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.
What a novel way to detect artillery
I’m picturing the droid in rogue One
There’s some.
Send some guys to run out screaming “I bet the artillery can’t hit me” with targets on their backs.
What’s as big as a house, burns 20 liters of fuel every hour, puts out a shit-load of smoke and noise, and cuts an apple into three pieces?
A Soviet machine made to cut apples into four pieces!
Now they know there’s artillery. Test successful.
Next they’re gonna test for cruise missiles again.
The counter-battery radar doesn’t prevent artillery from working; it makes it dangerous for them. Theoretically the units that took this out could already be destroyed after having had their coordinates calculated and counter-battery fire immediately called down on them.
In practice it was just setting up, having been tracked to its location, and possibly wasn’t working yet. Also the GMLRS rockets fired by HIMARS are not ballistic - they execute a counter-battery-confounding turn. And the salvo is fired quickly after which the vehicle immediately leaves - it can park, get ready and fire a full salvo in under a minute. When the first rocket is detected a couple of minutes later, the launcher will already have driven off and counter-battery coordinates will not be that useful/
To add to that, this war has shown the importance of shoot-and-scoot. Towed artillery with long setup and teardown times are too vulnerable to drones. Might be the end of an era for towed artillery.
The same holds for radar. A radar literally shines a light that anyone looking for it can see. Pinpointing a radar is trivial. Mobile radars can’t stay and detect from a location for very long, without risking an artillery strike. Fast setup and teardown times are crucial, along with a strategy where multiple mobile radars cover for each other, so detection is never offline for long.
For some radar. This is actually the biggest gap between western capabilities and Russian - Russia does not make proper digital AESAs, which are very critical for LPD operation. If you only transmit in scanning pencil beams, it is extremely difficult to locate you.
This was an interesting conversation to follow, but I got lost on the acronyms. Could you expand those please? TIA (thanks in advance)!
Just taking some guesses based on a minute of googling:
digital AESAs
digital active electronically scanned array (AESA)
LPD operation
Low Probability of Detection operations
So normal radar is like a lightbulb. You can tell where it is from any direction. The right kind of AESA is like a laser. You have to more or less be right in the path to detect it, and you have to detect it to locate it.
Speed is the essence of war, and speed has definitely been the deciding factor. That and logistics. Last I read, Russia was still supplying their military with unpalletized, man-portable crates that take teams of men hours to unload, while Ukraine has their goods loaded onto pallets that take a couple guys with forklifts a couple minutes to get off the trucks and to the people who need them.
On the other hand the artillery mounted on trucks seems to be quite effective.
Stuff like the Caesar can park, fire 6 shells and leave in less than 3 minutes.
What? Ukraine is effectively using towed artillery, Russia isn’t really using anything effectively so there’s an argument for them I guess.
Russia has a very long kill chain, sometimes taking hours or days to respond to threats. That might be why towed is still effective for Ukraine.
Even if it was fully operational, Western artillery used by Ukraine is more precise with longer range than Russian, so they can target the ruskies with less risk.
It detects artillery, it doesn’t deflect it.
Ironic, he could save others from death, but not himself
Just like rain on your wedding day…
Probably had a great view the whole way in. I’m silly laughing right now thinking about some Russians just watching this missile come in on an old ass CRT monitor.
You see, this is why the westoids always underestimate the glorious Russians. Even when their system is hit, it is still reporting the artillery by sending a smoke sign that is visible for kilometers - we never stood a chance
Lifelock marketing department salivating at this new ad script
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Apparently Russia called for a meeting of the UN Security Council to complain about Ukraine fighting back
LOL no fair when you fight back, it’s violence! /s
They called it terrorism even lol
They called it terrorism even lol
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:
It’s possible the Ukrainians knew where to look for the Yastreb-AV because the truck-mounted phased-array radar emitted a distinctive signal—one Ukrainian intelligence may have had on file.
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!
Drones are incredibly sneaky, so long as they’re high up. They’re tiny and basically impossible to detect by radar. Once they get close you can hear them, but keep your distance and they should be stealthy enough - particularly if you’re is in a vehicle with a noisy engine.
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 strike.
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.
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.
You can definitely play tricks with jamming. If you have multiple antennas working together you can create weird, messed up harmonics. E.g. (vastly simplified) you might have 10 jammers, but apparently 100 emitters.
The jammer vs anti jammer war has been hit since around WWII. It was a big thing with the u boats, and even Bletchly park got involved. 70 years of defence spending beyond that, takes it a long way.
That’s a good point, I forgot about interference. Since the frequency is unchanging, multiple antennas could even set up a standing interference pattern that looks like there’s an emitter in an empty lot. That “follow the signal” scheme is pretty easy to defeat.
That’s also one of the simpler ideas. It’s also a bit of a rock paper scissors game. E.g. the counter to my first suggestion is to up the sensitivity of your tracking, and use the extra resolution to pick out the real target(s). That, in turn can be countered with a directional pulse. You either sweep, or target an ultra high powered pulse. The pulse is like a flash bang in a dark cave, the sensors get cooked by it.
The game goes on and on, with many branching methods and counters.
Some early fun on the subject
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.
GPS uses time differential to calculate relative distance. It requires a fairly omnidirectional antenna to function. It would have to be a dedicated anti jammer targeting system.
The easier option is to use GPS to get into the general vicinity, then just go inertially guided, or use a camera etc.
Lmao, love to see it
It would be better if Ukraine was regaining territory.
Why? Because they’re defending against massive waves of badly trained unsupported conscripts right now with extremely favorable loss ratios?
One step at a time. It’ll take time for the blyats to figure out this shit isn’t worth it.
Preferably all the way to Moscow.
I just saw the clip of the thing getting deployed, then getting blown up real good. It was awesome.
well, don’t keep a thing like to yourself. if you have links, bring enough for everyone!
Ask and you shall receive. One exploding, freshly-minted, counter-battery radar!
This looks way too small to be HIMARS. A guided shell maybe?
ooo! i’ll wait to watch this till i get home!
Russians engineers are hardcore, they really go all out on systems validation.
Seems to be pretty effective at detecting that there’s artillery within range.
Even to the point of being able to detect how precise it can hit.
Good gunners those Ukrainians
Well it was very successful in detecting artillery
What’s the status of the artillery detecting radar?
Well, sir, it’s a good news/bad news thing…
