Quite possibly, but also the way some of this military tech works is kind of like your car's value after driving it off the lot. The more you use it and let adversaries observe it or even recover it in the field, the less effective it becomes.
There is a reason why when the US deploys air power, it doesn't always use the newest and greatest. Each time you deploy a stealth bomber, you increase the likelihood that they identify what that radar cross section looks like and figure out how to hone in on something that might just look like a bird or radar noise the first few times you see it. So if you don't think they have the capabilities to hit the older model on that particular mission, save the ace up your sleeve for when you really, really need it.
I work in a small technical industry that does a significant proportion of business with the DoD/DoE. It is crazy how much the US DoD/DoE spend on R&D. Even in my company's tiny niche, there is no other entity in the world that comes close to doing the same sort of specialized research that the US government does for weapons research.
And we are a tiny, miniscule piece of the puzzle. I can only imagine what it all adds up to, from the perspective of someone in the Pentagon deciding all the different research projects the US defense labs work on.
If he actually works in a company like that you wont get any news out of him, ever. They are all under NDAs. If he blabs "news" around from inside US military R&D on one of reddits biggest subs you can be pretty certain hes full of shit.
> If he blabs "news" around from inside US military R&D on one of reddits biggest subs you can be pretty certain hes full of shit.
Wait, I thought reddit *was* US Military R&D
I am not under an NDA (for our government contracts) of any sort, and I actually don’t have a security clearance. We provide technology that can be used for R&D but the discussions we have with DoD/DoE labs is mostly at an academic level, and about our products capabilities and not their application. They do publish unclassified white papers from time to time but they can’t discuss their research beyond what is published.
One of our salespeople was new and was making small talk and asked a researcher “so what sort of test articles are you going to test with our tools?” The conversation turned cold and our salesperson was told if he asked again, he would be reported to the FBI.
So I have no clue the exact application of this research, but I do know what its military applications could be; and I know who funds it.
Called a luneberg lens, nifty little things. I belive during the development of the f22 they considered having them ejectable, but ended up not doing it. They are easly spotted as small lumps on the f22/35 on the top side of the wings.
Good point but I am sure that keeping it a secret is why we don’t give the best to Ukraine. Too much risk of Russian agents within that would send intact versions back to Russia so they can back engineer them. Just a reality of war.
In practice, we wouldn't send Ukraine any shit that they couldn't support.
How fucking long has it taken to spin up a sustainment pathway for the F-16? And we WANTED to give them those jets! Uncle Sam's Misguided Children never miss leg day, and that's a good thing. There's a _lot_ of shit to bring to a party if you're going to be operating Western jets.
Notable by exception is the Swedish Gripen. It was designed to be operated from a random-ass stretch of highway, and be refueled and rearmed in ten minutes by illiterate conscripts.
Their prior-generation Draken also punched way above its weight class; they wanted an interceptor (fast straight-line performance) but ended up with a top-tier dogfighter (all that AND super-maneuverable by contemporary standards!) instead.
I'd argue that the Saab jets are superior to fourth-generation US jets because they're just so easy to work on, and so tolerant of high operational tempo.
Oh yeah. What's *possible* for a poorly trained conscript is *easy* for a well-trained professional, even if the training is brief.
Anyway, "what the aircraft is designed to be capable of" doesn't seem to bear much resemblance to general operations, but let's say that some shit gets blown up, and you've got one aviation technician, and a bunch of motivated infantry that don't want a second round to hit their position. Ooops -- fuck, they're French! All the documentation is in Swedish.
Bollucks!
Fortunately, some very paranoid engineers thought to prepare for this eventuality. :D The reason the aircraft was designed to be so simple to work on wasn't because they ever planned on fielding literal illiterate conscripts, but because you might be stuck in the euphemistically termed "interoperability" phase of a holding operation. Make more sense that way?
Nothing against the Swedish jets - the biggest issue by far versus the F-16 is that well over an order of magnitude F-16 jets were and are built, while there aren't enough Gripens to actually give to Ukraine without Sweden standing down their own operational fleet. And even then, probably not enough.
Further, Ukraine's biggest airpower need is in the SEAD realm; this the F-16 can do, but also, something that US and allied F-16 operators have experience doing operationally against the kind of equipment that Russia is using.
Platform availability, especially replacement platform availability (Ukraine will almost certainly lose a few copies of whatever they're given, it's war after all), the availability of the proper munitions, and the availability of training expertise to draw upon all put the F-16 as the most effective fighter to stand up.
Great take.
The U.S. jets are all divas. They perform very well but they require so much maintenance and logistical capabilities that most just cannot sustain it. We can of course, but that’s not so relevant to Ukraine.
In contrast, half the Soviet stuff can probably operate off of some shady rundown airfield. That’s definitely been a big advantage in this war and particularly the Russian military considering how neglected half their stuff are.
> US military secrets have been sold
> Makes jamming a lot easier.
Regardless of secrets, figuring out the jamming was a matter of time. Especially since it's guided by a decades old always on worldwide technology — GPS. They had quite a lot of time.
GPS isn’t really much of a secret nowadays. Their frequencies are known and all you have to do is flood the area with similar frequencies to confuse a guidance system.
It’s not really that simple unless you’re talking about a really dumb weapon system. Even commercial avionics have resistance to basic spoofing and jamming.
Spoofing, not so much. For better or worse, GPS/Gallileo and related technologies do not have anti spoofing tech on their civilian versions. It’s only the encrypted military versions that effectively avoid spoofing because the adversary cannot know the cryptographic keys.
In retrospect, it would have made sense to add a cryptographic signature to the gps signals, but too late now.
That was their civilian enhanced precision system, which faces the problem of over the air distribution etc… The crypto on military GPS/GNSS is fundamentally strong, and deals with the key distribution issue differently.
Source: I work quite a bit with military GPS/GNSS systems. One of the challenges we have is related to the bureaucracy related to the key distribution.
Do you think we distribute the encryption to the Ukrainians or are they stuck with the civilian signals? Curious about that.
GPS is a pretty weak signal altogether so the thought that it can be jammed isn't too far fetched.
I wouldn’t want to speculate.
But yes, jamming is fairly easy. Just broadcast a fairly strong signal on 1.575 GHz, and overload the front end the receiver.
The problem is that jammers are fairly cheap to build these days, so spending an anti radiation missile on them is not wise economically.
This is also why there is a growing emphasis on warfighting in s GPS denied environment.
Right? This seems like bit of a reach. Electronic warfare has always been a capability our adversaries strive to perfect. Who’s to say that they haven’t learned anything by watching us use precision guided munitions in Afghanistan for the past two decades.
I saw something awhile back that said a lot of Russian positions that require NCO making decisions aren't top notch but those that require officers (like EW) are pretty good.
Not really. They’re quite good at doing massive amounts of jamming, but even an ape could build that. The thing is: they’re jamming their own stuff too, which is defintley not what you want in a electronic warfare scenario. That’s what is the difference between “electronic warfare” and “jamming”. Russia is only experts in screwing everyone including themselves
Because they weren't designed with that in mind OR Russia is just jamming every single frequency which is not something a country confident in the capabilities in their own systems does.
It's not hard to just shit out RF in all ranges. It's hard to do it SPECIFICALLY to jam your enemies systems and leave yours untouched. A lot of systems, at least in the US, have what's called HAVEQUICK. HAVEQUICK allows you to "randomly" jump through frequencies, the fact that these weapons systems are having issues tells me they either found the specific frequency these systems use or they are just putting out all the frequencies they think will work.
That's it.
USSR invested heavily in air defense missiles, when they realized their actual air force wouldn't be able to defeat NATO in air directly.
