Clark tells WIRED that Russia's systems were “not very mobile, not very distributed”. Their relatively small number of large systems, says Clark, “were not really relevant in the battle.”
Moscow's strategy assumed that there would be a relatively stable battlefield. At the front, they will be deployed infaunaA heavily armored vehicle that targets radio communications. Further ahead, about 15 miles from the front line, they would send layer-3A six-wheeled truck that is capable of not only jamming cellular networks but also disrupting communications Sending SMS to nearby cell phones. Even further away, about 180 miles away, the size of a fire-truck Krasukha-4 Will scan aerial sensors.
“When you get close to the front, you get electronic weather,” says Clark. “Your GPS won't work, your cell phone won't work, your Starlink won't work.”
This electromagnetic no-man's-land is what happens when you do a “barrage,” Clark explains. But he says there is a big compromise in this. Jamming across the entire spectrum requires more power than jamming over a wider geographic area. The more power a system has, the larger it should be. So you can disrupt all communications in a targeted area, or disrupt some further communications – but not necessarily both.
move fast and jam things up
At the beginning of the war Russia's army was crippled by poor communications, poor planning, and general slowness in adaptation. Still, it had a great start. “Unfortunately, the enemy has a numerical and material advantage,” a representative of Ukrainian defense tech startup UP Innovation told WIRED in a written statement.
Ukraine therefore developed two complementary strategies: produce cheap EW solutions in large quantities, and make them iterative and adaptable.
For example, Ukraine's Bukovel-AD anti-drone system fits comfortably in the back of a pickup truck. eater The system, about the size of a suitcase, can detect jamming signals from Russian EW systems – allowing Ukraine to target them with artillery. Ukrainian electronic warfare company Kvertus now makes 15 different anti-drone systems – ranging from drone-jamming backpacks to stationary devices that can be installed on radio towers to intercept incoming UAVs.
When full-scale war broke out in 2022, Kvertus had a product: a shoulder-mounted anti-drone gun like the EDM4S. “In 2022, [we were producing] Tens of thousands of devices,” Quartus CEO Yaroslav Filimonov told me when we sat in his Kyiv office this March. “In 2023 it was hundreds. Now? It’s thousands.”