The war exposed serious flaws in some of the most sophisticated US weapons systems: Precision-guided weapons have been jammed by Russian electronic warfare units; ammunition unable to be produced quickly enough.

7 comments

1. >From the jamming of missiles to drones and artillery, the US is gaining valuable insights into its weaknesses in the brutal battlefields in east and south Ukraine.

   >One area in which the US has revealed its shortcomings is in electronic warfare. Russia’s jamming systems have created major issues with Western precision weaponry, including GMLRS rockets and Excalibur artillery shells, as previously reported by Business Insider.

   >Russia’s electronic warfare units have become increasingly adept at scrambling the GPS navigation systems used to guide the missiles and shells to their targets, sending them off course and rendering them useless.

   >”The war has revealed that some of the US precision-guided munitions fail in a highly contested electromagnetic environment,” Stacie Pettyjohn, a military analyst at the Center for a New American Security, told BI.

   >In contrast, cheap, off-the-shelf drones have played an enormously important role in Ukraine. The Ukrainian military has used the drones to offset some of the disadvantages in manpower and equipment it faced against Russia. It has used them to surveil enemy positions, guide artillery strikes, and fitted them with grenades or explosives to attack enemy positions.

   So did the Russian military, and on a much greater scale (https://www.kyivpost.com/post/25710).

   The rest in the article.

2. Let’s not pretend Ukraine has been getting all the latest and “most sophisticated” weapons from the US, nor weapons in overwhelming quantity.

3. Kinda like the Spanish civil war helped the Nazis fine tune their equipment. Russia will learn from Ukraine.

4. I mean not all weapons are going to be perfect and this has always been the case.
   It is a common secret that this war is basically a testing ground for both Russia and the West. And if there’s one thing the US MIC is frighteningly good at ,that’s improving it’s designs after they’re found lacking.

5. If the United States suddenly finds itself in a hot war they will easily produce enough ammunition for themselves. Ukraine not receiving enough ammo is a completely separate issue

6. It’s fascinating how important this war is for arms dealers because of all the data collecting on military vehicles and weapons

7. Jamming GPS signals to protect high value targets is not exactly a secret. Especially against an opponent like Russia or China. Shooting down Kinzhal missiles with Patriots also supposed to be surprising when the software upgrades were specifically meant to shoot down ballistic trajectory area denial weapons and higher speed cruise missiles. The back and forth of this is as old as warfare itself. There is nothing like a real war to see what works and what doesn’t work. Which is unfortunate for those involved.