down then the drone is worth (in general). Modern military is still trying to figure out how to handle all the cheap enemy drones overhead, there is - so far and to my knowledge - no good answer (of course if there was a good answer it would be classified at least until the enemy figures out what you are doing and so I wouldn’t know).
Trained falcons. Not sure how cheap or feasable it would be but they’re being used in certain areas around the world already to take down consumer drones. I know they probably have more hardcore drones in the war but couldn’t hurt to train a falcon to drop some net on a drone or something. Or use other drones to drop nets on drones.
They do have other drones to drop nets on drones but they are more expensive and then we’ll just end up with drones netting the netting drones.
Drones netting the falcons netting the drones netting the drones!
Drone scouts found it and they called in a fire mission from a HIMARS, since this was considered a HVT. I saw the raw footage of it yesterday - it was pretty neat.
The Russians are actually pretty good at EW and invest a lot of effort into it, but it’s possible that a new, detectable freq pattern got a lot of attention.
e.g. the AFU EW picks up something that is detectable above the noise floor and sends a drone to look – what is this weird radar sig? Drone sees something and they get a strike setup.
Plus we’re only seeing the blow up, it could have been killing M777 and CAESAR crews for days till it ate a HIMARS.
On that note, is it even possible to hide jamming equipment? It’s whole purpose is to put out a signal that disrupts another signal to the point it can’t be used. In that opening paragraph, I was thinking “of course a gps guided missile took out a gps jammer, they’d just have to add a different mode that just seeks the loudest signal on gps frequencies”, and similar for the drone jammer. Both cases just need software to be aware that signals can be jammed and to pivot to targeting the jammer if they can’t find the original target.
Focusing on the GPS jammer would require some hardware for direction finding; it’s not just software. Still, it’s not a huge design change.
I would have figured they’d already have multiple antennas for reliability, though I suppose that doesn’t imply they are set up to determine direction.
Nah you don’t hide the jammers, that’s the point. They can already see you, so you make a ton of noise to obfuscate where the real target is and where the jammers are. They either hold fire, or go after the jammers.