Russia Announced It Had Deployed, To Ukraine, Its Best New Artillery-Detecting Radar. Hours Later, The Ukrainians Blew It Up—With Artillery.


Ukraine plinking a Russian GPS-jammer with a GPS-guided bomb. Ukrainian drones blowing up Russian drone-jammers. Ukraine’s cruise missiles striking Russian air-defense sites whose missions include, you guessed it, shooting down cruise missiles.

Russia’s 23-month wider war on Ukraine has seen a lot of ironic, darkly-hilarious clashes. The latest was also one of the quickest between setup and punchline.

On Tuesday morning, Russian media announced the deployment, to Ukraine, of Russian forces’ latest high-tech counterbattery radar. A few hours later in southern Ukraine, the Ukrainians blew it up ... with artillery rockets.

The irony deepens. In theory, a Russian Yastreb-AV radar would help to protect Russian troops from Ukraine’s American-made High-Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems launchers—its HIMARS. Now guess what the Ukrainians apparently used to destroy that first Yastreb-AV.

That’s right: HIMARS. Although to be clear, it also is possible they fired a guided howitzer round.

The Russian loss isn’t just funny. It’s important. Artillery counterbattery radars are more important by the day in Ukraine as the war settles into a grinding attritional fight.

The side with the most responsive artillery and drones wins. Counterbattery radars can tilt the firepower balance, by allowing the user to spot enemy artillery shells in mid-flight and then pinpoint the battery that fired the shots—so that friendly batteries can bombard them.

“The effective performance of combat missions by missilemen and artillerymen, together with the use of unmanned aircraft, which increases the efficiency of artillery fire and survivability on the battlefield, is also ensured through the use of modern artillery reconnaissance equipment,” the Kremlin boasted in the hours before Ukraine blew up that rare Yastreb-AV.

But the extreme value of counterbattery radars also makes them top targets. Within a day, a Ukrainian drone had zeroed in on the Yastreb-AV—and HIMARS, apparently, had struck it with 57-mile, GPS-guided M30/31 rockets.

It’s possible the Ukrainians knew where to look for the Yastreb-AV because the truck-mounted phased-array radar emitted a distinctive signal—one Ukrainian intelligence may have had on file.

“Electronic warfare 101,” Trent Telenko, a former quality auditor with the U.S. Defense Contract Management Agency, wrote on the social-media site formerly known as Twitter. “Unique [or] low-density and high-value electronic signatures attract priority kinetic targeting.”

Source: https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidaxe/2024/01/02/russia-announced-it-had-deployed-to-ukraine-its-best-new-artillery-detecting-radar-hours-later-the-ukrainians-blew-it-up-with-artillery/?ss=aerospace-defense

Their problem