APOGEE STAFF

Russia’s land-based electronic warfare (EW) systems, which use jamming and spoofing to disrupt GPS satellite signals, are raising concern among battlefield commanders in Ukraine who say the signal interference is thwarting guided weapons systems.

Russian signal jamming has become so widely used that Ukraine’s forces can’t be sure their U.S.-supplied Joint Direct Attack Munition (JDAM) glide bombs will hit their targets.

“Jamming is not causing the JDAMs to stop working, but it is risking their accuracy — arguably a key selling point of the weapon,” Dr. Thomas Withington said in a mid-2023 analysis for the Royal United Services Institute, a London think tank. “This is a potential problem when comparatively small targets are being engaged. U.S. GNSS [global navigation satellite system] engineers may have to rethink how they safeguard JDAMs for the wars of tomorrow, based on the conflicts of today.”

In many cases, Withington said, the weapons have failed to arm or simply missed their targets. Anti-jamming upgrades are helping, but in some cases Russian EW forces are amplifying the signals to drown out the satellites’ JDAM guidance messages. “Above all, the problem may well be the sheer power of the jamming signal that can be brought to bear,” Withington said.

JDAMs, the workhorse of Ukraine’s counteroffensive, were thought to be a practical and cost-effective answer to superior Russian artillery. Outfitted with tailfins and guidance systems, JDAMs can be upgraded at a relatively low cost to function as “smart” munitions. Once operational, the bombs can be uploaded with target coordinates from an aircraft or provided new coordinates later during a mission. Based on position, navigation and timing (PNT) information and data provided by its inertial guidance system, the tailfins adjust the bomb’s trajectory as the weapon streams toward its target.

An artist’s rendering shows JDAM kits fitted to unguided bombs and a close-up of a tail guidance section, at top right. U.S. AIR FORCE

For a time, the upgrades performed as expected, improving accuracy and providing an extended range of up to 80 kilometers for the bombs, which helped Ukrainian pilots safely avoid artillery fire. But the bombs’ accuracy has wavered as Russian signal jammers have stepped up their game. Similar problems were reported among U.S.-supplied High Mobility Artillery Rocket System launchers, but a software update in 2023 corrected the issue.

Withington wrote that a chief component of Russia’s EW battlefield strategy is the Army’s R-330Zh Zhitel, a truck-mounted jammer with a 30-kilometer range equipped to disrupt GPS and satellite communications in the 100 MHz to 2 GHz wavebands. “Signals from the U.S. GPS satellites, which JDAM kits use, are transmitted on wavebands from 1.164 GHz to 1.575 GHz. These fall squarely within the R-330Zh’s catchment area,” he said.

Compounding the problem, “GPS signals are very weak by the time they have traveled the 10,900 nautical miles (20,200 kilometers) from the satellite to Earth,” and even at the extremes of its range, the R-330Zh’s signal is notably stronger than the strength of GPS signals arriving from space. “The closer the GPS receiver is to the R-330Zh’s jamming antenna, the stronger the jamming signal becomes,” he said.

The good news for Ukraine — and, potentially, NATO and U.S. forces as they consider potential future conflicts — is that Russia’s radio frequency jamming technology hasn’t made JDAMs obsolete. Among the jamming technology’s shortcomings, it produces signals restricted to specific ranges, creating coverage gaps. Also, by boosting the signal to narrow the gaps, the jammers draw attention to the signal’s origin and leave themselves vulnerable to counterattacks. Once the jammer’s latitude and longitude can be determined, the coordinates can be passed to artillery to halt the disruption. “This tactic may help to explain some of Russia’s EW equipment losses,” Withington said.

An R-330Zh Zhitel ECW signal jammer is deployed on exercises. Operators work from inside the truck, which includes a trailer and telescopic signal poles. Wikipedia

Another pitfall is that the technology disrupts GPS signals employed by potential “friendly” forces, including civilian populations within jamming ranges. By boosting the jamming signal across frequencies used by PNT, Russian EW operators risk jamming their own satellite communications. “Russia’s GLONASS GNSS constellation transmits some signals which are similar to GPS,” Withington said. “Evidence from Ukraine suggests that the Russian Army regularly suffers electromagnetic fratricide to this end.”

Russian jamming, a problem for years in Eastern Europe, escalated in spring 2022 as fighting intensified and later as Ukraine forces began deploying guided JDAMs. Since then, it has only increased, spilling over into civilian areas inside Russia. In March 2023, the European Union Aviation Safety Agency cautioned commercial airline pilots to expect interference with their navigation systems, especially near the Russian city of Kaliningrad, in areas of the Baltic and Black seas, and in the eastern Mediterranean near Cyprus, Israel, Lebanon, Syria and Turkey, as well as northern Iraq.

The problem cropped up a few months earlier, in December 2022, as Russian cities faced widespread GPS disruptions after long-range drone attacks by Ukrainian forces deep into Russian territory.

