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.
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.