A year ago, Russian air force fighter-bombers were lobbing a hundred glide bombs every day all along the 800-mile front line of Russia’s wider war on Ukraine.
The satellite-guided KAB or UMPK glide-bombs, each traveling 25 miles or farther under pop-out wings, were a “miracle weapon” for the Russians, the Ukrainian Deep State analysis group noted at the time. And the Ukrainians had “practically no countermeasures.”
Russian forces settled into a comfortable routine. Glide bombs rained down on Ukrainian defenses. As the dust cleared, Russian infantry attacked the battered and traumatized Ukrainian survivors. The bomb-first, assault-next tactic helped the Russians capture the fortress city of Avdiivka in eastern Ukraine and then advance 25 miles along the same axis toward the next fortress city, Pokrovsk.
Gradually, and without many outsiders noticing, something changed. Now, as Russian forces stall outside Pokrovsk, it’s evident that “the golden era of the divine UMPK turned out to be short-lived,” noted Fighterbomber, the unofficial Telegram channel of the Russian air force.
“The bombs are still flying,” Fighterbomber noted in a missive translated by Estonian analyst WarTranslated. Indeed, the Ukrainian Center for Defense Strategies has recently noted KAB/UMPK attacks in Sumy, Chernihiv and Donetsk Oblasts in eastern and northern Ukraine.
“But there’s a catch,” Fighterbomber explained. “All satellite-guided correction systems have left the chat.” And for one main reason: Ukrainian radio jammers have become so effective, and so numerous, that they “saturate the front line.”
The glide bombs can’t communicate with the GLONASS satellite constellation, Russia’s less sophisticated and less expansive answer to the United States’ own GPS satellite constellation. Without a steady connection for course correction, the glide bombs tend to stray and harmlessly explode on some fields.
“All high-value targets are guaranteed to be covered by [electronic warfare],” Fighterbomber claimed. It might take eight or even 16 glide bombs to reliably hit one target, the channel added. And while the glide bombs are inexpensive for a precision munition—each costing around $25,000—the Sukhoi jets that lob them two or four at a time aren’t cheap.
Launching four jets to maybe hit one target is risky and inefficient for an air force that has just a thousand or so modern jets, and has already lost 120 of them in action in Ukraine.
The intensive Ukrainian jamming has also grounded many of Russia’s drones, compelling desperate Russian operators to switch to pricier fiber-optic drones that send and receive signals via long thin cables instead of via radio.
The jamming has effectively accomplished what the Ukrainian air force struggled to accomplish with its expensive, vulnerable S-300, Patriot and SAMP/T surface-to-air missile batteries, which can hit Russian jets from scores of miles away but were always too few in number to fully protect the front line and safeguard Ukrainian cities.
The Russians jam, too, of course—but Russian jamming doesn’t have the impact that Ukrainian jamming does. Many Russian jammers are badly made and ineffective.
Equally importantly, the best Ukrainian munitions—American-made Joint Direct Attack Munition glide bombs and French-made Hammer glide bombs—include GPS guidance but also have backup inertial navigation systems, or INS, that are entirely self-contained and are thus impervious to jamming.
Consider that both American and Ukrainian jets have, in their respective bombing campaigns, blown up enemy GPS jammers using GPS-guided munitions with INS backups. “I’m also pleased to say they’ve had no effect on us,” Victor Renuart, then a U.S. Air Force general, said of Iraqi GPS jammers after USAF warplanes dropped GPS munitions on them back in 2003.
By contrast, Russia’s own inertial guidance backups—complex systems that internally calculate a munition’s direction, altitude and speed in order to keep the munition on course—tend to be inaccurate. In a 2022 essay for Proceedings, the professional journal of the U.S. Navy, analyst Mark Schneider concluded Russian missiles are often a tenth as accurate as their makers claim.
Filling the air with radio noise that bothers them less than it bothers the Russians, the Ukrainians may have erased one of Russia’s main battlefield advantages. It’s time for Russian commanders to “acknowledge this reality,” Fighterbomber urged. “The future belongs to autonomous INS.”
But when it comes to INS, Ukraine has the edge.
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