Security Partners Quietly Up-Arm Ukraine For Spectrum Dominance
Security Partners Quietly Up-Arm Ukraine For Spectrum Dominance
Electromagnetic force mobilization
Desperately short of drones, Vladimir Putin turned to Iran for help. Teheran has supplied hundreds of unmanned aerial platforms, but only to limited effect. According to Oleksii Reznikov, Minister of Defense, the Ukrainian Air Force has neutralized “suicide drones” like Shahid-136 (see above) using powerful jammers.
We turned to our partners, in particular, those who are afraid to give us weapons but still have good expertise. I told them: ‘We will give you their [Iranian drones’] parts; examine them and give us the suppression systems.’ And a number of countries that did not want to give [us] weapons became interested in this proposal. [Emphasis mine]
As I have written before, electromagnetic spectrum operations (EMSO) is a distinct domain of weaponry that can be supplied to Ukraine with less risk than tanks or missiles or planes while still providing a vital force multiplier for those systems that Ukraine already has. Since the invasion resumed in February, otherwise-reluctant partners have waged a quiet, but important electromagnetic proxy war with Russia. One result of that effort is that most of Iran’s drone bombs are being intercepted.
Radio waves do not go zoom, or boom, or pew-pew-pew. They simply make the entire system of systems of systems of subsystems that is a modern military work, or cause complex enemy systems that use radio waves to not work — for example, by jamming the Shahid’s guidance system, or the control signals.
As we have seen, command of the air begins on the ground. Complementing all those shoulder-fired anti-air missiles on the ground in Ukraine are systems like this one, made in Lithuania. Don’t get me wrong, Lithuania looks lovely, but it’s not a big country or well-known for lots of military hardware production. What they have in spades are knowledge and access to global markets. They can feed this demand.
Small teams of Ukrainians are using that weapon on the battlefield every day, hunting and capturing their prey. At least one team has posted a video of themselves using one of these EDM4S systems to “shoot down” and recover a Russian quadcopter. Although the scene may have been staged for marketing feedback or recorded in training, the presence of such weaponry on the battlefield explains the rise in cumulative Russian drone losses since midsummer.
EMSO is also ideal for rapid development of capabilities as enemy platforms are recovered. For example, while cleaning up in Kharkiv September, Ukrainians came across a months-old Su-30SM crash site that Russians had never bothered to clear. Searching through the wreckage, they discovered Russia’s newest electromagnatic weapon, an SAP 518-SM Regatta jamming pod, “slightly dented” but intact.
Ukraine was able to hand this intelligence treasure over to foreign partners worldwide who could unlock every last secret and engineer solutions with the most efficiency. It is one of two examples reported in western press since April, and they explain to some extent why the performance of Russian aviation has declined.
There have been other high-profile captures, such as this Krasukha-4 system that was left behind under a sorry state of camouflage during the retreat from Kyiv and recovered by the Ukrainians on March 22. By now, this material will have been exhaustively studied and effective countermeasures devised. Whatever edge Russia might have developed in operational EW capabilities is now mitigated.
Electromagnetic warfare (EW) also makes up a substantial portion of the recent aid package that Congress approved for Ukraine, and much of it is aimed at drone defense.
Line items include “two radars for unmanned aerial systems,” twenty “multi-mission radars,” and “counter-unmanned aerial systems,” which are drones that seek and destroy enemy drones.
Other line items include secure tactical communications systems — radios that hop between frequencies, encrypting and dividing the signal so that Russians cannot exploit or jam them. The EMSO domain also includes intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) systems such as optics.
Some line items have subtle EMSO implications. For example, much of the training, maintenance, and sustainment that falls under the funding language will involve these new systems. It is not hard to train an EDM4S team — in fact, Lithuanians can, and probably have, trained hundreds of them for Ukraine by now — but it does cost money.
Finally, Ukraine’s best weapons provider lately has been the Russian Army. By now we are all familiar with how poorly trained, badly led soldiers have simply abandoned their vehicles and walked away, leaving it all to be captured. Most of these systems are tanks, BMPs, and other fighting vehicles. However, some very sensitive stuff is also still getting abandoned.
If this complete, intact 1L260 Zoopark-1M counterbattery radar complex is not working right now alongside everything else that Ukrainians have captured recently and turned around, that is only because it has been dissected into little pieces in a shop, somewhere secure and far away, to be examined in detail.
Zoopark is used to track artillery shells and rockets back to their launch points, allowing rapid response from friendly artillery batteries, hopefully knocking out enemy gunners and guns. Similar western systems have helped win recent artillery battles in Kherson and around Lyman.
As already noted, however, the human dimension is what makes electromagnetic dominance possible. People must understand their weapons and be trained in their use. With EMSO, those complexities multiply as the size of the operation increases. An army must be well-organized to conduct effective tactical jamming, for instance. Every channel that your own side uses must be “whitelisted” so that, ideally, friendly units can communicate while the enemy cannot.
Russia failed to do this in February. They began their invasion with blanket jamming of everything between 20 and 80 MHz, realized that this was creating chaos in their own convoys, and simply stopped jamming. While they resumed later, particularly against the small-drone control signals of Ukrainian forces in the east, Russia has not used their full EW capabilities to great effect.
Ukraine keeps targeting these systems from their own emissions, too. Russians still have not figured out how to combine jamming with operations. Poor staff training explains a lot of this. Many of the Russian soldiers who knew how to conduct electromagnetic warfare are now dead or prisoner. An officer corps with feeble command of logistics will also demonstrate poor EMSO and encryption-handling skills. Every headquarters destroyed by a 227mm rocket barrage has attrited their institutional knowledge of how to conduct electromagnetic operations.
Meanwhile, Ukrainian ground jammers are reportedly making it impossible for Russians in Kherson to talk to one another during Ukrainian attacks this week, but without preventing Ukrainians from talking to each other. I know from personal experience just how hard this is to achieve, and kudos to the wartime army that succeeds at it.
After a month of no movement, the northern end of the pocket has collapsed southwards at a rate of kilometers per day. That they can do this, while Russians never could and still cannot, speaks volumes about the direction the war has taken, and why.