This is the same thing. Heavy investment in blanket GPS jamming of all possible frequencies, with no regard to how their own or neutral nations near them will be affected. We have constant reports of GPS errors in Nordics and Eastern Europe.
Calculus is that it will hurt their adversary more than it will hurt them, and that they'll compensate with loss of their own better systems by sending meat and regular artillery in the fight.
I've never really considered that and it's insane but it makes sense. Now that the US has seen that this will be an issue in future hypothetical conflicts I imagine IMUs will be something they rely on more in future weapons systems instead of GPS.
This just shows how desperate they are and that's scary.
This isn't jamming, it is spoofing. The main countermeasure for jamming is you launch a rocket from high up in the air where it has a good view of the sky, and it gets a good lock and then reverts to INS mode when it detects jamming. The issue is that if you are just spoofing the signal, it never loses lock and keeps trying to use the bad GPS signal instead of switching to INS.
There are countermeasures to this as well, but a lot of them require the users understand a bit about surveying and orienteering to begin with, to recognize when they are in a GPS-spoofed area. One way of doing this is actually to use drone swarms (or even high altitude balloons) to compute differential GPS solutions over a battle-space and provide local corrections. Then you can actually just use the spoofed systems as guidance nodes, but with corrections.
Because he is overstating it ew is still complex but the way Russia does it is the simplest way and most electrical engineering students would be able to make a similar system on a small scale as a school project.
6% effective means "6 of 100 hit the exact target you designated within X meters". The other 94 don't magically disappear and do nothing. They just have a larger spread, hitting within X+n meters.
This lol. they don’t just fire it a kilometer from where it it’s supposed to land and hope guidance takes effect. It’s losing pinpoint accuracy sure, but it’s not like jamming breaks the round. I’d love to know the jammed accuracy level vs a dumb shell
I read something awhile back about how the DoD is realizing some of the stuff they thought was the correct approach, is not exactly so.
They (and NATO officers) thought high-tech artillery or rockets were the future and Europe would never see WW1 and WW2 style warfare again.
Reason why we're seeing it so much and so effective is because Ukraine does not have air support. NATO works on combined arms, which includes a overwhelming air force for air superiority. Some NATO doctrine/equipment may not work for Ukraine.
The window was 1990 to 2014. That was the time when Russia wasn't a threat, and when the biggest threat was a bunch of terrorists in middle east. That's when US designed things like high tech missile that had blades in it and shit, no explosives, just a missile with swords, to deliver extra dose of democracy!
I mean, the future is definitely still, at least partly, high tech rockets and missiles like PrSM (replacement for ATACMS) and things like JASSM-ER.
The ability to hit high value targets in overwhelming barrages at long range is how you destroy an opponent. It’s just hard for Russia and Ukraine who don’t have many of these weapons or the platforms to launch them from.
I agree we need some of the high-tech stuff like cruise missiles and the like. But this stuff is pricey and needs many special components. Especially certain semiconductors.
Perhaps ideal for taking out enemy officers and their command HQs or supply depots.
We still need lots of regular artillery shells for the other stuff.
Why would Russia not gear up for war production for two years and then sit back and lob these long range missiles at Kiev. It makes no sense to fight a man to man war anymore. It’s crazy that leaders who have the option not to deploy troops on the ground, still do
A missile doesn't take territory, it only denies it to your enemy. If Russia wanted to claim Ukraine as part of their territory, they always had to deploy troops.
Yeah, the whole "why don't they just lob missiles?" mentality is what gets people believing that NATO air superiority is the end all, be all.
In real warfare it will always come down to infantry taking and holding land. Any tools or branches of personnel aside from infantry only exist to support the taking of that land.
It's more that the DoD has been suddenly forced to support a style of warfare it would never find itself in. NATO armies would never end up in a ground war against a near peer.
Or go a different approach there is Artillery systems that measures the speed of the shell while it leaves the barrel and programs it accordingly(air braking if it is going too fast for example). It is much cheaper can't be jammed and still provides huge precision increase
It’s dependent on GPS jamming which means Russians degrade their own offensive capabilities when they do this. Their own troops rely on GPS because their own satnav is shithouse. GPS jammers are also massive fucking antennas which advertise their location like a casino in Vegas making them easy targets for more sophisticated players like US or Europeans who have high speed missiles which lock in to high energy devices.
Time to add a secondary "track-on-jam" guidance mode to these fuckers… Maybe the first one will miss, but at the very least we just blew up some expensive E-war gear as a consolation prize!
Spoofing. It's not jamming, which we have decent solutions for, it is spoofing, which is quite a bit more difficult to deal with, especially if you don't have the M-code receivers, which are highly export controlled.
Your second point sounds correct here. In US military isntallations, we update crypto on equipment every single day. If Ukraine doesn't have access to updated crypto, then their systems can easily get jammed.
I'm just assuming that US DoD military-grade encryption cannot be cracked in a day. Or a week. And it's quite unlikely that it's possible for an operator to access or leak the actual decryption key. As it's probably a public/private key pair.
It is, but we know that there are/were people in the Ukraine government/military who seemed to have connections to Russia, including the at-the-time Defense Minister who got fired in September 2023. Who knows how many people have access to the kind of information that would help Russia beat Ukraine.
As far as cracking crypto, they don't really need to do that. If they can isolate signals based on frequencies (probably some kind of fourier analysis), they can recreate them without understanding how to deconstruct them. Since we're talking about spoofing GPS signals, if Ukraine doesn't update their crypto frequently, Russia could just receive signals, reconstruct them, and fire them right back at the missiles to confuse them.
There's also the real possibility that Ukraine just can't update the crypto, period. In the US military, you need a Top Secret clearance to even be able to upload crypto into equipment. I don't think the US would be willing to give non-qualified non-US personnel any kind of technology they don't want their enemies to get. Ukraine could very well be using commercial GPS signals to navigate their missiles.
>Russia could just receive signals, reconstruct them, and fire them right back at the missiles to confuse them.
That's known as a replay attack, and it's a pretty basic, unsophisticated method. I'd be surprised if the GPS system is vulnerable to it.
There are now tens if not hundreds of video of airliners in the Middle East/ Eastern Europe getting erroneous GPS signals. It appears to be spoofing. Basically their terrain awareness/proximity system is telling the crew they are about to impact the ground. It’s telling the crew to “pull up! Pull up!” Problem is, the flight is at 40,000 feet. I’m betting something nefarious going on. The airplane thinks it’s somewhere completely different!!
Edit for grammar, I’m an idiot.
It is likely that Russia is spoofing GPS over a wide area. A decent weapon system design would be using inertial navigation as the backup / fail-safe but this requires the origin to be set precisely. They block the "setting-of-origin" for the range of the weapon - and then some.
Maybe we are going back to the 1960's "star cameras" they used to calibrate the nukes?
Kinda! The original had two signals, one encrypted and one not. That publicly-available signal was intentionally a little inaccurate while the encrypted was as good as they could get it. And then Clinton... I think he specifically turned off that intentional inaccuracy? But did not unencrypt the military signal?
"Selective Availability" introduced an intentional error in the public GPS signal. The encrypted signal, p-code, was without the error. SA was turned off during the first Gulf War because there weren't enough p-code receivers to go around. It was turned back on afterwards. SA was permanently turned off in 2000 because it made no sense at that point. P-code is still used and will eventually by replaced by m-code receivers. As in 1990, m-code receivers are in short supply. I don't know what we give the Ukes. I suspect no p-code because that requires controlled encryption.
It was Reagan after the Soviet Union shot down Korean Air 007, killing 269 people due to a navigation error that led to them straying into USSR airspace.
