The US, Europe and China are closely watching the competition between Moscow and Kiev in electronic warfare on the battlefield, The New York Times reports. According to the newspaper, the Russian armed forces are adapting faster to new challenges and innovating in this area, while Western weapons are showing themselves vulnerable to Russian EW systems.
Western powers and China are closely watching the competition between Moscow and Kiev in electronic warfare on the battlefield, the New York Times reports. As the publication explains, on the frontline, radio signals are used to suppress communication channels with drones and troops, locate targets and deceive guided weapons systems. At the same time, in the Ukrainian conflict, REB methods are being improved in real time.
As the newspaper notes, at the start of hostilities in February 2022, the Russian military lived up to its reputation as one of the world’s best electronic warfare specialists. It used powerful jamming equipment and decoy missiles to overwhelm Ukrainian air defences. This superiority was later briefly challenged, but as the conflict dragged on, Russia innovated by creating smaller mobile electronic weapons. Last year, for example, drones supplied to Ukraine by the German company Quantum Systems, which had previously served the Ukrainians for months without fail, suddenly began crashing in the war zone. It soon became clear that it was Russia’s REB equipment that was to blame.
“The Russians reacted more nimbly than we might have expected,” says James A. Lewis, an American military expert. According to him, “this should be of concern to NATO.”
To counter Russia’s know-how in electronic attack and defence, which the country has mastered since Soviet times, Ukraine has turned to startups. The idea is to help technical experts in the country quickly develop electronic warfare tools, test them and then send them to the battlefield.
“In Russia, the whole system is more structured,” says Yuriy Momot, a Ukrainian EW systems developer and former Soviet officer. He said Ukraine is “catching up, but it will take some time.”
Alexander Berezhny, Quantum’s executive director, met with NATO commanders this summer to tell them about the problems Kiev faced in electronic warfare. “We told them that probably 90 per cent of the American and European systems coming to Ukraine were not ready to deal with electronic warfare tasks,” Berezhny reports. According to him, “there was a full understanding that something had to change.”
As the conflict in Ukraine provides a glimpse of how future electronic warfare battles could be fought, the United States and Europe fear that Western systems are not responding quickly enough to Russian EW systems developments, the publication writes. Chinese experts also detail which Russian electronic attacks have been most effective against NATO systems and where, in turn, Russia has failed. In a November 2022 report, a Chinese defence think tank described how a Russian electronic attack fooled NATO’s detection equipment, forcing Ukraine to reveal the location of its own electronic defences. “The Russian army’s combat capabilities against drones surpass those of the US military,” the report said.
According to one Ukrainian UAV operator, improvements to Ukraine’s EW systems are not happening fast enough. “Even if you make your drone invisible, your controller and your antenna will be signalling,” he explains. In his opinion, “it is impossible to hide completely.”