Posted on 05/26/2024 9:15:20 AM PDT by Ultra Sonic 007
The US has been outclassed by its rivals, such as Russia, in its capacity to remotely take out enemy weapons using jamming technology, according to former US military officials.
Mike Nagata, a retired US Army lieutenant general who led special operations in the Middle East, said that the US is "still falling behind" in its electronic warfare capabilities, reported Defense One.
Electronic warfare units, which use electronic signals to remotely scramble the GPS coordinates used to guide weapons, have played a key role in Russia's war in Ukraine.
"The gap between where the United States should be and where we are, in my judgment, continues to expand not everywhere, but in far too many places," Nagata reportedly said at the SOF Week conference in Tampa, Florida. He called on the US to get more creative to regain its dominance in electronic warfare.
Two retired special operations personnel singled out Russia in remarks to the publication. They said that one reason the Kremlin's technology is significantly better, is because it ignored international laws designed to stop jamming of civilian telecommunications.
It had also invested in electromagnetic innovation for decades while the US had focused its jamming technology on gathering intelligence in areas such as the Middle, according to the publication.
Russia has repeatedly used its electronic warfare units to disable expensive precision-guided weapons that the US has given its ally Ukraine in its battle against Russia.
According to reports, they've proven effective in sending GPS-guided Excalibur artillery rounds off course. They have also been effective against the JDAM US-made missiles used by Ukraine's air force, as well as the rockets fired by US-made Himars missile systems.
Last year, Ukraine's outgoing senior commander, Valery Zaluzhnyi, in an interview with The Economist, said Russia's electronic warfare capability had given it an important edge.
(Excerpt) Read more at businessinsider.com ...
Who knows these days.
The official theme song of our military leadership is “Goodbye Horses” and the official drill and ceremony is the Buffalo Bill mirror scene from Silence of the Lambs.
Agree, sadly.
I guess it never occurred to the GENIUSES* now trying to get to World War 3 started that, while GPS may be able to get them home after work, the Russians might object to its use in attacking their soldiers and thus prevent it from working on the battlefield.
...just never thought of that possibility, not one damn bit.
*meaning Neocons, of course
Sounds like we need to resurrect the “S” band and “C” band megawatt jammers we used to build and add some higher frequency children to that family.
They want more money. They won’t tell you their capabilities.
*They need it more than we do.*
*And why would that be?*
The truth will set you free. That’s why we are freer. At least for now.
While the Russians are making use of GPS jamming in Ukraine, it’s hardly sophisticated and the title is very misleading.
Jamming GPS is not high tech. It’s simply putting out enough noise power to prevent a receiver from seeing the very low power GPS signal. If the US was fighting this battle, these jammers would quickly become targets themselves for HARM missiles or other anti-radiation weapons. But Ukraine is not equipped like the US to fight a combined arms battle. Both sides, Ukraine and Russia, are fighting century old trench warfare, with Russia simply having a larger force to throw into the melee, and having some jamming capability to reduce the effectiveness of some older western weapons.
Quantity does become a quality of its own at some point. The old 5 to 1 (or more) ratio of attacker to defender applies in this conflict for Russia. For Ukraine, taking the full 28 months of conflict into account, it’s easy to argue they have been fighting ‘smarter’ (otherwise they wouldn’t still be fighting). But without some ability to change the battlefield dynamic, like achieving air superiority or a huge influx of drones, Ukraine will have difficulty doing more than just holding Russia in place.
This has always been russias war to lose. And they seem to have done a good job at that, but also have enough resources to keep throwing into it. I stated two years ago, and say again today, short of genocide, they can’t ‘win’. Even if they defeat the Ukraine army and occupy the country, they will be constantly attacked by Ukraine freedom fighters for decades. People who have nothing else to lose will not surrender.
“We’re in deep trouble!”
Not really. It kind of depends on what you want a conflict or the tools to keep it at bay to be. The Russians have been using very sucessful jamming tech to include the cancelling of our warskill material for well over 40 years. But with the amounts the US has in stores, we still can ruin the world for about anyone and in the process for everyone. Jamming is a good tech, but ICBM’s overrule its effecientcy. Both are being used as a threat and an end game we haven’t reached yet. It all leads to enough fear not to reach the second use. Both the US and Russia have the capacity and can’t be stopped.
wy69
>> We need to build more drones.
Drones are a low margin commodity weapon.
>> We should be building motherships to host drones.
Far too simple and cheap for a capital ship. Not enough shipyard union labor required to build one.
>> Aircraft carriers are already obsolete.
Yeahbut, they are a high margin ship, and building lots of them floats the union labor boat as well as the military-industrial boat. So to speak.
C’mon, man! Get your head properly aligned on this. Good times!
Bkmk
Probably made in China.
Boy, I wish you wouldn’t do that. Gag!
I remember it on shortwave back in the 50’s and 60’s.
At some point in 1976, a new and powerful radio signal was detected simultaneously worldwide, and quickly dubbed ‘the Woodpecker’ by amateur radio operators. Transmission power on some Woodpecker transmitters was estimated to be as high as 10 MW equivalent isotropically radiated power.
Even prior to 1976, a similar ‘woodpecker’ interference is remembered by radio amateurs occurring in the high frequencies. As early as 1963, or before, radio amateurs were calling this “the Russian Woodpecker”. Little is known about the power levels or Russian designation but it was probably a forerunner of the Duga radar systems. It was also speculated at that time, at least among radio amateurs, that this was an over-the-horizon radar.
These signals even caused interference on 27 MHz CB radios in the late 60s and early 70s sometimes completely blocking even local communications in Portugal for example, leading to the supposition of several megawatts of RF power transmission.
It’s not just GPS jamming that the Russians are doing - they’re actually starting to demonstrate in the field effective distributed jamming techniques against the spread spectrum communications systems that even commercial toy drones now employ.
The kind that were at one time naively promoted to be ‘unjammable.’
The kind we threw on the F-35 to allow it to be a drone controller and for communications.
BTT
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