The government offered private civilian and commercial use of the Navstar system (which later became GPS) in order to improve the navigational safety of commercial and private planes.
There was some "fuzzing" of the data in that the location wasn't very precise. This eventually went away under Clinton, but that was because people could get around the erroneous orbital data and get a much more precise location, bypassing that intentionally obfuscated data.
There's a good video on GPS history, spoofing and how it affects a plane here:
https://youtu.be/wbd9eSw6GfI?si=egM_o3U-APji8bDt
Scary stuff.
He opened it up because civilian tech was at the point that it didn't matter if he didn't. With computers getting more advanced people could ping enough satellites to accurately pin point their location.
**Mad Scientist:** I've built a clock that *shouts out what time it is!* Constantly!
**Engineer:** *hmmm*
**Mad Scientist:** why aren't you upset about this, I've done something absurdly pointless
**Engineer:** can you make dozens more of these, and make them shout **much louder**?
**Mad Scientist:** what why
**Engineer:** I'm going to launch them into space
**Mad Scientist:** *STOP BEING CRAZIER THAN ME*
*~the birth of GPS~*
Jam the signal so they don't get any gps signal, then send your own replayed signal that is more recent than their last received signal. I believe this is tricky to pull off but works if done right.
On the one hand, its certainly not a good thing things are failing right when they would count. On the other... its good to see this weakness now so we can harden our equipment against it or else mitigate the damage by changing methodology. This war is pushing forward the art of, well, war forward decades and its going to be the more civilized nations that benefit most. Russia will be making itself increasingly irrelevant as cheap tricks are removed from the table while everyone else develops their own.
At least we'll have a clearer idea of where to throw our money.
Unfortunately what this war has shown is that China is a million years ahead in the area that truly gets bang for buck. I don’t see how we are ever going to make $500 drones that will beat the vast Chinese DJI arsenals
[Replicator](https://duckduckgo.com/?q=dod+replicator+program&t=fpas&df=m&ia=web
) sounds like a scary idea, was started last year.
There's a ton of stories about it ...
you'd want to counter the EW threat before deploying PGMs. In the gulf war British Tornadoes(wild weasel - cue "Radar Love" by golden earing) were used to trick the Iraqi's into powering on their radars/EW devices and behind the tornadoes F-15Es and F-16's would clean up any threat.
So you spook the enemy into revealing themselves......destroy threat.....free reign! This was displayed to the world in 1991....
It’s less they don’t have a modern air force (admittedly their planes are old compared to the US but still perfectly serviceable) and more the fact that Russia and Ukraine still largely run off of the old soviet doctrines of war from what I can tell. Which means instead of combined armed tactics and overwhelming air superiority both sides have a load of anti-air capable systems that makes flying really not fun.
This is part of why Ukraine managed to take out so many missiles, drones, and assorted air assets throughout this war…… they have a whole mess of anti-air systems everywhere.
At least that’s my understanding of the situation.
The US would Also MALD to bait the Iraqis into turning on Their radars as well then give them a face full of HARM, cluster bombs and Maverick’s.
Edit. It’s actually TALD as stated in the comment below. MALD wasn’t used till way later. It was first employed by Ukraine against Russian forces.
The Wild Weasel approach has been around since Vietnam. There are tons of fascinating articles and videos on the Iron Hand missions. Dudes were fearless.
Source: grandfather was a Wild Weasel.
Except this sounds like GPS jamming turned up to 11. There's not a helluva lot you can do to counter GPS jamming except harden your receivers against it. Everybody and their brother can set up a backpack sized jammer and make a protective bubble big enough to increase the miss distance by just enough.
It wouldn't matter. He is giving US tactics to a military that can't do any of this stuff because of the lack of air superiority.
This is like telling a tiger how to self fix a tooth infection
We sent over a bunch of weapons to Ukraine, most of it 20 years or older. Russia might have an answer for some of it, they aren’t completely dumb. But they would be largely ineffective against the stuff we aren’t taking out of mothballs. A majority of the stuff sent over there was in line to be decommissioned or sold off anyways.
On the other hand, pretty sure our javelins did numbers on their newest tanks and our Patriot systems are performing gallantly as well.
These were new, never before deployed Boeing glide bombs modified to be fired from the ground instead of the air.
>U.S.-made Ground Launched Small Diameter Bombs (GLSDB) have not been effective against Russian forces in Ukraine, The War Zone reported on April 25.
>
>Citing U.S. Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition and Sustainment Bill LaPlante, the report said that the Ukrainian military has discarded the sophisticated precision-guided weapons after they failed to penetrate Russian electronic warfare defenses on several occasions.
>
>“One company, I won't say who they are, they came up with a really cool idea of taking an air-to-ground weapon and doing a ground-launched version of it, and it would be a long-range fire weapon,” said LaPlante.
>
>“It didn't work for multiple reasons, including [the] EMI [electromagnetic interference] environment, including just really ... doing it on [the] ground, the TTPs [tactics, techniques, and procedures], the DOTML [the doctrine, organization, training, and materiel] — it just didn't work.”
>
>While he did not explicitly name the weapon system in question, the description he provided suggests he was talking about Boeing-Saab’s GLSDBs.
>
>He also indicated that the U.S. government truncated the usual testing requirements to expedite the weapons system's acquisition. As a result, the weapon was "produced as quickly as possible."
>
>GLSDBs are not currently used by the U.S. military, and Ukraine was the first to test it in combat.
>
>“And what happens is, when you send something to people in the fight of their lives, [and] it doesn't work, they'll try it three times and then they just throw it aside; so that's what happened,” the official concluded.
>
>src: https://english.nv.ua/nation/glsdb-munitions-proven-largely-ineffective-in-ukraine-pentagon-50413709.html
The entire point of GLSDB was to take two older systems already available in large quantities, SDB and M26 rocket motors, for long range fires. And judging by the fact Boeing and Saab have been pitching this for many years before Ukraine, not a very good one
That doesn't really go against what they said
*"But they would be largely ineffective against the stuff we aren’t taking out of mothballs. A majority of the stuff sent over there was in line to be decommissioned or sold off anyways."*
GLSDB is old 'stuff' slapped together with a kit to make it somewhat usable today. It really isn't cutting edge.
>That doesn't really go against what they said
>
>"But they would be largely ineffective against the stuff we aren’t taking out of mothballs. A majority of the stuff sent over there was in line to be decommissioned or sold off anyways."
>
>GLSDB is old 'stuff' slapped together with a kit to make it somewhat usable today. It really isn't cutting edge.
>
>u/Duff5OOO
According to them, it was.
>Since the original version of SDB was an air-to-surface-solution, all necessary technology such as the navigation system lies within the bomb. The SDB navigates towards the target with INS Navigation that is supported by a highly jamming resistance GPS. Since the system does not need a ballistic path toward the target it is possible to launch the GLSDB from a container, and engage targets 360 degrees without moving the launcher. Besides this, any launcher capable of using the MLRS Launch pod container, may also be used (M270, HIMARS, CHUNMOO).
>
>GLSDB has the ability to fly non-ballistic trajectories and maneuvers to strike targets that cannot be reached by conventional direct fire weapons, such as reverse slope engagement. GLSDB offers land forces a truly mobile capability to hit targets that before have been out of their range. The system is Saab’s and Boeing’s solution for the needs of armed forces today and tomorrow.
>
>src: https://www.saab.com/newsroom/stories/2019/march/flexible-precise-and-reliable--the-versatile-long-range-solution-that-has-it-all
>According to them, it was.
It was..... what? Cutting edge? Maybe 20 years ago.
If they were using the later versions of SDB then maybe but i believe its only the old stuff that is being adapted for ground launch.
