Some U.S. Weapons Stymied by Russian Jamming in Ukraine
Some U.S. Weapons Stymied by Russian Jamming in Ukraine
Some American-made, precision-guided weapons supplied to Ukraine have proved ineffective on the battlefield, their accuracy badly diminished by Russian jamming efforts, according to Ukrainian commanders and a Ukrainian military research project.
The projectiles performed well when first introduced to the battlefield, but lost effectiveness as Russian forces adapted their defenses, two confidential Ukrainian reports found. The problem prompted the Ukrainian military to stop using the weapons, two artillery commanders said.
The reports, first revealed by The Washington Post, focus on the American-made Excalibur, a 155-millimeter guided artillery shell, and the Ground Launched Small Diameter Bomb or GLSDB. One of the reports was shown to The New York Times by people familiar with the research. The second report was described but not shown to a reporter. The individuals asked not to be identified because the reports contain classified military information.
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How long before the shells are modified to home in on the interference? It would have to be distributed quite a bit to keep it from being a target.
There are anti-radiation weapons, like HARM, but GPS isn't some super-strong signal. A jammer can be a long way from the target, out of range of the weapons that are trying to hit the target.
Just to add to this, because it's fascinating. GPS satellites signals are about as strong as radiation from a light bulb, 20000km away. The signal that arrives on earth is 20db weaker than the noise floor, so background noise is a lot stronger than the signal is.
The way it works is that the background noise is random and the signal is repeated many times a second, so you can split the signal and add it together. The random background noise averages out and you're left with a strong signal. But due to this, it's enough to have a very weak signal that adds non random noise on the correct frequency for it to just break.
And actually what I desribed above is just the first layer of a GPS signal, it gets a lot more complicated with signals within signals, it's pretty crazy how well it works. this is an amazing write uo on how the signal actually works, in case anyone is interested