The Excalibur artillery weapon worked wonders when it was put to use on the battlefield in Ukraine in the summer of 2022. The shells hit Russian tanks and artillery with surgical precision guided by GPS, and drones photographed the fireballs created by the hits from above. It didn’t last long.
Within weeks, the Russian military began to adapt to the new weapon, relying on its formidable electronic warfare capabilities. He was able to interfere with the GPS guidance and the activation mechanisms of the explosive charges, causing the shells to go astray, or fail to explode. In the middle of last year, Excalibur’s M982 ammunition, developed by the American RTX and the British BAE Systems, became useless and is no longer in use. So according to Ukrainian commanders.
Several other weapons, which also demonstrated the technological superiority of the West, met a similar fate. Russian electronic countermeasures have significantly reduced the accuracy of GPS-guided missiles fired by Himars systems, the weapon credited with turning the tide of the war in Ukraine’s favor in the summer of 2022, according to Ukrainian military officials.
A completely new ammunition system of small-diameter ground-launched bombs (GLSDB) manufactured by the American Boeing Company and the Swedish Saab Company has completely failed after being put into use in recent months. Ukrainian and Western officials claim this, because of Russian electronic warfare. It is no longer in use in Ukraine, and is awaiting a complete overhaul.
The Pentagon declined to discuss the performance of specific US weapons systems, citing operational security reasons.
Some of the West’s other recently supplied precision weapons continue to hit high-value Russian targets. US-made ATACMS ballistic missiles and the Storm Shadow cruise missiles produced by the French-British-Italian defense company MBDA destroyed several airports, command centers and communication facilities in the Russian-occupied Crimea and other parts of the country this year. Some of the successful hits were in the air defense batteries Russia’s glorified S-400.
Even for these weapons, it is only a matter of time before Russia learns how to reduce their effectiveness and improve intercept rates. “We have to assume that there will always be adaptation, and the Russians have already adapted to a variety of things,” said Rob Lee, a senior fellow at the Institute for Foreign Policy Studies. “The effectiveness of the abilities will be the highest immediately after the start of their use, and over time the opponents will develop countermeasures.”
Accuracy vs. Mass
Russia’s success with electronic countermeasures is a strategic problem for the US and its allies. China is watching Russia closely, and Moscow is likely sharing with it some of its battlefield lessons in dealing with Western weapons.
Western military doctrine has long relied on a belief that precision can defeat mass. That is, well-targeted strikes can hit enemy forces in greater numbers, reducing the need for massive expenditures on soldiers, tanks, and artillery.
However, this assumption was not tested in a major war until the front in Ukraine. The introduction of Western weapons there showed that what may have worked against Saddam Hussein’s army, against the Taliban or against the guerrilla fighters of the ISIS (“Islamic State”) organization, would not necessarily work against a modern army like that of Russia or China.
“Some of our assumptions were probably wrong, because over the last 20 years we’ve been launching precision weapons against people who couldn’t do anything about it,” said retired Lt. Gen. Ben Hodges, former commander of U.S. forces in Europe. “Now we’re doing the It’s against an equivalent adversary, and Russia and China have these capabilities.”
One of the lessons learned in Ukraine is about the importance, even today, of unguided artillery shells from the old school. Their production is starting to pick up in the US and Europe only now, after decades of decline, said Lt. Gen. Isa Polkinen, the secretary of Finland’s Ministry of Defense. said.
William LaPlante, the US undersecretary of defense for acquisition and readiness, acknowledged in recent statements Russia’s successes in jamming precision munitions. “The Russians have gotten really, really good,” he said.
The battlefield changes its face / Photo: Reuters, Ritzau Scanpix
cat and mouse game
In any war, the introduction of a new weapon system into use prompts the enemy to develop countermeasures to reduce its effect. This is a circle of innovation in a kind of cat and mouse game, which started already with the invention of the spear and the shield.
Russia has upgraded and improved its Shahid drones, which were designed by the Iranians, and the Ukrainians have adopted new ways to detect and film them. Russia is also constantly improving its cruise missiles and ballistic missiles to make it more difficult for Ukraine’s air defenses to intercept them, Ukrainian Air Force spokesman Yuri Ignat noted. , after a Russian barrage killed 33 people in Kiev about a week and a half ago.
For Ukraine, time is of the essence. The introduction of many western systems into use in a limited and gradual manner gave Russia the ability to minimize their influence. “The thing about warfare is the speed of adaptation,” said retired Air Marshal Edward Stringer, a former chief of operations at the British Ministry of Defense. “If you give antibiotics by infusion every week, you will actually train the pathogen to deal with it – and we trained the pathogen. We shouldn’t have given them that time, but we did.”
Anna Gvozdyar, deputy minister of strategic industries of Ukraine, the agency that oversees the country’s defense production, said she was frustrated by the inability of some Western manufacturers to adapt. “We learn faster because we are on the front line, we have to make decisions to survive,” she said.
Some of Ukraine’s Western partners notice this. In January, Stockholm launched a government initiative to make sure Sweden’s own defense manufacturers respond more quickly to lessons learned in Ukraine. “One of the truly amazing factors is the Ukrainian ability to innovate, and how quickly their innovation cycles take place. Things that would take five years to develop in Sweden are done in Ukraine within five weeks,” Sweden’s Defense Minister Pal Jonsson said in an interview. “If you want to be good at innovation, aggressively attacking bureaucracy is essential,” he added.
