It’s clear the Ukrainian military understands the importance of the electromagnetic fight. But it’s less clear the US military understands it.
Electronic warfare, or EW, is invisible. It’s the practice of tapping, blocking and hijacking the enemy’s radars and radios – while preventing the enemy from tapping, blocking and hijacking your own radars and radios.
It’s high-tech work, involving sensitive electronic receivers and powerful transmitters. It’s all about frequencies and wattage, time, space and coordination. After all, if you’re not careful, the same radio noise that might jam the enemy’s communications might also block your communications.
EW is expensive, unglamorous and requires a lot of training. So it should come as no surprise that many militaries neglect it. Not so the Russian military. The Russians, and the Soviets before them, had a reputation for fearsome electronic attack and defense.
That reputation wasn’t unearned. In July 2014, during the early months of Russia’s initial invasion of eastern Ukraine, three Ukrainian brigades learned the hard way that Russian regiments always fight for the electromagnetic spectrum.
The Ukrainians had massed their tanks and infantry in Zelenopillya, just a few miles from the Russian border, in preparation for an attack on rebel-held Luhansk. But Russian drones located the encampment – and Russian forces jammed the Ukrainian headquarters’ radios.
“The formations, prostrate and unable to communicate, were then ruthlessly attacked by Russian multiple-launch rockets and run-of-the-mill tube artillery,” US Army Major Amos Fox noted in a 2019 edition of Armor, a military trade journal.
Russian rocket batteries rained destruction on the Ukrainian camp. In all, 30 Ukrainian soldiers died along with six border guards and their commander. Scores of vehicles burned. “The attack crippled the assembled Ukrainian brigades,” Fox recalled. A few weeks later, Kyiv canceled the assault.
Encouraged by its EW victory in that battle, the Russian military prepared to repeat the feat – and on a grander scale. As the wider war loomed in late 2021, the Russians massed many of their best electronic eavesdroppers and jammers for what may have been the most intensive EW assault ever.
Amid the chaos of the Russian army’s initial push into Ukraine starting in February 2022, it took a few weeks for the Russians to deploy their EW gear. But once they did, they began jamming the Ukrainians’ best weapons – in particular, their drones.
The Ukrainians were counting on superior intelligence – largely provided by drones – to make their smaller artillery arsenal more precise than Russia’s own, larger arsenal of howitzers and rocket-launchers.
But the Russians’ EW prevented those drones from navigating and communicating – and deprived the Ukrainians of the precision they were counting on. “The defeat of precision was critical to unit survival” for the Russians, analysts Mykhaylo Zabrodskyi, Jack Watling, Oleksandr Danylyuk and Nick Reynolds explained in a study for the Royal United Services Institute in London.
The Russian military arguably had the EW advantage for more than a year. But gradually, and with tremendous effort, the Ukrainians began to turn the electromagnetic tide. When Gen. Valerii Zaluzhnyi, commander-in-chief of Ukraine’s armed forces, cited his troops’ most urgent needs back in the fall, EW systems were at the top of the list.
The first evidence of Ukraine’s new emphasis on EW came late last summer, as its forces prepared the left bank of the Dnipro River in Russian-occupied southern Kherson Oblast for an impending river-crossing operation by Ukrainian marines.
Before the marines boarded their boats, Ukrainian EW troops, artillery gunners and drone-operators struck Russian jammers – and jammed Russian drones. The result is that, for several months now, the Ukrainians have controlled the air over Krynky, helping them to hold onto a slim bridgehead in the left-bank town.
Kyiv’s EW troops repeated the feat around Avdiivka, a major battleground in northeastern Ukraine, a few weeks later. They targeted the radio-jammers the Russians use to ground Ukrainian drones while setting up their own jammers to ground Russian drones.
“The Ukrainian advantage in electronic warfare seems to be holding in this sector,” analyst Donald Hill wrote. “The number of Ukrainian drone attacks have increased. A lot. The number of Russian drone attacks have decreased by the same amount.”
The Ukrainians have learned from the Russians that the electromagnetic spectrum is a battlefield, too – and a decisive one. “Every trench, every location of our soldiers must be protected by electronic warfare to analyze the frequencies at which enemy drones fly,” Mykhailo Fedorov, Ukraine’s minister of digital transformation, said in October. “This is a huge systematic work and a new doctrine of modern technological warfare.”
Are the Americans paying attention? The US military notoriously dismantled the extensive EW infrastructure it had built up during the Cold War. It’s unclear that it’s rebuilding it – even as it observes the Ukrainian military fight its way back from the electromagnetic brink.
The Russians have always been deadly serious about electronic warfare. The Ukrainians had no choice but to get serious. Now it’s time for the Americans to do the same. It’s easier, and cheaper in lives and equipment, to prepare for the electronic fight in advance.
The Russian military’s electronic-warfare capability was the envy of the world. Emphasis on was. In 23 months of hard fighting, Ukrainian forces have not only blunted the Russians’ electronic advantage – on key battlefields, they’ve tilted it in their own favor.