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.
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.