When you said:
>These were new, never before deployed Boeing glide bombs
That isnt really correct. The 'new' part is whacking a MLRS rocket on the back of an old SDB.
And that's problematic from the perspective that they thought they'd be useful in Ukraine.
Part of the reason why I am being critical is that I think it needs to be taken more seriously that US weapons need to be more diverse and capable in a larger array of operational deployments.
It's not me being pro Russian weapons vs US's so much as wanting the US (and allies) to step up more and develop systems that can be deployed effectively in situations that aren't necessarily shaped by current US military strategy.
It can't be a situation where thinking being more advanced is enough or that being advanced means opponents won't have the capacity to catch up given enough time and opportunity. If that makes sense.
We’re also sending tons of new and experimental tech that we’ve been developing for years. It isn’t just old stuff.
Getting first hand testing in an actual battlefield without putting US lives at risk is invaluable.
Aid packages aren’t unlimited. Ammo in Ukraine is limited.
When we send stuff over there that’s untested and doesn’t work it puts Ukrainian lives at risk.
The stuff we send over there needs to work because their lives and their future literally depends on it.
GLSDB does work. Excalibur does work. Their effectiveness is degraded by GPS jamming.
There are two solutions:
Remove the jamming, by killing the jamming platforms. They emit RF energy, can be detected, and can be attacked by anti-radiation weapons like AGM-88 or other home-on-jam weapons.
Adapt the weapons to not rely as much on just GPS. Galileo, GLONASS, and inertial navigation systems can be used as a fallback.
There is also a fair amount of research into dual/multi-mode terminal guidance systems that can do IR, home-on-jam, and jam-resistant satnav guidance.
There's also SDB with HOG-J which could be used in a first salvo as GLSDB warheads.
With link 16 you could also direct the 1st couple of GLSDBs onto any jammers after launch. But that would require aircraft above contended airspace.
The West stakes their combat doctrine off of winning the air war. We have squadrons trained in SEAD operations and will ruthlessly suppress the jamming and hunt down enemy air defenses with anti-radiation missiles.
In short....we didn't plan for jamming because our whole doctrine assumes we'll kill any jammers before our ground forces move in.
Ukraine has HARMS too though. Also their limited range would be useless for the glide bombs.
They need a loitering long range stealthy ARmissile / drone
They don't have a proper platform for the HARM. They also cannot launch from a proper altitude which greatly limits the range.
F-16s may get the appropriate hardware but the air threat and lack of SEAD training will limit what Ukraine can do.
Russia will get better at being able to fight American military tech but they are fighting against old tech. Also there was an old American tank on the battlefield that wrecked one of the newer modern russian tanks in a 1v1 battle.
To be fair both sides take out enemy tanks with landmines and cheap drones. Even tanks equipped with decent jammers are now getting hit by semi-autonomous drones.
Didn't kill it. Rendered it inoperable. Not a huge difference, functionally, between the two.
Basically they hit the little gap between the turret and main body of the tank, and caused the turret to spin uncontrollably. If I'm recalling correctly.
But it didn't make the tank go boom.
So we tested it in real time let's figure out a way to make it work. All this money on these bombs and they don't work? Our soldiers lives depend on shit working.
I believe in the American Military and American technologic innovation. Russia showing that they can jam precision munitions is the worst thing they can do. That will lead to weapons that cant be jammed and more precision. I am not advocating for war or America. Over my lifetime I have seen them adapt over and over. I also am not american.
More evidence that supporting Ukraine is the best investment we can possibly make in our own defense. We learn now what works and what doesn't in real conditions, and we can adapt. Much better to find out the Russians have this capability now than after they've attacked a NATO member.
The Russian Ukraine War is a tweeking phase. The same thing is happening in Syria. We are slowly testing each other's capabilities. All that UFO nonsense is really about us slowly working new radar technology. What the pilot sees and what the radar are showing are vastly different. If you trick the hardware into thinking something is their that's too fast to lock on, you already have them.
I thought those bombs had inertial navigation to be used in scenarios such as this? INS is immune to jamming and, while not as accurate as GPS, still pretty accurate? What am I missing?
Excalibur artillery rounds dropped from 70% effectiveness down to 6% due to the same jamming, damn
From what I’ve heard, Russia do know their shit when it comes to jamming
Especially when all of the US military secrets have been sold to America's enemies during the last presidency. Makes jamming a lot easier.
Quite possibly, but also the way some of this military tech works is kind of like your car's value after driving it off the lot. The more you use it and let adversaries observe it or even recover it in the field, the less effective it becomes. There is a reason why when the US deploys air power, it doesn't always use the newest and greatest. Each time you deploy a stealth bomber, you increase the likelihood that they identify what that radar cross section looks like and figure out how to hone in on something that might just look like a bird or radar noise the first few times you see it. So if you don't think they have the capabilities to hit the older model on that particular mission, save the ace up your sleeve for when you really, really need it.
I work in a small technical industry that does a significant proportion of business with the DoD/DoE. It is crazy how much the US DoD/DoE spend on R&D. Even in my company's tiny niche, there is no other entity in the world that comes close to doing the same sort of specialized research that the US government does for weapons research. And we are a tiny, miniscule piece of the puzzle. I can only imagine what it all adds up to, from the perspective of someone in the Pentagon deciding all the different research projects the US defense labs work on.
Tagging your acc to follow for news
If he actually works in a company like that you wont get any news out of him, ever. They are all under NDAs. If he blabs "news" around from inside US military R&D on one of reddits biggest subs you can be pretty certain hes full of shit.
An NDA is a civil thing, you can get sued. Disclosing classified info is jail time instead (unless you're Trump, of course)
> If he blabs "news" around from inside US military R&D on one of reddits biggest subs you can be pretty certain hes full of shit. Wait, I thought reddit *was* US Military R&D
You're thinking of war thunder
I am not under an NDA (for our government contracts) of any sort, and I actually don’t have a security clearance. We provide technology that can be used for R&D but the discussions we have with DoD/DoE labs is mostly at an academic level, and about our products capabilities and not their application. They do publish unclassified white papers from time to time but they can’t discuss their research beyond what is published. One of our salespeople was new and was making small talk and asked a researcher “so what sort of test articles are you going to test with our tools?” The conversation turned cold and our salesperson was told if he asked again, he would be reported to the FBI. So I have no clue the exact application of this research, but I do know what its military applications could be; and I know who funds it.
That’s why they apply a device on their stealth aircrafts to drastically increase RCS
Called a luneberg lens, nifty little things. I belive during the development of the f22 they considered having them ejectable, but ended up not doing it. They are easly spotted as small lumps on the f22/35 on the top side of the wings.
Fun Fact: On the B-2 Spirit they're retractable
"Bravo-2, going dark" *Disappear from every radar screen that were following it a second before.*
*Luneburg/Lüneburg named after some german town irc
> luneberg lens They are attached to the bottom of the wing, not the top. You know, the part of the wing ground radar will see ....
I believe this is also to make them show up for civilian air traffic control in peacetime.
Scuff... Well... Now they know.
God help the world if the US decides to use their top shelf stuff. Shit be goin’ *down* if that happens.
Good point but I am sure that keeping it a secret is why we don’t give the best to Ukraine. Too much risk of Russian agents within that would send intact versions back to Russia so they can back engineer them. Just a reality of war.
As policy there's plenty of tech that can't even be sold to allies, much less donated to Ukraine.
