Ukraine makes new push to defeat Russia’s electronic warfare

 A chink in Ukraine’s NATO-provided armor

And that’s the problem for Ukraine. Russian jammers have turned the technological advantage of Ukraine’s Western-provided arsenal of “smart” – guided – weapons into a vulnerability.

Precision-guided missiles and guided multiple launch rocket systems – such as HIMARS – are by their nature more vulnerable to electronic warfare than unguided weapons because they rely on GPS to hit their targets. Unguided weapons, common in the Soviet-era stockpiles of both Russia and Ukraine, pre-2022, do not.

The Pole-21 system, designed to jam GPS signals to protect Russian assets from incoming drones or missiles, is just one feature of Moscow’s growing electronic arsenal.

Jamming, as well as “spoofing” GPS – a technique which effectively tricks an enemy drone or missile into thinking it’s somewhere else – which also disrupts radar, radio and even cell communications, are all part of the Kremlin’s playbook.

From drone army to electronic army

Ukraine said it has been able to increase domestic drone production a hundredfold this year – something that has transformed the battlefield.

The man behind this, Ukraine’s minister of digital transformation, Mykhailo Fedorov, now hopes to repeat that success with electronic warfare – not least because drones are so often the victims of EW.

“We are not only scaling UAV (unmanned aerial vehicles) production, we are scaling EW production too and generally changing the approach to the use of electronic warfare,” Fedorov said in an interview with CNN from Kyiv. “The entire doctrine for using this technology is changing on our side.”