Owing to sophisticated jamming, it now takes up to 16 glide bombs to hit one target.
A year ago, Russian air force fighter-bombers were lobbing a hundred glide bombs every day all along the 800-mile front line of Russia’s wider war on Ukraine.
The satellite-guided KAB or UMPK glide bombs, each traveling 25 miles or farther under pop-out wings, were a “miracle weapon” for the Russians, the Ukrainian Deep State analysis group noted at the time. And the Ukrainians had “practically no countermeasures.”
That has changed. Now the Ukrainians not only have countermeasures—some of these countermeasures appear to be extremely effective.
“Previously, the enemy used glide bombs with high accuracy to attack objects in the territory of regional centers such as Kharkiv and Zaporizhzhia,” Narek Kazarian, whose 10-person Night Watch team in Ukraine develops electronic warfare systems, told Forbes.
Night Watch’s new Lima jammer is partly responsible for the recent degradation of Russian glide bombing, Kazarian claimed.
Lima isn’t a traditional jammer that simply blasts radio noise toward the enemy. “We use digital interference,” Kazarian explained. It’s “a combination of jamming, spoofing and information cyber attack on the navigation receiver.”
“After the deployment of the E.W. system, the accuracy of the bombings first decreased and then, realizing the ineffectiveness of this method of destruction and the impossibility of achieving the goal, the enemy stopped shelling regional centers altogether,” Kazarian said.
Last year, Russian forces settled into a comfortable routine. In addition to striking cities, glide bombs also rained down on Ukraine’s front-line defenses. Russian infantry would then attack the battered Ukrainian troops—and overwhelm them.
The bomb-first assault tactic helped the Russians capture the fortress city of Avdiivka in eastern Ukraine and then advance 25 miles along the same axis toward the next fortress city, Pokrovsk.
