Invisible Battlefield: Jamming & Anti-Radiation Missiles
In this video we cover some real-life examples in Electronic Warfare (EW) for both ground and air operations.
Follow him on twitter: / tomwithington
More information about EW here:
www.armadainternational.com/c...
www.thedefencehorizon.org/pos...
Dmitriy Pichugin (GFDL 1.2 www.gnu.org/licenses/old-licen... or GFDL 1.2 www.gnu.org/licenses/old-licen..., via Wikimedia Commons
commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fi...
»» GET OUR BOOKS ««
» Stukabook - Doctrine of the German Dive-Bomber - stukabook.com
» The Assault Platoon of the Grenadier-Company November 1944 (StG 44) - sturmzug.com
» Army Regulation Medium Panzer Company 1941 - www.hdv470-7.com
» Achtung Panzer? Zur Panzerwaffe der Wehrmacht - panzerkonferenz.de
»» SUPPORT MHV ««
» patreon, see videos early (adfree) - / mhv
» subscribe star - www.subscribestar.com/mhv
» paypal donation - paypal.me/mhvis
»» MERCHANDISE ««
» teespring - teespring.com/stores/military...
» SOURCES «
www.armadainternational.com/c...
www.thedefencehorizon.org/pos...
/ tomwithington
00:00 Intro
01:00 Real Life Example 1: Air
06:36 Real Life Example 2: Ground Operations
09:34 Anti-Radiation Missiles?
14:14 Dealing with Jamming?
17:09 How does Ukraine defend against EW?
A complex yet poorly understood topic. This was a very, very good EW 101 explainer, an excellent interview. Learned quite a bit I never gave a thought to myself.
He didn't say anything that wasn't already obvious to everyone. Is electronic warfare really nothing but only jamming? That's the only thing he had to say about it anyway.
Saw an interview with a US soldier from Iraq. They had jammers on vehicles to stop mobile phones triggering IED's. One vehicle in their convoy got hit by an IED, intense action followed, with some helping the injured,others trying to set up a perimeter etc. But as everybody had then cranked up their jammers to maximum, they lost all radio communication, resulting in confusion and chaos.
5:30 An interesting bit about air radar jamming: A common form of jamming is to listen to the enemy radar signal and repeat the exact signal back. That leads to the enemy radar not knowing your exact distance because it doesn't know which one is the correct one. In a radar screen in top-down mode this looks like a bongo line of contacts going from yourself to infinity on the heading the enemy is on.
Range gate stealing, angle error deception...and then there's always the brute force jamming enough RF energy to force his TR/ATR tubes to protect his front end receiver frrom going poof.
I think It is called DRFM (Digital Radio Frequency Memory).
@@maverikmiller6746 that its most modern form
Can you use destructive interference to reduce your signature? I've read stories about Gripens "sneaking up" on other fighters during Red-Flag exercises, and it just occurred to me that they might have used destructive interference to pull that off 🤔
The only thing I was trained on regarding jamming (as an E-3 mortarman) was to NEVER mention jamming on the radio, as that could let the adversary know their efforts were working.
If their efforts were working, how would you use the radio to unintentionally reveal that fact?
Bull excrement
@@shannonkohl68 Step outside of jammer range and broadcast. If you need to get a message out you will. But don't make it easy for the enemy to know you're having trouble and what you're doing to mitigate.
@@shannonkohl68 Jamming is like a spectrum/range not binary.
@@ChucksSEADnDEAD Perhaps. Not saying it isn't good advice, but it just seems pointless. My guess is the jammer is well aware of the effects of their jamming, so the emphasis on never mentioning it seems pointless.
In the 1980/3 I was a Plane Captain for E-2C... I have been working with radio signals since I was 10 years old... Looking back on all my studying on EMF spectrum... You did a most excellent job on this subject... There differently more to be said... But on a more basic level you said it all... Good Work!!! 👍🇺🇲😀✌️
I was so disapointed when this ended. I feel like we only just got started with the more advanced topics. Great video, have him back for part 2.