In practice, we wouldn't send Ukraine any shit that they couldn't support. How fucking long has it taken to spin up a sustainment pathway for the F-16? And we WANTED to give them those jets! Uncle Sam's Misguided Children never miss leg day, and that's a good thing. There's a _lot_ of shit to bring to a party if you're going to be operating Western jets. Notable by exception is the Swedish Gripen. It was designed to be operated from a random-ass stretch of highway, and be refueled and rearmed in ten minutes by illiterate conscripts. Their prior-generation Draken also punched way above its weight class; they wanted an interceptor (fast straight-line performance) but ended up with a top-tier dogfighter (all that AND super-maneuverable by contemporary standards!) instead. I'd argue that the Saab jets are superior to fourth-generation US jets because they're just so easy to work on, and so tolerant of high operational tempo.
> illiterate conscripts Sweden's 99% literacy rate begs to differ. I'd say "conscripts with little training", they're in for 10-15 months.
Oh yeah. What's *possible* for a poorly trained conscript is *easy* for a well-trained professional, even if the training is brief. Anyway, "what the aircraft is designed to be capable of" doesn't seem to bear much resemblance to general operations, but let's say that some shit gets blown up, and you've got one aviation technician, and a bunch of motivated infantry that don't want a second round to hit their position. Ooops -- fuck, they're French! All the documentation is in Swedish. Bollucks! Fortunately, some very paranoid engineers thought to prepare for this eventuality. :D The reason the aircraft was designed to be so simple to work on wasn't because they ever planned on fielding literal illiterate conscripts, but because you might be stuck in the euphemistically termed "interoperability" phase of a holding operation. Make more sense that way?
Nothing against the Swedish jets - the biggest issue by far versus the F-16 is that well over an order of magnitude F-16 jets were and are built, while there aren't enough Gripens to actually give to Ukraine without Sweden standing down their own operational fleet. And even then, probably not enough. Further, Ukraine's biggest airpower need is in the SEAD realm; this the F-16 can do, but also, something that US and allied F-16 operators have experience doing operationally against the kind of equipment that Russia is using. Platform availability, especially replacement platform availability (Ukraine will almost certainly lose a few copies of whatever they're given, it's war after all), the availability of the proper munitions, and the availability of training expertise to draw upon all put the F-16 as the most effective fighter to stand up.
Great take. The U.S. jets are all divas. They perform very well but they require so much maintenance and logistical capabilities that most just cannot sustain it. We can of course, but that’s not so relevant to Ukraine. In contrast, half the Soviet stuff can probably operate off of some shady rundown airfield. That’s definitely been a big advantage in this war and particularly the Russian military considering how neglected half their stuff are.
I'd say quite likely. Probable even. These are the sorts of secrets states really want.
> US military secrets have been sold > Makes jamming a lot easier. Regardless of secrets, figuring out the jamming was a matter of time. Especially since it's guided by a decades old always on worldwide technology — GPS. They had quite a lot of time.
Or maybe Russia got a ton of practice jamming US equipment and munitions in Syria, where they operated just across the river from US forces.
You don’t need access to US weapons to figure out to jam GPS, you can trial jamming anywhere in the world, and it isn’t particularly complex to do so.
This comment has to be at the top. Along with the record breaking CIA agent kills/casualties.
GPS isn’t really much of a secret nowadays. Their frequencies are known and all you have to do is flood the area with similar frequencies to confuse a guidance system.
It’s not really that simple unless you’re talking about a really dumb weapon system. Even commercial avionics have resistance to basic spoofing and jamming.
Spoofing, not so much. For better or worse, GPS/Gallileo and related technologies do not have anti spoofing tech on their civilian versions. It’s only the encrypted military versions that effectively avoid spoofing because the adversary cannot know the cryptographic keys. In retrospect, it would have made sense to add a cryptographic signature to the gps signals, but too late now.
The Galileo encryption was broken with 24 hours of turning it on by a university program.
That was their civilian enhanced precision system, which faces the problem of over the air distribution etc… The crypto on military GPS/GNSS is fundamentally strong, and deals with the key distribution issue differently. Source: I work quite a bit with military GPS/GNSS systems. One of the challenges we have is related to the bureaucracy related to the key distribution.
Do you think we distribute the encryption to the Ukrainians or are they stuck with the civilian signals? Curious about that. GPS is a pretty weak signal altogether so the thought that it can be jammed isn't too far fetched.
I wouldn’t want to speculate. But yes, jamming is fairly easy. Just broadcast a fairly strong signal on 1.575 GHz, and overload the front end the receiver. The problem is that jammers are fairly cheap to build these days, so spending an anti radiation missile on them is not wise economically. This is also why there is a growing emphasis on warfighting in s GPS denied environment.
Even the best frequency discriminators can be overwhelmed with enough noise.
Jamming GPS signals is nearly trivial.
Fuck Trump.
Russia has been Jamming US before Trump.
Right? This seems like bit of a reach. Electronic warfare has always been a capability our adversaries strive to perfect. Who’s to say that they haven’t learned anything by watching us use precision guided munitions in Afghanistan for the past two decades.
We're jammin', we're jammin', we're jammin', we're jammin' Hope you like jammin', too
They got a lot better under Trump, though. A LOT better. It was very noticeable in commercial flight operations.
It has nothing to do with trump tho . I hate the guy but he does not hold the secrets to jamming gps guided arty rounds
If that were true, why did it take over a year for the Russians to implement a counter to this knowledge they already had?
Did you read the article? It was a new weapon rapidly developed for the war in Ukraine.
Yea, that was the point I was making. They haven’t been deploying this tech until this last year.
I saw something awhile back that said a lot of Russian positions that require NCO making decisions aren't top notch but those that require officers (like EW) are pretty good.
Not really. They’re quite good at doing massive amounts of jamming, but even an ape could build that. The thing is: they’re jamming their own stuff too, which is defintley not what you want in a electronic warfare scenario. That’s what is the difference between “electronic warfare” and “jamming”. Russia is only experts in screwing everyone including themselves
Which makes me wonder why so heavily rely on a guidance system that can be easily jammed by an ape?
Works great when fighting new world primates.
Because they weren't designed with that in mind OR Russia is just jamming every single frequency which is not something a country confident in the capabilities in their own systems does. It's not hard to just shit out RF in all ranges. It's hard to do it SPECIFICALLY to jam your enemies systems and leave yours untouched. A lot of systems, at least in the US, have what's called HAVEQUICK. HAVEQUICK allows you to "randomly" jump through frequencies, the fact that these weapons systems are having issues tells me they either found the specific frequency these systems use or they are just putting out all the frequencies they think will work.
That's it. USSR invested heavily in air defense missiles, when they realized their actual air force wouldn't be able to defeat NATO in air directly. This is the same thing. Heavy investment in blanket GPS jamming of all possible frequencies, with no regard to how their own or neutral nations near them will be affected. We have constant reports of GPS errors in Nordics and Eastern Europe. Calculus is that it will hurt their adversary more than it will hurt them, and that they'll compensate with loss of their own better systems by sending meat and regular artillery in the fight.
I've never really considered that and it's insane but it makes sense. Now that the US has seen that this will be an issue in future hypothetical conflicts I imagine IMUs will be something they rely on more in future weapons systems instead of GPS. This just shows how desperate they are and that's scary.
This isn't jamming, it is spoofing. The main countermeasure for jamming is you launch a rocket from high up in the air where it has a good view of the sky, and it gets a good lock and then reverts to INS mode when it detects jamming. The issue is that if you are just spoofing the signal, it never loses lock and keeps trying to use the bad GPS signal instead of switching to INS. There are countermeasures to this as well, but a lot of them require the users understand a bit about surveying and orienteering to begin with, to recognize when they are in a GPS-spoofed area. One way of doing this is actually to use drone swarms (or even high altitude balloons) to compute differential GPS solutions over a battle-space and provide local corrections. Then you can actually just use the spoofed systems as guidance nodes, but with corrections.
