![]() ![]() Russia was long believed to excel at this. Ukraine sometimes loses as many as 2,000 drones in a single week And as air power grew in importance through the cold war, finding and jamming the emissions of air-defence radars became vital. During the second world war, the so-called battle of the beams saw Britain jam and deceive radio signals used by German bombers to navigate to their targets. An enterprising Russian radio operator in Port Arthur drowned out transmissions from a Japanese warship that was helping correct naval gunfire. Although the shells of that era were dumb-the radar proximity fuze was 40 years away and GPS satellites more than 70-the age of radio had arrived. It probably began in 1904 during the Russo-Japanese war. This sort of electronic warfare (EW, in the lingo) is not new. The airwaves in Kyiv and Moscow are thick with jamming as both sides seek to deflect drones and missiles. “ jammers are a high priority,” read one slide, “and we will continue to…recommend that those jammers are disrupted/destroyed…to the maximum extent possible.” GMLRS, the precision-guided rockets fired by American HIMARS launchers, have also increasingly missed targets or failed to achieve their desired effects. Leaked Pentagon documents from the spring show that four out of nine Ukrainian air strikes with American-supplied JDAM-ER bombs may have missed their targets because of Russian GPS jamming. They were not the only weapons to be discombobulated in this way. ![]() ![]() Excaliburs were probably dropping like flies because Russia was turning on powerful jammers that disrupted the GPS signals guiding them to their targets or, more likely, the radar fuze that tells them when to explode. If modern warfare rests on three pillars-ever-more powerful sensors to detect targets, increasingly precise munitions to hit them, and networks that connect the two- electronic warfare can chip away at each.
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