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 deduct two things from this:
-Russia is not as big of a threat as propaganda depicts it
-Spending trillions in “defense” is useless
If even a small fraction of Russia’s nuclear arsenal is functional then they are still incredibly dangerous
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If they use nuclear weapons, it will end in one of two ways.
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Escalation to full scale nuclear exchange. Putin dies or has to live in the aftermath of a nuclear holocaust.
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The rest of the world saying “that’s enough”. Nobody in power wants using nukes to be normalized. It’s so profoundly destabilizing to the status quo that everyone sees it as a threat given it will inevitably lead to escalation. Every intelligence agency in the world will be making phone calls, offering sweet deals, and promising support to unhappy, powerful people in Russia to deal with the “Putin” problem. Ideological enemies will work together to eliminate this threat to their stability.
Option 3: Russia is converted into parking lot via a joint operation using conventional weaponry. Siberia is declared west Alaska.
It’s a dark version of funny thinking about the nuclear weapon deterrents.
Everyone wants them to force their way to the big boy table, they’re incredibly expensive, and using them is self defeating.
Also interesting how we spend a bunch of time, money, meddling, and military power on preventing proliferation, we are the only country that ever used them, twice.
Imagine being Truman and authorizing a weapon that was just invented that the scientists all regretted, conveyed they would be unimaginably powerful and at the same time, they had no idea if it would work or not.
Then after the first one, Japan doesn’t quit and you say, do it again.
I’m not sure if anyone has the balls to push that button now under modern circumstances.
When you stop and think about the amount of money just the US has spent on maintaining (barely) a nuclear arsenal I think, our species is stupid.
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Huh? But the equipment that was developed by those trillions of dollars proved to be super effective. The HIMARS missiles can even handle jamming by a much less funded army.
You are spot on on point 1 though.
They seem to be saying that Russia also has a massive military budget, but ours is way way bigger. The money we spend actually is worth it. We have the best military in the world by every metric you can come up with.
Let’s spend trillions on offense for Ukraine instead! Help them take back Crimea and make Russia afraid to go on conquest again.
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-Spending trillions in “defense” is useless
Who knew that skimming money off the top at every level will leave you with nothing but a shell of a military?
A Russian made chastity belt might be softer than my flaccid cock.
Now they know there’s artillery. Test successful.
Next they’re gonna test for cruise missiles again.
I just saw the clip of the thing getting deployed, then getting blown up real good. It was awesome.
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Ask and you shall receive. One exploding, freshly-minted, counter-battery radar!
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This looks way too small to be HIMARS. A guided shell maybe?
Good gunners those Ukrainians
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.
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.
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
It detects artillery, it doesn’t deflect it.
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
Ironic, he could save others from death, but not himself
Just like rain on your wedding day…
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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.
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.
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)!
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.
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
You can look up what the acronym AESA means without unstanding it.
Take two speakers that are next to each other. If they emit a tone of the same frequency, the sound will “add up” and be louder in some directions, and cancel out to some degree in others.
A phased array radar uses the same concept, but now on electro magnectic waves, instead of sound waves. And with much more than just 2 emitters. By carefully choosing the phase of the signal in each emitter, itnis possible to both choose a single direction that receives the strongest signal, and to tighten the spread around that direction (creating a pencil beam). This is what the dish is for in standard radars.
If these phases can be fully controlled electronically, you can steer where you are looking, and swap between wide and narrow search beams in an instant. However, that is not a trivial thing to produce. So cheaper phased array radars use mechanical systems, or partial electronic steering (example: only horizontal steering).
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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!
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.
It would be better if Ukraine was regaining territory.
One step at a time. It’ll take time for the blyats to figure out this shit isn’t worth it.
Why? Because they’re defending against massive waves of badly trained unsupported conscripts right now with extremely favorable loss ratios?
“Hmm, that’s weird… It’s coming right for us.”
Russia is a joke that just keeps writing itself.
Except after each page a new character is defenetrized
