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.
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
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_the_Beams