By Aaron Brantly, Director of the Tech4Humanity Lab
United States intelligence agencies have been issuing dire warnings of an impending war between the Russian Federation and Ukraine. Estimates of upwards of 175,000 soldiers massing at multiple points on the Ukraine-Russian frontier are ominous, yet any battle over Ukraine is likely to include an increasingly potent electronic warfare (EW) dimension that would be unlike any prior conflict to date. Over the last 7 years, the Russian Federation has been strategically positioning and testing a number of different technical assets. These assets comprise a suite of mobile tactical intelligence collection and offensive EW tools that extend the contact lines well beyond the trenches of the existing ATO. In 2017 I led a team from the Army Cyber Institute at West Point to Ukraine where we met with counterparts in the Ukrainian General Staff, intelligence services, academic institutions, soldiers, and volunteers who had fought on the front lines of Ukraine. Our team found the evolution of a new modality of land warfare in which many of the assumptions developed in the first Gulf War and subsequently honed through wars in Iraq and Afghanistan would be challenged and likely made obsolete. These findings were buttressed by a report from the International Centre for Defence and Security in Estonia and by an internal U.S. Army Asymmetric Warfare report. While initial analysis indicated that EW support during combined arms maneuvers would slow potential Russian advances, it is unlikely that this remains true today. Russian EW capabilities have been continuously honed over a period of eight years and are cross-spectrum and dynamic, reaching from the battlefield upwards and outwards in Anti-Access/Area Denial capabilities to negate U.S. and NATO assets.
Many of the Russian Federation’s EW capabilities are specifically designed to identify and target aerial assets ranging from UAVs to rotary, and fixed wing manned aircraft. As the hostilities of 2014-2015 demonstrated, Ukraine is unable to meaningfully contest airspace. Yet, it is the pioneering utilization of EW in the land tactical environment that is likely to prove the most damaging to the Ukrainian military should Russia attack. The U.S. often ingrains a network centric or approach to war in both its own training and planning and in those it trains. Yet understanding that networked communications methods are dependent on information superiority often falls to the wayside in trainings. Training with an emphasis on communications to enhance combat power through better and more efficient maneuvers and battlefield awareness is important. Yet, in every war where U.S. forces were heavily reliant on communications modern command control, communications, and computer infrastructures, adversary forces have been comparatively technically weak. By contrast, Ukraine has been training with U.S. assistance for the last 7 years for a war it cannot win through improved battlefield communications. Ukraine cannot utilize communications in the same way that the U.S. has because its adversary is technically adept and has proven so time and time again.
The Russian Federation has capabilities including the Zhitel P-330 which can conduct electronic reconnaissance and electronic attacks on mobile satellite communication systems, cellular communications and more. The Zhitel is only the tip of the iceberg and is supplemented by RP377LA “Lorandit” maneuver and control radio tracking interference complex, R330 Series EW vehicles with EW jamming and direction finding, Leer 3 UAV based EW platforms, and many more. It has moved several EW companies and Signals battalions in an out of its Southern Military district over the course of the last eight years to provide training. In early uses of its EW capabilities, Russian forces were able to use SS7 attacks to manipulate the mobile phones of Ukrainian soldiers on the front lines. These attacks resulted in directed information operations against regular and volunteer forces that reached all the way back to the soldier’s families hundreds of miles from the front lines. EW tools were also used to triangulate and lay fires on Ukrainian front-line positions when EW signatures from radios or mobile phones were detected. When remote sensing became increasingly difficult due to improved Ukrainian EW signature control, UAVs were used to augment land-based EW platforms. Years after the main hostilities died down, Ukrainian radio station Army FM was consistently targeted by separatist fires until it was moved so far back that it could not easily broadcast into occupied territories.
Lessons from the last eight years demonstrate that if Russian forces invade Ukraine EW capabilities will act as a force multiplier. EW will be used to suppress and undermine Ukrainian coordination and force management. EW will be used to identify and target Ukrainian forces on the battlefield and beyond wherever and whenever they emit radiation from a radio, satellite phone, or mobile phone. The Russian EW capabilities will effectively take the network centric lessons of the last thirty years and turn them on their head. Electromagnetic emissions of any kind will result in incoming fires. The battlefield of the future is here, it is ugly, and it is visible in wavelengths.