Lessons from Ukraine: Why Electronic Warfare matters
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- Опубліковано 10 чер 2024
- The Russian Armed Forces had experience with Electronic Warfare (EW) and also quite a lot of equipment, yet in Ukraine they ran into various troubles and many of their EW operations failed, why was this the case? To cover this, I talked with Thomas Withington an expert in Electronic Warfare (EW). We look at the differences between Ukrainian and Russian EW operations. Why drones could fall out of the sky. EW Support operations, why it is so hard to "sell" EW and understanding EW. Finally, we touch a bit on hybrid warfare.
Follow him on twitter: / tomwithington
More information about EW here:
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www.thedefencehorizon.org/pos...
Cover design by vonKickass.
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/ tomwithington
#ew #electronicwarfare #ukrainewar
00:00 Intro
00:56 Difference between Ukraine & Russia
07:21 Drone fell out of the sky? How could this be done?
12:18 EW Support for Ukraine
16:17 Selling EW & Understanding EW
24:27 Hybrid Warfare
Great info, thank you. But how am I supposed to trust an expert on EW who doesn’t cover his window with aluminum foil?
Good question!
He used transparent aluminum. Scotty gave away the formula.
@@kodiak2fitty Graphene obviously!
Well if you put him in a Faraday Cage (or a SCIF) the streaming wouldn't happen.
@@kodiak2fitty 🖖
One of the reasons that EW is so secretive is that, like cyber attacks, once you know the trick it's easy to duplicate or mitigate. Secrets always have a time associated with them. That time is how long it would take for an adversary to break the secret and use the information gained. Since you use the example of tanks - the secret of composite armor, if broken will still take a long time for anyone duplicating it to understand exactly why the components are certain thicknesses and placed the way they are. The duplicators could make exactly the same turret from the broken secret information, but they may not be able to use a duplicate turret, so they need to understand more. Thus, composite armor is both protected as secret which means the adversary must spend the time to break the secret and they must spend a likely longer time understanding the composite armor (or spend even longer breaking the secret of all the formulae and research behind the composite armor). With electronic and cyber warfare,, once the secret is broken it's usually trivial duplicating or mitigating the trick.
During The Bad Old Days, I was a technician Raven. Even then ('70s) B-52s could induce enough noise into power systems to shut down power grids.
Same here! I'm trying to explain just to my parents what I did and my aircraft did back then in layman's terms......wonderful guest and keep up the great work. And your tank information. If we get across the pond next year I'd like to visit Austria, Poland and Germany after she has her fill of England!
Interesting thing about the drones being jammed and crashing because they get confused about their altitude. There was a privately financed moon lander that crashed a few weeks ago because of a software glitch that made it belive it was about to land when it was miles above the surface, so the Landing sequence started miles higher than intended. There was another glitch for another lander when it started believing its altitude was below the lunar surface, and it ended up spinning itself upside down and crashing. I think this is probably a very difficult thing to program against, much less harden against electronic warfare that is trying to trigger these responses intentionally.
because in the Ukraine they use tin foil, not alluminiuum!
So I'm assuming that sounding your elevation with a laser or a tiny radar was never an option?
@@oron61radar altimeter is how most of those systems operate already
@@lemonator8813 That's why I'm confused it can happen at all.
Blind faith in systems that are always failure prone, affected by innumerable outside factors.
An automated system needs THREE data gathering systems at minimum. Because if only one, and it fails, it will crash. If two, and one fails, it wont be able to determine which to believe and which failed. So three is the minimum for redundancy. And a computer logic that understands how to cross reference and ignore bad data.
Should be noted that electronic warfare is not the same as electronic attack or electronic countermeasure. It seems you guys were using EW to mean EA. EA is only a small part of EW, and usually much less useful in comparison to Electronic warfare support and especially SIGINT, as you can detect formations and do electronic targeting of high value targets.
This guy mixed encryption with signal strength. The reason why Russians are blocking everything is because Ukraine uses different frequencies for transmitting packets, basically for one message wide spectrum of frequencies is used. Not a word about it of course. Wikipedia and news expert obviously.