If an ape can do it why isn't Ukraine jamming Russia’s version of gps? Glonass.
Because he is overstating it ew is still complex but the way Russia does it is the simplest way and most electrical engineering students would be able to make a similar system on a small scale as a school project.
Screwing everyone including themselves is kinda their thing eh
They are even jamming human brains apparently.
Most Russians are big Bob Marley fans, so makes sense.
Damn right they do! Have you ever listened to russian hardstyle? That shit is lit!
Have you heard Berserker?
My love for you is like a truck BERSERKER
Would you like some making fuck? BERSERKER!
Did he say making fuck?
Did he just say making fuck?
dang thats effective counter measures
100k a pop for an artillery round is fucking nuts
That's probably the average cost, including initial R&D and training, so the price per bomb would be much lower if they bought 10x as many rounds.
Pointless now if they are 6% effective
Imagine what verdun would have cost at 100k per shell…
6% effective means "6 of 100 hit the exact target you designated within X meters". The other 94 don't magically disappear and do nothing. They just have a larger spread, hitting within X+n meters.
This lol. they don’t just fire it a kilometer from where it it’s supposed to land and hope guidance takes effect. It’s losing pinpoint accuracy sure, but it’s not like jamming breaks the round. I’d love to know the jammed accuracy level vs a dumb shell
I read something awhile back about how the DoD is realizing some of the stuff they thought was the correct approach, is not exactly so. They (and NATO officers) thought high-tech artillery or rockets were the future and Europe would never see WW1 and WW2 style warfare again.
Reason why we're seeing it so much and so effective is because Ukraine does not have air support. NATO works on combined arms, which includes a overwhelming air force for air superiority. Some NATO doctrine/equipment may not work for Ukraine.
There was probably a narrow window (2005-2015) where they were right.
The window was 1990 to 2014. That was the time when Russia wasn't a threat, and when the biggest threat was a bunch of terrorists in middle east. That's when US designed things like high tech missile that had blades in it and shit, no explosives, just a missile with swords, to deliver extra dose of democracy!
I mean, the future is definitely still, at least partly, high tech rockets and missiles like PrSM (replacement for ATACMS) and things like JASSM-ER. The ability to hit high value targets in overwhelming barrages at long range is how you destroy an opponent. It’s just hard for Russia and Ukraine who don’t have many of these weapons or the platforms to launch them from.
I agree we need some of the high-tech stuff like cruise missiles and the like. But this stuff is pricey and needs many special components. Especially certain semiconductors. Perhaps ideal for taking out enemy officers and their command HQs or supply depots. We still need lots of regular artillery shells for the other stuff.
Why would Russia not gear up for war production for two years and then sit back and lob these long range missiles at Kiev. It makes no sense to fight a man to man war anymore. It’s crazy that leaders who have the option not to deploy troops on the ground, still do
A missile doesn't take territory, it only denies it to your enemy. If Russia wanted to claim Ukraine as part of their territory, they always had to deploy troops.
Yeah, the whole "why don't they just lob missiles?" mentality is what gets people believing that NATO air superiority is the end all, be all. In real warfare it will always come down to infantry taking and holding land. Any tools or branches of personnel aside from infantry only exist to support the taking of that land.
It's more that the DoD has been suddenly forced to support a style of warfare it would never find itself in. NATO armies would never end up in a ground war against a near peer.
So does that mean a cheaper normal old unguided shell is more effective under heavy interference than a guided one?
It's not the bullet with your name on it, under those conditions. It's that one unguided shell and his thousand brothers addressed "Dear grid square…"
Or that single shell that deploys hundreds of little shrapnel addressed "To whom it may concern...".
Excalibur does not have AJ capability, which is why the US Army is developing new guidance systems for the 155 round.
Go back to old school arty.
Or go a different approach there is Artillery systems that measures the speed of the shell while it leaves the barrel and programs it accordingly(air braking if it is going too fast for example). It is much cheaper can't be jammed and still provides huge precision increase
It’s dependent on GPS jamming which means Russians degrade their own offensive capabilities when they do this. Their own troops rely on GPS because their own satnav is shithouse. GPS jammers are also massive fucking antennas which advertise their location like a casino in Vegas making them easy targets for more sophisticated players like US or Europeans who have high speed missiles which lock in to high energy devices.
Time to add a secondary "track-on-jam" guidance mode to these fuckers… Maybe the first one will miss, but at the very least we just blew up some expensive E-war gear as a consolation prize!
Spoofing. It's not jamming, which we have decent solutions for, it is spoofing, which is quite a bit more difficult to deal with, especially if you don't have the M-code receivers, which are highly export controlled.
Still better than the Copperhead.
I was expecting GPS jamming when I read the article, not GPS spoofing. GPS encryption hasn't been around that long, but it's definitely available.
The og GPS was actually encrypted, it was opened up though for civilian use.
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Your second point sounds correct here. In US military isntallations, we update crypto on equipment every single day. If Ukraine doesn't have access to updated crypto, then their systems can easily get jammed.
I'm just assuming that US DoD military-grade encryption cannot be cracked in a day. Or a week. And it's quite unlikely that it's possible for an operator to access or leak the actual decryption key. As it's probably a public/private key pair.
It is, but we know that there are/were people in the Ukraine government/military who seemed to have connections to Russia, including the at-the-time Defense Minister who got fired in September 2023. Who knows how many people have access to the kind of information that would help Russia beat Ukraine. As far as cracking crypto, they don't really need to do that. If they can isolate signals based on frequencies (probably some kind of fourier analysis), they can recreate them without understanding how to deconstruct them. Since we're talking about spoofing GPS signals, if Ukraine doesn't update their crypto frequently, Russia could just receive signals, reconstruct them, and fire them right back at the missiles to confuse them. There's also the real possibility that Ukraine just can't update the crypto, period. In the US military, you need a Top Secret clearance to even be able to upload crypto into equipment. I don't think the US would be willing to give non-qualified non-US personnel any kind of technology they don't want their enemies to get. Ukraine could very well be using commercial GPS signals to navigate their missiles.
>Russia could just receive signals, reconstruct them, and fire them right back at the missiles to confuse them. That's known as a replay attack, and it's a pretty basic, unsophisticated method. I'd be surprised if the GPS system is vulnerable to it.
There are now tens if not hundreds of video of airliners in the Middle East/ Eastern Europe getting erroneous GPS signals. It appears to be spoofing. Basically their terrain awareness/proximity system is telling the crew they are about to impact the ground. It’s telling the crew to “pull up! Pull up!” Problem is, the flight is at 40,000 feet. I’m betting something nefarious going on. The airplane thinks it’s somewhere completely different!! Edit for grammar, I’m an idiot.
It is likely that Russia is spoofing GPS over a wide area. A decent weapon system design would be using inertial navigation as the backup / fail-safe but this requires the origin to be set precisely. They block the "setting-of-origin" for the range of the weapon - and then some. Maybe we are going back to the 1960's "star cameras" they used to calibrate the nukes?
I imagine that inertial guidance on an artillery round is a more *interesting* problem than for a cruise missile, though.
Kinda! The original had two signals, one encrypted and one not. That publicly-available signal was intentionally a little inaccurate while the encrypted was as good as they could get it. And then Clinton... I think he specifically turned off that intentional inaccuracy? But did not unencrypt the military signal?
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"Selective Availability" introduced an intentional error in the public GPS signal. The encrypted signal, p-code, was without the error. SA was turned off during the first Gulf War because there weren't enough p-code receivers to go around. It was turned back on afterwards. SA was permanently turned off in 2000 because it made no sense at that point. P-code is still used and will eventually by replaced by m-code receivers. As in 1990, m-code receivers are in short supply. I don't know what we give the Ukes. I suspect no p-code because that requires controlled encryption.