When I was a student at a military college, I took an electronics course n which we developed passive transceivers with antenna designed to minimize the loss of signal so the transceiver response was greater than the bounce of the radar from a vehicle. Some of us used that to supplement our radar detectors in our vehicles. It was important to have the transceiver send the radar signal back with timing and frequency changes that imitated a different speed than the, possibly, excessive speed our vehicle was doing. The most sophisticated of these devices were adjustable - so you could cause your transceiver to adjust the signal to show 100k speed rather than the 150k you were actually doing. Combine that with your radar detector and you could slow down to 100k before the White Mice would get a visual lock.
One thing that was not mentioned is how an electronic warfare force can use the characteristics of, for example, a radar, and send exactly matching return signals as if the are in a different location than the real return signal. This is done with aircraft by an EW aircraft that is far enough from the SAM radar that it is unlikely to receive missile fire, but at an azimuth with respect to the SAM radar that is different from the aircraft that is in danger. That EW aircraft sends a signal as if the close aircraft is in their direction and the SAM radar picks up on that and launches missiles in the wrong direction.
Ex Prowler person here. good intro to EW.
Another technique is spread spectrum radios / radars which as the name suggests spreads the transmission spectrum over a wide frequency range using a special code so it appears like noise or is at the noise floor level. The receiver which knows this code correlates the spread signal back to a narrow signal which is now above the noise floor and can be used. Enemy receivers without the correct code only see noise. The only counter is powerful jamming across a wide range of frequencies at once which is difficult and makes the jammer an even bigger target.
the problem with these as radar systems is that the spatial resolution is quite poor and requires a lot of backend processing on the DSP in order to scan a large of area of the sky in addition to detect and track a large number of targets compared to traditional pulse based system. There was a lot of interest in the early 2000s, at least in open source, this interest has died down a bit. I communications, it is used a lot in civilian system, in fact it directly give birth to CDMA (one of the 3G implentations) and all modern 4G and 5G as well as WiFi after 1999 all this this technically. However, as we see impractive, those things are far from unjammerable. Also If the advarsary is also capable in computation power, they can evesdrops just by running autocorrelation on the "noise" with deep learn this is even easier, so you can't replace traditional encryption with it either. Essentially the radar usage is still in concept phase even with itls poor spatial performance and in communication is it is widely used but not fool proof. Since I can't link youtube comments. check out the following papers and patents if you are interested. patent US7812761B2, paper "INTERCEPTION TECHNIQUES FOR DIRECT SEQUENCE SPREAD SPECTRUM SIGNALS" paper "Adaptive Detection of Direct-Sequence Spread-Spectrum Signals Based on Knowledge-Enhanced Compressive Measurements and Artificial Neural Networks"
@@WangGanChang it is used in radars albeit you need an AESA for it but it is used.
So, I got some experience with Jamming. At my time at the Bundeswehr, I was working as a radar operator, so from the military perspective, there are just circuits, you can turn on or off. The plane that doesn't want to get located jams the antenna of your radar, the receiver, with arbitrary echos. Means you send out a signal, then wait for the echo. The echo is very low powered, so even a very low powered jammer will destroy your signal and leave your screen almost white with a thousand of false echoes. Of course you now know for sure that there is a plane out there, but not where it is. You then activiate ECM, which will either try to alternate your radar signal and tries to filter out the jamming signal, which method is usually known. It betters the situation but doesn't remove it. And then there is on the planes side an ECCM button, where the plane starts to alternate their jamming signals, which again kills off your ECM and you only know that it is there. You can of course now triangulate the source of the jamming signal, but that's not part of a usual radar and part of an EW unit. AWACS was jamming hard, that's for sure. To pinpoint a RF signal with triangulation good enough to be able to send a missile to that point is quite hard, by the way. There's a good reason the US only has one of those missiles and it's damn expensive. As a radio amateur, a HAM, I know jamming, QRM, from daily operation. Some signals will just get interference by non intentional jamming with overcrowded bands for example, some people out there will jam intentionally, which should not happen, but it does. How do we compensate? First