Data analysis from GPSJam, a monitoring system that uses data from planes to track problems with satellite navigation, revealed widespread GPS disturbances — an apparent consequence of Kremlin forces defending against the drones. A report issued after the drones launched noted high instances of interference in Saratov, Volgograd and Penza, all cities in western Russia and within hundreds of kilometers of the Ukrainian border, as well as in areas of Belarus. 

Ukraine, meanwhile, has shown recent success with its own EW systems — exploiting signal gaps to launch EW attacks and performing anti-jamming upgrades to resist Russian signal jammers. The Pentagon has been keenly observing the back-and-forth as it looks to strengthen its own jamming and deception arsenals in the event a wider conflict erupts in Eastern Europe or possible engagement with the People’s Republic of China (PRC) over Taiwan. 

JDAM munitions like these, attached to an MQ-9 Reaper drone in 2018 at Kandahar Airfield, Afghanistan, can be equipped with guidance systems. SGT. PAUL LABBE/U.S. AIR FORCE

“Both sides are doing the cat-and-mouse game very, very well,” Col. Joshua Koslov, commander of the 350th Spectrum Warfare Wing at Eglin Air Force Base, Florida, told reporters during a discussion at the September 2023 Air, Space and Cyber Conference in National Harbor, Maryland. “In the future, for us, if we do confront a peer, being agile and being rapid is the key to success in the spectrum,” Koslov said. “Not having control of spectrum leads to fatalities, leads to getting killed. And we’ve seen that time and time again in that conflict.”

Of course, Russia’s EW strategy wasn’t devised with just Ukraine in mind. According to the 2022 report by the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), “Challenges to Security in Space,” Russia considers U.S. reliance on space its Achilles’ heel and RF jamming as a key tool — along with cyberattacks, high-power microwave weapons, lasers and anti-satellite (ASAT) launches — to disrupt signals to and from U.S. satellites.

One target of Russia’s EW strategy is the Navstar GPS system of satellites used by the U.S. and made available to many countries around the world. The Kremlin operates its GLONASS system while the Europeans have Galileo and the PRC its Beidou system.

Downlink jamming, used extensively in Ukraine, produces a localized effect — focusing on ground forces that rely on satellite navigation to equip munitions’ guidance systems, as well as aircraft navigation and radar systems — while uplink jamming is directed toward satellites to impair service for users in a satellite’s reception area. Spoofing, which is more sophisticated than jamming, deceives the receiver by introducing a fake signal with erroneous information.

According to the DIA’s report, “Russian counterspace doctrine involves employing ground-, air-, cyber-, and space-based systems to target an adversary’s satellites with attacks ranging from temporary jamming or sensor blinding to destruction of enemy spacecraft and supporting infrastructure.

“Moscow believes that developing and fielding counterspace capabilities will deter aggression from adversaries reliant on space,” the report notes. “If deterrence fails, Russia believes its counterspace forces will offer its military leaders the ability to control escalation of a conflict through selective targeting of adversary space systems.”

Russia isn’t alone among U.S. adversaries fielding EW programs. The PRC, North Korea and Iran have all deployed jamming. The PRC stands out for installing a particularly robust EW program that includes jammers in areas of the South China Sea. Reports in 2018 point to a PRC jamming station on one of the Spratly Islands in defiance of other nations’ claims to the shallow reef.

Two years earlier, a Department of Defense report to Congress confirmed the PRC’s increasing focus on EW, saying that the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) sees EW as an important force multiplier and would likely employ it in support of all combat arms and services during a conflict.

“PLA’s EW units have conducted jamming and anti-jamming operations, testing the military’s understanding of EW weapons, equipment, and performance,” the report said. “This helped improve the military’s confidence in conducting force-on-force, real-equipment confrontation operations in simulated EW environments.”

The assessment falls squarely in line with a separate study by the NATO Cooperative Cyber Defence Centre of Excellence, an Estonia-based think tank. The 2016 study, “China and Cyber: Attitudes, Strategy, Organisation,” said the PRC regards information as key to victory and is focused on countering U.S. satellite systems for command, control, computers, intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (C4ISR) through GPS jamming, radar jamming and other technologies.

The DIA’s 2022 report assessing threats in space concurs, noting that while Russia and the PRC continue to integrate “space scenarios into their military exercises,” the PRC’s program should be taken more seriously because of its rapid ascension in space — more than doubling the number of intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance satellites it has in orbit since 2018 — and its pursuit and deployment of counterspace capabilities.

“The [PLA] probably sees counterspace operations as a means to deter and counter a U.S. intervention during a regional military conflict,” the DIA said, adding that the PRC “probably is developing jammers dedicated to targeting SAR [synthetic aperture radar], including aboard military reconnaissance platforms,” to prevent U.S. satellites from maintaining a clear picture of Taiwan and other areas in the South China Sea.

“Interfering with SAR satellites very likely protects terrestrial assets by denying imagery and targeting in any potential conflict involving the United States or its allies,” the DIA study said.