I like these less common subjects. Perhaps they don't draw the big crowd that tanks do but they are more interesting.
People fear the banjo
I second this opinion. This subject is sparsely talked about and ever increasing in importance. Not only in lieu of warfare, but also for a Carrington event.
ABC News Australia released recently a special about the role of the DSD (defence signals directorate) in intelligence matters, including an overview on mobile phone traffic analysis to stitch together and track down the network of the Bali Bombers, among other related topics, including EW operations in Afghanistan. I think individual parts are uploaded to their you tube channel.
as im doing a paper on this topic, let me simplify the answer to your 7:30 question -
first, a distinction: "jamming" means you stop the communication between the drone and the GPS satellites or Ground Control Station.
"spoofing" means you put your signal (camouflaged as the legit signal) instead of the real one.
"Jamming" leads to a drone falling back to its "i lost my signal, what do i do?"-routine. (which could very well be "drop down to safe heights")
"Spoofing" leads to the drone doing what you want. You can convince it that it has to climb 1km, or that it has to go to point xy. this is far more dangerous, obviously, but it has be done. Iran has at least two confirmed captures of the MQ-9 reaper drone. And if it can be done against a US military drone, it can be done against any drone. Just takes the resources of a state actor... which we have here, on both sides.
My interests also include EW, bicep curls, and the banjo.
I'd love to learn how to jam cell phone signals. I have a feeling this could improve my social interactions much more effectively than any psychology tips can.
A former co worker of me used to switch the router of, whenever he wanted the Attention of his Kids. It worked all the time.
Tin foil.
Faraday cage.
Large magnate.
Body of water.
7:15 - commercial drones are sold on a “please obey local laws and don’t use them for military operations” basis. To control this the manufacturers also produce specific jammer equipment to backdoor their drone products, that they then sell to governments. The target market for these jammers are police departments, but using these devices is how the Russian Army now can take control of the crowd-funded Chinese made drones used by Ukraine. These kind of drones have a lifespan of 1-3 flights on the battlefield. It’d be useful to know which kind of drone crashed, to work out how it was done. The Ukrainian Army made models are more advanced and should be secured against this. When this war is over we may get some details of if the military drones deal autonomously with the opposition drones in the air or if that still needs to be ground controlled. The current battlefields are where the most developed low-range military drones in the world are.
I imagine that the electronics specialists are doing a good deal of aftermarket upgrades to a lot of these drones to make sure that those backdoor jamming/hacking techniques are mitigated to the extent that the drones are still flying weight, but jam/hack resistant, more than likely focusing on really good camera/thermal imaging ones first, the loitering munitions second, then the smaller recon drones as they are able. Some are sent to the front unmodified, to be sure, but the serious ones are probably modified before use. They should modify some to be "home on jam" to "discourage" those who would do so. By now that is probably an easy software fix, Home in on the loudest signal, explode at source.
I wonder how a crowdfunding effort in which many people all built individual components of a drone and then they were sent to a central assembly location.
The cyber attack of the Viasat ground terminals enabled Russian air missions in the opening week of the war to meet very disjointed and limited air defense from Ukraine. It also impacted lots of terminals outside of Ukraine in western Europe. I am surprised it's not covered in more detail since that is how Ukraine was networking their air defense over the country. Perhaps it is still too secret, but it certainly had an impact outside of Ukraine as well.
Thank you for this great video! :)
More Infos about jamming GPS and the countermeasures would be great!
Sadly, information about EW is ever so circumstantial und vague. Mostly 'we can do things we cannot share in the electro-magentic spectrum'.
I guess EW would be perceived much more sexy, if it would be shown in a practical matter. For example, how an artillery radar helps to get counter-battery-fire under way. Or how EW suppresses SAM sites... I think, everybody would get the message ;)
And what about all the NATO aircraft around the ukrainian borders every day? I don't think they are only listening... ;)
I totally agree. I think it's at the point where there needs to broad but unspecific talk about how it can be used. Then set a scenario of how it integrates in to already commonly understood real world scenarios. The dots need to be connected.