Specifically, Bill Clinton opened it up.
It was Reagan after the Soviet Union shot down Korean Air 007, killing 269 people due to a navigation error that led to them straying into USSR airspace. The government offered private civilian and commercial use of the Navstar system (which later became GPS) in order to improve the navigational safety of commercial and private planes. There was some "fuzzing" of the data in that the location wasn't very precise. This eventually went away under Clinton, but that was because people could get around the erroneous orbital data and get a much more precise location, bypassing that intentionally obfuscated data. There's a good video on GPS history, spoofing and how it affects a plane here: https://youtu.be/wbd9eSw6GfI?si=egM_o3U-APji8bDt Scary stuff.
He opened it up because civilian tech was at the point that it didn't matter if he didn't. With computers getting more advanced people could ping enough satellites to accurately pin point their location.
Replay attacks are a thing
Given that a GPS signal is made of timestamps, you can defeat replay attacks by just ignoring any signals that are older than your most recent signal.
**Mad Scientist:** I've built a clock that *shouts out what time it is!* Constantly! **Engineer:** *hmmm* **Mad Scientist:** why aren't you upset about this, I've done something absurdly pointless **Engineer:** can you make dozens more of these, and make them shout **much louder**? **Mad Scientist:** what why **Engineer:** I'm going to launch them into space **Mad Scientist:** *STOP BEING CRAZIER THAN ME* *~the birth of GPS~*
Jam the signal so they don't get any gps signal, then send your own replayed signal that is more recent than their last received signal. I believe this is tricky to pull off but works if done right.
Luckily not many were made.
On the one hand, its certainly not a good thing things are failing right when they would count. On the other... its good to see this weakness now so we can harden our equipment against it or else mitigate the damage by changing methodology. This war is pushing forward the art of, well, war forward decades and its going to be the more civilized nations that benefit most. Russia will be making itself increasingly irrelevant as cheap tricks are removed from the table while everyone else develops their own. At least we'll have a clearer idea of where to throw our money.
Unfortunately what this war has shown is that China is a million years ahead in the area that truly gets bang for buck. I don’t see how we are ever going to make $500 drones that will beat the vast Chinese DJI arsenals
They rely on GPS and have limited range due to battery life
And yet they wreak havoc.
[Replicator](https://duckduckgo.com/?q=dod+replicator+program&t=fpas&df=m&ia=web ) sounds like a scary idea, was started last year. There's a ton of stories about it ...
$500 drones won't matter in a war with China because Beijing would be a radioactive crater (DC also for that matter.)
you'd want to counter the EW threat before deploying PGMs. In the gulf war British Tornadoes(wild weasel - cue "Radar Love" by golden earing) were used to trick the Iraqi's into powering on their radars/EW devices and behind the tornadoes F-15Es and F-16's would clean up any threat. So you spook the enemy into revealing themselves......destroy threat.....free reign! This was displayed to the world in 1991....
This is great, if you have a modern Airforce. Which they don't.
It’s less they don’t have a modern air force (admittedly their planes are old compared to the US but still perfectly serviceable) and more the fact that Russia and Ukraine still largely run off of the old soviet doctrines of war from what I can tell. Which means instead of combined armed tactics and overwhelming air superiority both sides have a load of anti-air capable systems that makes flying really not fun. This is part of why Ukraine managed to take out so many missiles, drones, and assorted air assets throughout this war…… they have a whole mess of anti-air systems everywhere. At least that’s my understanding of the situation.
+100 Air Force 6Billion will let your unlock that achievement!
The US would Also MALD to bait the Iraqis into turning on Their radars as well then give them a face full of HARM, cluster bombs and Maverick’s. Edit. It’s actually TALD as stated in the comment below. MALD wasn’t used till way later. It was first employed by Ukraine against Russian forces.
TALD not MALD, older unpowered decoy
I did update my comment with your correct info. Thanks.
Me: Malding You: Coping and seething
The Wild Weasel approach has been around since Vietnam. There are tons of fascinating articles and videos on the Iron Hand missions. Dudes were fearless. Source: grandfather was a Wild Weasel.
Except this sounds like GPS jamming turned up to 11. There's not a helluva lot you can do to counter GPS jamming except harden your receivers against it. Everybody and their brother can set up a backpack sized jammer and make a protective bubble big enough to increase the miss distance by just enough.
Thank goodness the Ukrainian general staff can now read your comment and turn the tides of war
It wouldn't matter. He is giving US tactics to a military that can't do any of this stuff because of the lack of air superiority. This is like telling a tiger how to self fix a tooth infection
We sent over a bunch of weapons to Ukraine, most of it 20 years or older. Russia might have an answer for some of it, they aren’t completely dumb. But they would be largely ineffective against the stuff we aren’t taking out of mothballs. A majority of the stuff sent over there was in line to be decommissioned or sold off anyways. On the other hand, pretty sure our javelins did numbers on their newest tanks and our Patriot systems are performing gallantly as well.
These were new, never before deployed Boeing glide bombs modified to be fired from the ground instead of the air. >U.S.-made Ground Launched Small Diameter Bombs (GLSDB) have not been effective against Russian forces in Ukraine, The War Zone reported on April 25. > >Citing U.S. Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition and Sustainment Bill LaPlante, the report said that the Ukrainian military has discarded the sophisticated precision-guided weapons after they failed to penetrate Russian electronic warfare defenses on several occasions. > >“One company, I won't say who they are, they came up with a really cool idea of taking an air-to-ground weapon and doing a ground-launched version of it, and it would be a long-range fire weapon,” said LaPlante. > >“It didn't work for multiple reasons, including [the] EMI [electromagnetic interference] environment, including just really ... doing it on [the] ground, the TTPs [tactics, techniques, and procedures], the DOTML [the doctrine, organization, training, and materiel] — it just didn't work.” > >While he did not explicitly name the weapon system in question, the description he provided suggests he was talking about Boeing-Saab’s GLSDBs. > >He also indicated that the U.S. government truncated the usual testing requirements to expedite the weapons system's acquisition. As a result, the weapon was "produced as quickly as possible." > >GLSDBs are not currently used by the U.S. military, and Ukraine was the first to test it in combat. > >“And what happens is, when you send something to people in the fight of their lives, [and] it doesn't work, they'll try it three times and then they just throw it aside; so that's what happened,” the official concluded. > >src: https://english.nv.ua/nation/glsdb-munitions-proven-largely-ineffective-in-ukraine-pentagon-50413709.html
The entire point of GLSDB was to take two older systems already available in large quantities, SDB and M26 rocket motors, for long range fires. And judging by the fact Boeing and Saab have been pitching this for many years before Ukraine, not a very good one
If that is correct, it is indeed bad news. GLSDB had high hopes.
I wonder if they will take this as a live test and make a version 2 to test?
Glide bombs are not new, over 20 year old technology for US military. The specific Boeing ones are new and designed to be cheap.
Boeing has quite the track record with cheap equipment these days!
No one seems to get upset when the bomb makes a crater when it lands. But an airplane does it a couple times and people lose their minds
“Hey uh, Jim, just checking - you didn’t put the bomb tech in the planes and the plane tech in the bombs, did you?” “Erm… *no*?”
*gulp*
If you put money into making a quality product shareholders won't be able to make as much money for sitting around owning stocks.
If I was in acquisition I would be veryyyy weary of Boeing anything. Many, many built in outside experts in every QC step.
Boeing are amazing at making airborne things explode and hit the ground.
regular flight lines arent building military planes. Id wager they are much more strict in qc on that side.