The report also referenced advancements in jamming that likely include systems to disrupt satellite communications over a range of frequency bands, “including military-protected extremely high frequency communications.”

A U.S. Air Force Airman with the 216th Space Control Squadron works with a Honey Badger system during exercise Black Skies 22 at Vandenberg Space Force Base, California. The first of its kind, the exercise was a live simulation designed to rehearse command and control. U.S. SPACE FORCE

As Ukraine’s forces continue to grapple with relentless Russian jamming attacks, commercial satellite operators say they, too, have encountered problems. U.S.-based satellite operator Starlink says it faces constant attacks from Russian EW forces, including jamming and cyberattacks.

However, Starlink, which has provided satellite coverage to Ukraine since February 2022 after a Viasat satellite was attacked, maintains that its network has withstood the assaults. One, a jamming attack that was quickly repelled, might even serve as a lesson to U.S. forces.

At a conference hosted by C4ISRNET magazine in April 2022, Dave Tremper, then director of electronic warfare for the Office of the Secretary of Defense, recounted how Kremlin jammers two months earlier had targeted Starlink terminals to disrupt communications across wide swaths of Ukraine. The problem was resolved with a software update, and the network was operating normally several hours later. 

“From an EW technologist perspective, that is fantastic,” Tremper told the conference. “That paradigm and how they did that is kind of eye-watering to me. There’s a really interesting case study to look at, the agility that Starlink had in their ability to address that problem.

“The way that Starlink was able to upgrade when a threat showed up, we need to be able to have that ability,” he said. “We have to be able to change our electromagnetic posture, to be able to change very dynamically what we’re trying to do without losing capability along the way.”

The U.S. and the PRC have been strengthening their anti-jamming and offensive EW capabilities. In August 2023, the U.S. Space Force announced the creation of the branch’s first targeting squadron, the 75th Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance Squadron (ISRS), designed to identify threats in space and present options to the joint force about how to address them.

According to a news release announcing the August 11 activation, the squadron has three primary missions: target analysis, target development and target engagement. Its goal is to prepare and present intelligence packages about targets and their affiliated systems, including information about satellites, ground stations, and the signal between the two.

“The 75th ISRS conducts advanced analysis on adversary space force and counterspace force threats along with their associated architectures,” said Lt. Col. Travis Anderson, commander of the 75th ISRS. “Space forces are space capabilities used by a country to facilitate their joint warfighting. Counterspace forces, also called space attack forces, are space capabilities designed to deny the United States the ability to use our satellite systems during conflict.”

The squadron is part of Space Delta 7, the operational intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance arm of the Space Force.

The U.S. Space Force’s portable Counter Communications System (CCS). L3Harris is producing an upgraded system, known as the CCS Block 10.2, scheduled for delivery in 2025. Mounted on a trailer, the CCS is the Space Force’s first electronic warfare device. L3HARRIS

In an interview with Air & Space Forces magazine, retired Space Force Col. Charles Galbreath, senior resident fellow for space studies at aerospace-focused think tank the Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies, said the 75th ISRS would likely analyze elements of an adversary system and then recommend how best to “counteract that threat system.”

“In some cases, that may mean sending a jamming signal from our Counter Communications Systems [CCS], or it could mean putting a JDAM on a building somewhere to destroy the command and control or the end user,” Galbreath said.

The 75th ISRS is likely one of several new stand-ups by the Space Force as it develops these specialized operations. In September, Space Force Guardians kicked off a series of exercises designed to enhance their EW skills. The drill’s “Black Skies” segment — organized by the Space Training and Readiness Command and held in September 2022 and March 2023 — focused on jamming and featured “a live simulated exercise” between California and Colorado up to 35,400 kilometers above the Earth. 

“This range allowed space warfighters participating in the exercise to fire their weapon systems in a safe environment that replicated certain warlike conditions, offering them an opportunity to rehearse and refine their warfighting tactics, techniques, and procedures,” according to a news release from U.S. Special Operations Command.

To further strengthen its offensive capabilities, the Space Force is scheduled to take delivery in 2025 of the first of 16 mobile electronic jammers. Known as CCS Block 10.2 and developed by L3Harris, the device is equipped with radarlike dishes, designed to disrupt enemies’ satellite signals, and mounted on trailers for portability. CCS was first introduced in 2004 and a Block 10.1 upgrade was fielded in 2014.

“CCS has had incremental upgrades since the early 2000s, which have incorporated new techniques, frequency bands, technology refreshes and lessons learned from previous block upgrades,” Space Force Maj. Seth Horner, CCS B10.2 program manager, said in 2020. “This specific upgrade includes new software capabilities to counter new adversary targets and threats.”

Said Lt. Col. Steve Brogan, combat systems branch materiel leader in the Space Force’s Space and Missile Systems Center’s Special Programs Directorate: “This upgrade puts the ‘force’ in Space Force and is critical for space as a warfighting domain.”  

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