I wonder if this problem of politicians & the layman looking at tanks going "big tonk yes, good, shoot things effective!" but when you present them with a modern radio with encryption up the whazzoo and the ability to eavesdrop on enemy radios they go "Whut? Why are you sending *that* puny little thing?" was a problem 100 years ago too. Were anyone sending modern radio sets or top-of-the-line rifle scopes to the Spanish civil war and getting derided for it by the people sending MP 28s and 75mm howitzers?
I think one of the problems is people have trouble understanding a system of systems. They look at the tip of the spear tools and understand that. How all the backend and opaque tools integrate to complement and force multiply the spearhead is poorly understood.
@@chris8612 I think this is a problem with the Russian army in general.
A lot of their gear is all teeth and little back end.
Thank you so much for this video. It's a woefully under-discussed topic. ^^
This was really good and informative, thank you.
I can give you first hand information and experience with Russian electronic warfare being used against civilian electronics. For example the GPS on phones and navigation systems. While in Siberia we would know when a certain VIP was visiting the area. Because suddenly all of our GPS enabled devices would be extremely inaccurate. Usually telling us that we were 2 to 3 km away or 100 meters underground, etc. We would also have a failure of any internet cellular and usually a failure of the whole cellular system even though the cell towers were still up and working. Drones would also fly in erratic manners. Once the particular person was out of the area things would go back to normal. What was interesting is watching delivery services on our phones go haywire on the western part of the city before we got hit on the Eastern part of the city. Or the central part of the city. Usually that meant that this VIP was traveling by train. That's for the drone issues, more than once we saw drones that got too close to a sensitive area in this Siberian city, the largest one there, and the same drop described by your German combat engineer friend happened with some civilian drones. My guess was that they were fed incorrect altitude information from GPS... The thing is, Russia is very accustomed to fighting civilians and taking down their capability to talk to each other, for communicating some man or another, they've had a lot of practice for the last 15 or so years that they've been doing this... When you wage war against your own population you tend to get good at taking down civilian systems
Very interesting experience you had.
Great point about using these tools for oppression.
We have also seen that the Russian command structure, because of the top-down design, can’t use it effectively. In the phone intercepts, they often harm their own side more than the Ukrainians. They get an order from someone with no data from the ground, “jam everything between x and y” and it harms their own soldiers, occupied civilians, etc. I have no issue with this as it helps the Ukrainians, but helps to explain Russian failure of doctrine and mastery of their own equipment.
Russia has experience fighting civilians? Maybe you ment the US in Afghanistan and Iraq.
@@richterhansjoachim3967 nice thick block of text.
I've had trouble with my phone's camera with at least two US presidential visits.
Two different phone apps would keep on crashing if I tried to open them.
The discussion does not really address EW in a big way and instead diverges into the topic of hybrid warfare. Overall, it is long, with no real meat therein.
Arguably, Electronic Warfare is MORE important than tanks, because jammers can disable drones, which provide targeting data to hidden artillery. A tank is much easier to pick off with an ATGM than an artillery cannon in the woods.
It is absolutely more important than everything else. On many levels.
quite good channels, interesting speakers (mostly)
Told you guys before it's a long video & small sections have been sliced up , ready to be uploaded later .
Its ok . Every one does it
Wasn’t sliced up, was planned this way from the start.
The difference between EW and insurance is the money you spent on EW results in equipment/troop proficiency/etc which may or may not be relevant when the need arrives but will certainly be better than nothing. Whereas the money spent on insurance is used in it's entirety and then some to figure out how NOT to pay you when the time comes.
Strange because a lot of his comments are at really at odds with the guys over at RUSI. Grandpa I suspect may not be an EW expert
Fascinating
Well I always enjoy watching all your videos. I enjoy your analysis of things. Plus I enjoy your accent and when I am reading your books I always hear you narrating what I am reading in my brain.
I like signals and Cyber
About topics, I understand the need to feed the algorithm. But it would be nice to see more cyber, ew, really any and all of the softer subjects when discussing military doctrine and even country doctrine and policy. One of my favorite videos was your cyber video
Sadly, they all did poorly. The time investment is often even more with these topics and I basically get paid for views.
