Russia Is Jamming Ukraine’s Precision Glide Bombs

Ukrainian jammers are throwing Russia’s satellite-guided bombs off course, significantly blunting what was once one of Russia’s main advantages over Ukraine—its bigger air force with its even bigger stock of winged glide bombs.

But jamming cuts both ways, and now Russian electronic warfare is throwing Ukraine’s satellite-guided bombs off course. “They have brought in new electronic warfare equipment,” one Ukrainian military blogger noted. “They can really interfere with a strike.”

“The GPS of the bombs can go out,” the blogger added. But Ukraine should be able to cope—with bombs whose guidance systems are self-contained.

It’s not yet clear that Russian jamming is as widespread and effective as Ukrainian jamming. Ukraine has generally maintained an electronic edge over Russia, swiftly fielding well-made radio noisemakers that can drown out Russian communications.

Regardless, it’s certainly not good news for Ukraine that it can no longer strike, with 100-percent reliability, Russian targets with precision glide-bombs such as the French-made Hammer and the American-made Small Diameter Bomb.

Most recently, Ukrainian air force Sukhoi Su-27 fighters have been hurling the bombs at bridges in Belgorod Oblast in western Russia, aiming to cut off Russian troops in the oblast’s border region, where Ukrainian brigades have launched small-scale incursions. Accurate air support could mean the difference between the incursions succeeding and failing.

Inertial backup

It’s a truism in warfare that every measure has a countermeasure, and every countermeasure has a countercountermeasure. When it comes to precision bombing, the main countermeasure is jamming that can interfere with satellite guidance. The main countercountermeasure is navigation that doesn’t depend on satellites.

That usually means an inertial navigation system: an entirely self-contained system that tracks its own location by way of gyroscopes and accelerometers. “The future belongs to autonomous INS,” announced Fighterbomber, the unofficial Telegram channel of the Russian air force.

The best Ukrainian munitions—American-made Joint Direct Attack Munition glide bombs and French-made Hammer glide bombs—have backup inertial navigation systems.

By contrast, Russia’s own inertial guidance backups 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, the Ukrainians and Russians could force each other to rely on precision bombs that don’t need to talk to satellites. As long as Ukraine’s INS is better that Russia’s INS, the mutual electronic suppression should benefit Ukraine.