thing you can do is go narrow band. Means you take your good old Morse keyer and send out your signal over that dumb jammer and that's it. You can't jam short bursts of information, that are more or less transmitted on a single frequency or say 10-30 Hz, like Morse. Doesn't work. Because when the jammer starts jamming he will not be able to listen anymore, because you can't send and listen on the same band if you don't carry around a ton load of very narrow filters with you. And I mean what I say, a metric ton of filters, maybe more than that. You can't effectively jam Morse transmissions. Sadly nobody in modern military gets educated in that anymore and they usually are not able to fall back. The Morse training costs between 4 and 18 months by the way. Doing nothing else. And depending on the quality of operators you want to get and the quality of service men available. They were always few and this never changed. If you are using phony on radio, your signal is much broader. Say 3 kHz against 15 Hz for Morse. It is easy to interfere with speech. Your power of transmission over noise and QRM will increase if your bandwidth gets narrower. So that you have an advantage of about 17 dB over SSB. This means factor 50, means I snuff a 250W SSB easily with 5W CW. And with FM it's even worse (for FM), because you easily can interfere with that very broad signal. So, we have an illegal signal on our bands, a signal where we have priority as HAMS and where the interfering, jamming signal doesn't identify itself, so we just start using CW/Morsetelegraphy on that part of the band. The idiot will try to use his service for a while, then go away. Trust me. We kill OTHR (over the horizon radar system) easily with that method, because you may not counter the sending signal, which is many kilowatts in power, but you don't need to. You just have to mess the echo of that radar system and this is very easy, for we can silence a few microwatt echo with even the lowest power setting of our radios, say 5W and most of the standard rigs today do 100W without any hassle. Enough to kill every illegal signal. On the other hand, to send a thousand or even a few megawatt of OTHR costs quite a bit of money. To send 5W against it costs nothing, if you have a little solar panel. Nothing. And we have ten thousands of transmitters, so it's not very smart for military to mess on the HAM bands. Doesn't work. I wonder why they still try it. They must be insanely dumb there and never able to learn. So, you don't want to get jammed? Keep it short, keep it low power, keep it narrow band, keep the signal intelligent (aka your encoder and decoder is a human, not a dumb machine) and you don't get jammed. Low power, you ask? Why low power wouldn't high power be better? No. Because if the jammer doesn't hear you, he can't try to start to jam you. So either be low power or use a directional antenna. Keep the signal on the target of your transmission and not somewhere else. And if you do that, use some part of the band where NOT the last active and educated shortwave operators are working on, means the HAM bands. That's like running into a wall again and again and hoping that the result will change some day, it's the definition of madness. But that's military, especially Russian military if I may say so from experience. So much about QRM. Hope I could help.
another way that counters jamming, while still providing communication between units, is to use phone lines. In the earlier phase of the conflict, the Donbass Militants who had the same problems the Ukranians they were facing are having now, would use phone lines to transmit actual orders, but would use field radios & cellular phones for misdirection "One of the worst problems in the Slavyansk garrison was the lack of good communications.......The commanders used Motorola and Kenwood radios as well ordinary cellphones, but carefully due to Ukrainian wiretapping. Cellular communications were controlled by Kiev (MTS,Life, and Kyivstar). However, during periods of intense hostilites mobile communications were jammed. Hasanov recalls: "We were strained by a catastrophic lack of communications. The radios that were sent to us were mostly toys - Motorolas that worked in the VHF range up to a maximum of 5 km. What was needed was a normal connection, something that was guaranteed to work even in the face of electronic warfare. In the defense, the most important method of communication in absence of encrypted radios was wire communication. We put the whole department into an emergency search for telephone cables. Grumpy was a great help, and regularly sent more telephones, we were able to establish regular and secure communications. The communications was connected to PBX lines if possible. Some garrison positions were not connected to the field telephone network, so messengers were sent by scooter to deliver orders. VoIP communications were only used at the headquarters. By the second half of June, the communications network was largely completed." Strelkov was often unable to leave the command post due to the communications problem........When Strelkov