I unerstand and appreciate EW equipment. The Duke and Symphony systems kept enemy IED's from going off by radio control and kept me and my boys alive in Afghanistan
It would be funnier to gather cell tower data and all numbers connected to that tower in previous hours or days. Then before rolling out, auto-dialer ring all numbers... See ya!
Great point of the guest saying that Ukraine can now advise the West on electronic warfare and essentially all aspects of modern set piece warfare. We in the West don't have any actual experience fighting them.
We do.
@@yurinator4411 When has the West engaged Russia in modern warfare?
@@mattblom3990 In every conflict since Vietnam, inclusive.
@@yurinator4411 So, confirm for me, you're saying the USA fought Russia in Vietnam, Gulf War I-II, and Iraq? Direct conflict, with Russia?
@@mattblom3990 In Vietnam yes. In the other conflicts, their trainers, their equipment, their tactics, their weapons and their doctrine. I can confirm these things for you, for the last 50 years. In addition, the US has had observers in Ukraine for the last 10+ years at least so they are not only familiar with Ukrainian tactics and equipment but also with the Russian tactics and equipment in use in Ukraine for the past 10+ years. Part of this knowledge and experience is what this guy, with the glasses and the banjo on the wall, is basing his observations on.
A question and maybe a good idea for a video is,
With arty's importance in this conflict i had the question if we we're learning the wrong lessons from arty, since in my opinion russian arty can get away with a lot more since ukraine doesnt have the strongest airforce to counter these arty batteries. Would Russia get away with their arty use against a nation that could hit far and accurate enough to destroy their arty guns.
What is being done/ what would ukraine need to start hunting Russian arty effectively. And how do you effectively target arty when you dont have the most advanced or numerous airforce? Could you use specific arty hunters or special forces to sneak behind enemy lines and take them out to help with an offensive, how would that work?
The cheapest and simplest answer would be more western artillery. They are already more accurate and quite fantastic at counter-battery fire, which means they detect the round being fired and send a surprise back. You probably wanna shoot n scoot right after just so you aren't complacent against someone trying the same thing to you, even if it's from a less accurate system that takes longer. Just good practice to not die.
Counter battery artillery radar. They can tell where the artillery came from. Artillery spotting drones.
Shocked to hear the EW videos don't do as well - I really appreciate them. Hope you keep making them!
I think it might be intentional as it might be the easiest to diy
I think I can sum up this "Artilllery/Tanks/etc" vs "EW equipment" issue quite well.
Weapons are explicit in their threat. When used for their intended purpose, they directly kill or cause harm to the enemy. This is a simple concept to understand, you treat it like you'd treat encountering a wildcat or a rattlesnake when out in the wild.
EW equipment is insidious in its threat. EW acts on the battlefield like a disease or sickness that only affects technology and not humans.
Of course, the exception there is if a human gets too close to an active antenna (or antenna array) connected to a high power EW jammer, there is danger there too, but then the comparison becomes "microwave oven" rather than "disease or sickness", and at that point the danger of note is identical to that encountered with any high power radio transmitter.
EW can also be just the ability to hear enemy communications. Communications that are not encrypted in some fashion are relatively easy for the enemy to listen in on, provided they have the equipment to decode from whatever modulation scheme is being used. Sometimes the modulation scheme itself can be part of the encryption, say you set it up so that it constantly cycles thru a few different quadrature phase shift keying patterns (with the de-modulated data stream itself also being encrypted, of course). This makes it both harder to jam the signal and harder to decrypt it in the first place, because if you don't have the list of patterns being used, you can't even demodulate the signal, let alone attempt to decrypt it.
Great to cover this aspect, EW os absolutely crucial in this conflict especially without the air power component.
Ah yes the British resonator/banjo defense expert. You have to trust him with those roots instruments in the background. Insightful interview on a topic not well explained in other venues.
Aren’t people allowed hobbies?
"yeah, but you are not like other people". Seeeeeennnn my dude, seen
What about country's and civilians that are effected outside the war zone? Like communications systems and navigation systems that are effected. Can that be seen as an attack on those country's?
How can the drone return to its launch site when it losses GPS without GPS?
