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.
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 active electronically scanned array (AESA)
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.