When it comes to Ukrainian-made weapons, such as UAVs, models that worked just a few months earlier are no longer effective on the battlefield. This is all because of the constantly evolving technology, according to a Ukrainian intelligence official. “It’s like updating software on a cell phone – we and the Russians have to Every month to keep up,” the source said. “But when we receive weapons from the West, the manufacturer put their software in it many years ago, and rarely wants to change anything.”
Many of the American weapons supplied to Ukraine, especially under the “presidential drawdown authority”, are old systems that the American military is gradually decommissioning to replace them with more modern products. These products are usually more expensive, and are not necessarily shared with Kiev. This fact, according to a senior official at an American defense company, does not provide manufacturers with many incentives to upgrade precision ammunition from the previous generation.
The leading American defense manufacturers, RTX and Boeing, referred all questions to the Pentagon. A spokesman for Lockheed Martin, which manufactures GMLRS missiles for the Himars system, responded to a query about the performance of the munitions on the battlefield, saying that “questions regarding the actions of the US military or foreign militaries are best handled by those governments.”
A US defense official said the Pentagon is “very aware” of the ever-evolving electronic warfare threat posed by Russia in Ukraine. He works closely with Ukraine and defense industry partners to rapidly address threats and ensure that American precision weapons remain effective in a highly complex electronic warfare environment. In some cases, the US, along with industry, was able to provide options to Ukrainian forces within hours or days, he added.
While Moscow has had success against previous generations of Western precision weapons, some of the more sophisticated systems are not being supplied to Ukraine precisely so that Russia – and through it, China – will not develop effective countermeasures for them, military officials say. In a potential war, the US and its allies would have much stronger capabilities, starting with massive air power.
“We don’t want to draw lessons from Ukraine too much,” LaPlante, the undersecretary of defense, said at a presentation in April. “They fight, out of necessity, in a way that we wouldn’t necessarily fight.”
Some Ukrainian officials and Western military analysts, however, are concerned that officials in the U.S. military and defense companies treat the problems faced by precision targeting systems in Ukraine as insignificant; or they attribute these problems to poor training of Ukrainian soldiers.
“There is quite a bit of learning, but unfortunately the US military also learns about this war things that are not necessarily true, and what is learned is filtered through the arrogant assumption that many of the problems that the Ukrainian military is facing will not be faced by the US armed forces, or that they can be overcome on them easily,” said Michael Koffman, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment think tank, who has visited Ukraine’s frontline units many times.
The development of the Cold War
Russia’s focus on electronic warfare began with the development of Western precision weapons in the last decade of the Cold War. It was a breakthrough that disrupted the balance of power created by the Soviet and Western nuclear arsenals.
Weapons like Excalibur and GMLRS missiles were designed decades ago. It is therefore not surprising that Russian electronic warfare equipment, created specifically to deal with this threat, has proven capable of doing so once deployed on a significant scale.
Many of the modern Western precision munitions systems rely, at least in part, on satellite navigation to hit their targets. By the summer of 2023, the Russians had used the mass of their electronic warfare capabilities to jam or spoof satellite navigation within a belt about 40 miles (about 64 km) wide along the 800-mile (about 1,300 km) front line.
Russia’s own precision munitions, such as the Krasnopol shells, rely on laser guidance by Orlan-30 UAVs, which continued to operate without GPS guidance. The US has supplied Ukraine with similar M712 Copperhead artillery shells, but Ukrainian forces rarely use them , according to them, due to a lack of UAVs compatible with the designation of targets.
Recently, Russia has put into use on a significant scale the improved Kometa-M satellite guidance system. It is much more resistant to Ukrainian blockades, and it has made it possible to use Russian cruise bombs with devastating effect against Ukrainian positions.
Russian jamming proved particularly successful with Excalibur, which used detonators programmed to detonate at a certain height, and due to GPS interference failed to detonate at all, Ukrainian soldiers say. Other precision guided artillery shells, such as the “bonus” shells produced by France and Sweden, have also become less effective due to Russian disruptions.
With GMLRS ammunition for the Himars system, the picture is more complex. The deviation varies with distance: Shorter-range hits are more susceptible to GPS trickery, and can reach several tens of yards, Ukrainian soldiers say. This is a big problem for the M31 single-warhead GMLRS missile, which was used with great success in 2022 to target Russian bunkers, command centers, boats, weapons and equipment depots.
With this ammunition, a deviation of 10 to 30 yards is the difference between a hit and a miss. The reduced accuracy is not a significant problem for the M30 GMLRS missile, which on impact sprays a meter wide area of tungsten pellets. Ukraine continues to use this munition to hit Russian artillery positions as part of anti-battery fire.
In both types of missiles, the accuracy can be improved on the basis of a more efficient reconnaissance of the enemy’s territory by means of electronic warfare and more advanced tactics.
The commander of a Ukrainian reconnaissance unit that guided about 300 Excalibur shells at Russian targets in 2022 and 2023 fondly recalls how devastating that munition was. “It’s cheap, it’s versatile, it was the real weapon of victory,” he said. “He could be like that again if he was regenerated in a way adapted to the changed battlefield. But, as far as we know, he is not regenerated.”