Ins? "This is where I was before I lost lock. Better head that way"
I know most bigger drones just go up until they regain signal
The drone knows where it is because it knows where it isn't.
But unless these drones have some wires of dead reckoning and or logic, I don’t see how they can get back to where they started once they no longer know where they are. I’m not saying it can’t be done I’d just like to know how it is done.
Operator brings it home
Not a smart person are who
Great topic! Does the EW effort in Ukraine includes spoofing of laser targeting or laser rangefinders? I am curious about EW does beyond the radio spectrum.
I hope you guys do more of those!
Cheers.
An IR strobe for example can mimic the flash rate of the laser being pointed at it's sensor.
Suggestion: Can you please number the electronic warfare interviews? I was really confused more than one if I had already seen the content or if it was new ...
We need an iPhone of EW to get people excited.
✌️✌️
Thanks Bernhardt. Your information always seems to be higher quality than I'm getting.
Giggle. He's a long way from the front.
I presume Ukraine did not get last generation gear. Russians beat them in EW applied on drones, AA defense, etc.
Russian artillery and aviation had basically free run last few days
The AFU make their own for the brigade level, a platoon may buy more or use crowd-funded solutions.
If you’re talking about Monday’s drone footage of a Russian artillery ambush of a mine clearance company that unit were not an offensive unit so wouldn’t have an EW capability of their own. Was pretty pathetic watching Konashenkov claim jets had blown up 25 Leopards, with only footage of artillery destroying 9 MWRAPs and a covering T-72.
The only Russian aviation kills we’ve been shown are some very dangerous looking 4-wheeled big cat harvesters.
@@MsZeeZed leopards (2A4 and 2A6) and Bradleys were destroyed recently.
@@MsZeeZed Now we coming into area of information warfare, where what is omitted counts sometimes more then what is said. So, Russian Air Force operates over front and Ukrainian not. And I do not think they shot only harvesters (And what were harvesters doing on battle line?). Also, Russian artillery drones are very well known, and efficient...
Well Tanks look better on the Parade,
but IT doesnt damage the Road.
24:46 going through a satalite or may be going through a cable?
Really? A cable would be the most likely.
And even if it were to go through a satellite, it would still go through a cable.
Again, LFP batteries do not make much sense in Canada because winter already reduce range by 30-50% for NCM batteries, and LFP are even more affected...
Ukraine better get this EW tech on all tanks and armored personnel carriers, if they expect to have a successful Spring 2023 offensive. Reports have the 1st ever Leopard 2 tank destroyed on the battlefield. Not by another tank or artillery. But, from a drone!! Not acceptable. Enjoyed the video. Merci
I wish they would use less ew especially in the winter because the electric price is already much too expensive when it's cold
Talk about the leopards Ukraine just used in their largest probing attack.
Used and lost...
One damaged, one burned out. Many Bradleys k.o.
The NATO proxy proober. I'm gonna proooooooooooooooobe!
I love how people were so blinded by propaganda they thought landmines, artillery, and ATGMs just would not work on the wunderwaffen. That and you do not use your best equipment in your 9 most well trained and equipped brigades for a probing attack.
@@scifidude184 Clearly we just haven't done enough TikTok dances for Ukraine yet.
Feeding the algorithm
Thanks
I think one important aspect this man is not looking at is ….what if the Russians are holding some cards up their sleeve? If you are fighting a small scale….compared with a war against NATO say, you learn things in that war as in Syria, but your opponent is also watching you. If you don’t want him to know about some capabilities you might refrain from using them. The west has the idea that it is superior in everything, but so far it’s been found wanting. If I was Russia and could disable satellites for instance, I would keep that for later. Also he mentions not jamming particular frequencies but jamming all. It’s the same thing, it shows that the ones you use are in the unjammed range….do you want to let your opponent know what to look for? In 2014 during Ukraines debacle at Baltsevo, western experts found out that Russias electronic capabilities were vastly superior to what the west had. Do you really think they fell behind these last few years? Let NATO try something and then we will see who has the better capabilities. One thing is absolutely certain, the western political leadership are basically a clown show and as they say …there is no cure for stupid.