went to inspect positions, he left his cell phone in the center of the city or at a faraway checkpoint so that the Ukrainians could not track his movements. More often, if he needed to issue an order to a group he would make a call by wire to the checkpoint nearest to that group. The checkpoint would relay the order to the group, by bicycle or motorcycle if necessary. Strelkov, knowing that his cell phone calls were being listened to, manipulated the Ukrainians by giving away false information. For example, he informed his subordinated that he was directing a company of militia to such and such settlement when he knew that it was infact a unit of Ukrainians on their way to the settlement instead. That way, the Ukrainians fired on their own troops with artillery or from an ambush. Strelkov used a similar deception during the retreat from Slavyansk-he talked on his cell phone about his future plans in Slavyansk while preparations for retreat from the city were already. The militia listened to Ukrainian communications as much as they could. In April, an SBU electronic warfare vehicle had been seized near Kramatorsk. The SBU officers decided to join the militia voluntarily, and used their vehicle to intercept Ukrainian communications. From them, we learned that the Ukrainians were tracking the movements of Strelkov and other commanders. The Ukrainians set up three electronic warfare stations on Mount Karachun. Two scanned signals, another interfered with them. One station was damaged by militia shelling at the end of May." This is from Zhuchkovsky's "85 days in Slavyansk" which although very obviously biased, demonstrates the critical role that alternative forms of communication played for the earlier phases of this conflict. I don't want to make this comment any longer, but many on the Ukrainian side after to the official Russian entrance, have reported to using telephone lines as a way of avoiding Russian electronic warfare.
Pretty sure that is a very well known tactic
@@gotanon9659 85 Days of Slavanysk is the only first hand narrative translated into English about the earlier part of the conflict.
"The radar, sir! It appears to be...jammed!" "Raspberry. There's only one man who would dare give me the raspberry! Lone Star!"
I have wored with SEAD aircraft and missles. I understand anti radiation very well. Chaff only works well if the person is directly behind you and on the same plane of refrence. So the Chaff would need to be in direct line of sight.
180°
I don't know if it's just the editing of the video but your interviews seem to end so abruptly. It's like the interviewee just gave a great answer and you immediately follow up with--thanks, peace out bye.
Excellent video on a little known topic
A Grad rocket "home on jam" guidance kit would be _stupendously_ disruptive against Russia.
Very informative. Thank you.
Good work 👍
Intersting video. Thx
With directional antennas, jamming has to happen between the transmitter and receiver. A lot of jamming will be negated by MIMO systems.
Wouldn't it be possible to jam all radio comms in a local area by putting a high wattage jammer that clogs up all the radio bands at the same time?
It doesn't quite work like that. While it is more efficient to locate your jammer in between the sender and receiver, you can stilll interfere with RF comms from the side of the antenna, it just takes more power.
can't help but think that Tom Withington always seems like some kind of movie baddie. Although his lair probably needs some work if he wants to get into the big leagues, a more imposing chair is needed for starters, than maybe a fishtank as all the best villains have them.
I really enjoy, that you integrate first hand accounts of people fighting in Ukraine right now / that have been fighting there recently. If possible, please continue with this! Maybe even with a number of different People (eg Jonas Kratzenberg or so).
Good video.
The "cat and mouse" aspect is interesting, and plays into facets that we still will not be able to automate in the foreseeable future. Since transmitting makes you vulnerable, but you often have to transmit in order to figure out the situation, there will always have to be a human in the loop to decide when to take that risk. AI cannot do this (until the whole battlefield is automated and no more humans are present), since it has to occur in coordination with other humans. The decision will affect human troops in the vincinity (and possibly also some a long distance away), so whoever pushes the button has to make a judgement call about when their allies are in the best situation to deal with the consequences. Techniques like frequency hopping are already largely automated, so with sufficiently modern equipment the human operators only have to press a single button to trigger such a complicated process. And we will certainly see an increasing number of automated assistance tools to assist human judgement and to speed up complicated processes. Yet nothing can replace the human element entirely, and we will see the necessity to train both "grunts" and highly skilled experts in the facets of EW.