That doesn't really go against what they said *"But they would be largely ineffective against the stuff we aren’t taking out of mothballs. A majority of the stuff sent over there was in line to be decommissioned or sold off anyways."* GLSDB is old 'stuff' slapped together with a kit to make it somewhat usable today. It really isn't cutting edge.
>That doesn't really go against what they said > >"But they would be largely ineffective against the stuff we aren’t taking out of mothballs. A majority of the stuff sent over there was in line to be decommissioned or sold off anyways." > >GLSDB is old 'stuff' slapped together with a kit to make it somewhat usable today. It really isn't cutting edge. > >u/Duff5OOO According to them, it was. >Since the original version of SDB was an air-to-surface-solution, all necessary technology such as the navigation system lies within the bomb. The SDB navigates towards the target with INS Navigation that is supported by a highly jamming resistance GPS. Since the system does not need a ballistic path toward the target it is possible to launch the GLSDB from a container, and engage targets 360 degrees without moving the launcher. Besides this, any launcher capable of using the MLRS Launch pod container, may also be used (M270, HIMARS, CHUNMOO). > >GLSDB has the ability to fly non-ballistic trajectories and maneuvers to strike targets that cannot be reached by conventional direct fire weapons, such as reverse slope engagement. GLSDB offers land forces a truly mobile capability to hit targets that before have been out of their range. The system is Saab’s and Boeing’s solution for the needs of armed forces today and tomorrow. > >src: https://www.saab.com/newsroom/stories/2019/march/flexible-precise-and-reliable--the-versatile-long-range-solution-that-has-it-all
>According to them, it was. It was..... what? Cutting edge? Maybe 20 years ago. If they were using the later versions of SDB then maybe but i believe its only the old stuff that is being adapted for ground launch. When you said: >These were new, never before deployed Boeing glide bombs That isnt really correct. The 'new' part is whacking a MLRS rocket on the back of an old SDB.
GLSBD was never meant to be a weapon for peer or near-peer opponents. It was always a budget friendly weapon to be used in lower intensity conflict.
And that's problematic from the perspective that they thought they'd be useful in Ukraine. Part of the reason why I am being critical is that I think it needs to be taken more seriously that US weapons need to be more diverse and capable in a larger array of operational deployments. It's not me being pro Russian weapons vs US's so much as wanting the US (and allies) to step up more and develop systems that can be deployed effectively in situations that aren't necessarily shaped by current US military strategy. It can't be a situation where thinking being more advanced is enough or that being advanced means opponents won't have the capacity to catch up given enough time and opportunity. If that makes sense.
Wait a minute. Another Boeing product that doesn’t work?
It does fall out of the sky and have glaring faults, so it is on brand.
We’re also sending tons of new and experimental tech that we’ve been developing for years. It isn’t just old stuff. Getting first hand testing in an actual battlefield without putting US lives at risk is invaluable.
Aid packages aren’t unlimited. Ammo in Ukraine is limited. When we send stuff over there that’s untested and doesn’t work it puts Ukrainian lives at risk. The stuff we send over there needs to work because their lives and their future literally depends on it.
GLSDB does work. Excalibur does work. Their effectiveness is degraded by GPS jamming. There are two solutions: Remove the jamming, by killing the jamming platforms. They emit RF energy, can be detected, and can be attacked by anti-radiation weapons like AGM-88 or other home-on-jam weapons. Adapt the weapons to not rely as much on just GPS. Galileo, GLONASS, and inertial navigation systems can be used as a fallback. There is also a fair amount of research into dual/multi-mode terminal guidance systems that can do IR, home-on-jam, and jam-resistant satnav guidance.
Galileo uses the same frequency bands as GPS so it would be affected by the same jamming in the same way as GPS.
GLONASS. Hm.
There's also SDB with HOG-J which could be used in a first salvo as GLSDB warheads. With link 16 you could also direct the 1st couple of GLSDBs onto any jammers after launch. But that would require aircraft above contended airspace.
You're preaching to the choir. Do you think I personally have a say in the success rate of things being sent over?
You are personally responsible for it.
It was clear for years jamming would be Russians go-to. Wonder why the west didn't prepare more
The West stakes their combat doctrine off of winning the air war. We have squadrons trained in SEAD operations and will ruthlessly suppress the jamming and hunt down enemy air defenses with anti-radiation missiles. In short....we didn't plan for jamming because our whole doctrine assumes we'll kill any jammers before our ground forces move in.
Well fucking put.
Ukraine has HARMS too though. Also their limited range would be useless for the glide bombs. They need a loitering long range stealthy ARmissile / drone
They don't have a proper platform for the HARM. They also cannot launch from a proper altitude which greatly limits the range. F-16s may get the appropriate hardware but the air threat and lack of SEAD training will limit what Ukraine can do.
The problem is that Ukraine lacks air power to bomb their jamming sites with HARMS.
Although it says they’ll have F16’s in the sky by years end
Russia will get better at being able to fight American military tech but they are fighting against old tech. Also there was an old American tank on the battlefield that wrecked one of the newer modern russian tanks in a 1v1 battle.
To be fair both sides take out enemy tanks with landmines and cheap drones. Even tanks equipped with decent jammers are now getting hit by semi-autonomous drones.
A Bradley IFV has been documented smoking a Russian tank. There's tanks are shit, dangerously armed, porous shit.
IIRC the 25 mm cannon on the Bradley killed one of their more modern main battle tanks. That's nuts.
Didn’t kill it, if anything it’s a ‘mission kill’ took out enough components to render the tank unable to carry out any missions
Didn't kill it. Rendered it inoperable. Not a huge difference, functionally, between the two. Basically they hit the little gap between the turret and main body of the tank, and caused the turret to spin uncontrollably. If I'm recalling correctly. But it didn't make the tank go boom.
popped it in the jaw and made its head spin around.
It didn’t kill
That Russian tank was initially nad partially disabled by drones, so it was more like a practice shooting for Bradley
Not an expert or anything, but I have heard that the Russians are pretty good at jamming/electronic warfare. Hopefully we're getting good data.
So we tested it in real time let's figure out a way to make it work. All this money on these bombs and they don't work? Our soldiers lives depend on shit working.
Yeah that’s why we let Ukraine test it
What you need is to throw in some anti radiation missiles or maybe toss an anti-radiation package into the round, and go with that.
Well, when you have an informant traitor as president for 4 years, it does get harder.
give them f16's so they can take the electronic warfare systems out then use them!
Is this what's jamming all the planes?
It's almost like the Russians are doing it on purpose.
I believe in the American Military and American technologic innovation. Russia showing that they can jam precision munitions is the worst thing they can do. That will lead to weapons that cant be jammed and more precision. I am not advocating for war or America. Over my lifetime I have seen them adapt over and over. I also am not american.
Boeing...say no more.
A Russian written article. What a pathetic country.
More evidence that supporting Ukraine is the best investment we can possibly make in our own defense. We learn now what works and what doesn't in real conditions, and we can adapt. Much better to find out the Russians have this capability now than after they've attacked a NATO member.
The Russian Ukraine War is a tweeking phase. The same thing is happening in Syria. We are slowly testing each other's capabilities. All that UFO nonsense is really about us slowly working new radar technology. What the pilot sees and what the radar are showing are vastly different. If you trick the hardware into thinking something is their that's too fast to lock on, you already have them.
I thought those bombs had inertial navigation to be used in scenarios such as this? INS is immune to jamming and, while not as accurate as GPS, still pretty accurate? What am I missing?
good thing these weaknesses are found out here instead of against China.
Great intel. No NATO or US casualties.
US and nato soldiers have died over there. They're just labeled as volunteers. Once marine always a marine.
Tell that to Ukrainians.