RUSI says Ukr loses 10000 drones of all types monthly
Hopefully in a couple of years, at NATO exercises we see Ukrainian trainers teaching the other countries how the Russians fight and other important information. I for one am drawn to your videos about CYBER more than tanks except when you compare different tank capabilities.
Everyone is watching and observing with satellites, drones, boots on the ground, social media, etc.
Nobody needs Ukraine to teach how Russia fights. They need to develop their own war winning strategy and tactics.
The bright window backlight is a real killer for your video. You do know, don't you, that these days we have something called "window shades"?
I was listening to a talk by an Ex-US general. He stated that neither the Ukrainian or Russian EW was that advanced.
lmao. I'm sure he would say Russian rockets aren't that advanced either. Russian air defense systems aren't that advanced. All things which Russia has the premier solutions in the world. US is a clown car. It's entering a new dark age. But yea sure, a general lying to idiotic public is not news. It's very easy to lie when the public are so naive and feeble anyhow.
Russia found out that they can't use EW in a similar manner as they use artillery.
are you blue beard?
Interesting. A few years ago I watched an episode of russian weapon propaganda from RT.
They showed the new systems the guards of the strategic rocket forces got.
They stated on of their EW vehicles could make a sphere of crashing munitions because it interfere with altimeters (I thought they said radar) and so all munitions would hit the ground before designated impact.
I really thought it was bullshit, but it probably wasn't.
If the Orlen10 he was talking about becomes the new cell tower it probably also affects GPS. Cell phones and I assume their devices need a signal for GPS. If the new signal is at 3k meters but broadcasting its ground level the drone should read that its far to high. GPS would be harder to spoof but they already need a signal to jam. That signal can give a fake location.
Could but be on super high power
When cut loose American sets jam everything in a large are and even induce electricity
And that was the 80s
I have to correct my statement.
The show was Combat Approved on Szevda.
So much pro Ukrainian propaganda. Just, for once, say something true about Ukrainian's poor performance and meager prospects.
There’s no panic in Tokmak 🤡
After all the videos in which Russian drones destroy German tanks, I would say: This video has aged very badly.
😢
Save Leopard 2😉
Poor Germany Us blows up your pipeline and Russia blows up tanks :(
I don't think Germany cares about either. Take another hit of copium
This guy has no clue.... you jam the GPS and the drone lands or goes home? Really?! Maybe this was true 10 years ago, but every drone on the market will just go into inertial mode, and continue flying with no problems, except maybe loosing the 'cool' filmmaking gimmicky features like orbit and zoomie... Most of the time you can see from UKR footage that the drones are showing a NO GPS error, and flying their mission flawlessly, under manual control without 'safeties'... Please interview somebody who has hands on knowledge, and not some armchair consultant...
The cheapest form of EW is COMSEC and of course OPSEC. Loose lips sink ships, just ask Russia
Russia is learning. Manpads kill aligatots. Aligators jam stinger. Russia sends Iranisn drones. Ukraine turns radar on. Russia sends Lancet suicide drone
Perhaps try interviewing people with a little less bias
Perhaps have an original comment to prompt a debate?
@@MsZeeZed that is an original comment, cry about it
What are you talking about? Russian EW is kicking Ukraine's ass. Cope harder.
Hahahahahahahaha
Cool story bro
Stumbled upon this copium hugbox right after watching the video where Russian troops showcased Ukrainian FPV drones that were repossessed thanks to "bad Russian EW"
So what is it: Russian EW bad or Ukrainians just throw drones like rocks? How come Russians fight with shovels due to the "lack of weapons" and "use museum tanks", yet Ukraine armed with "latest & greatest" NATO has been steadily loosing ground and their fabled counter-offensive only achieved capture of 1.5 cabbage patches?
One's gotta be Olympic champion in mental gymnastics with highly developed doublethink skills to rationalize that away in his head 😸
Hope that doesn't cause you too much headaches, lmao
You cant expect a British person to be neutral, for some reason they have a hard-on for Ukraine.
Crap ...
2024 😂
The thumbnail is just absurd cope