I've heard of large drones that had a Human in it (inhabited system) where his sole responsibility was to affirm that the target was a combatant.
13:20 Interesting, in the light of the recently killed Patriot battery.
Using AESA technology means that you can make sure that emissions are very directional. Theoretically it should be possible to use signal processing to remove the jamming using computers.
The Russian tactics used during in Ukraine are similar to those used by the Egyptians during the Yom Kippur War and the Iran/Iraq War. You establish an air defense umbrella over your lines with low-altitude radar-guided AA guns, IR MANPADs, and medium/high altitude SAMs. Bring up your artillery to saturate your enemy's lines with shell fire and then conduct bite and hold offensives underneath that umbrella trying to lure your enemy into counterattacks. The problem for the Ukrainians is interdicting Russian supply lines in their rear areas to break up attacks because they are lacking air-support and guided medium-range tactical missiles. Normally SEAD missions target enemy air defenses to prepare for air attacks on logistics hubs but a lack of Ukrainian airpower makes that difficult. Also sending elephants to hunt elephant guns isn't a great strategy unless you are conducting deep strike operations. Another way to neutralize enemy air defenses is to use attack helicopters to sneak in under enemy radars and then destroy SAM sites with IR or laser-guided missiles like in the 1st Gulf War. But that would leave Ukrainian attack helicopters vulnerable to AA guns, MANPADs, and SAMs. The Israelis suffered heavy losses during the Yom Kippur War due to Egyptian IAD systems. Still, when the Egyptians tried to advance beyond their IAD umbrella they suffered heavy losses to Israeli air power. An interesting thing the Israelis did to counter Arab IAD during the Lebanon War was to mount Standard ARM missiles on ground launchers which could be brought up to the front lines under the enemy IAD umbrella to destroy SAM sites. The Israelis would send over reconnaissance drones to get their enemies to turn on their radars and once illuminated fire their anti-radiation missiles. Since the Standard ARMs were only a short distance from the SAM sites they could often destroy them before they had a chance to launch. Once gaps had been opened in the air defense umbrella strike aircraft and helicopters could then attack enemy defense lines. This option of sneaking up underneath an enemy IAD umbrella could become more important when facing the newest generation of Russian and Chinese air defenses due to their long range. I would hope that Western companies would develop anti-radiation missiles which could be launched from ground-launched MLRS to take out enemy IAD radars, artillery fire detection/direction radars, and enemy communications towers. If the Ukrainians had ground-launched anti-radiation missiles they could punch holes in the Russian air defense umbrella. But with insufficient numbers of attack helicopters, attack aircraft, and medium-range guided missiles NATO is allowing the Russians to bleed the Ukrainians white. In an age where everyone has access to a cellphone that means battlefield communications have become decentralized. That means there are a lot of radio frequency signals generated by your enemy. Since these signals are cheap and ubiquitous anti-radiation missiles need to become cheap and ubiquitous to deprive your enemy of their detection and communications infrastructure. While it may not be practical to target every cellphone with SIGINT you can collate the signals and give priority to higher-value targets. For instance, if you can collate the signals and see that enemy officers are issued satellite phones you can target those signals and kill off your enemy's leadership.
Those were good suggestions for the Ukros. Do you have any suggestions for the Ruskis.
@@bruceparr1678 - I would advise civil disobedience and regime change for the Russians.
@@ndenise3460 - The Sidearm was a modification of the radar-guided version of the Sidewinder that armed the F-8 Crusader. There wasn't much modification needed. Changing from IR guidance to radar homing would be more difficult. I would think that the guided Hydra missiles might be a better candidate?
@@bruceparr1678 Yeah. Go home.
@@ndenise3460 The Sidearms were taken out of service almost 20 years ago.
Radar tells distance by round trip time of signal. Like a ping, radar jammers will fug with that feature, pinging constantly so it looks like smears on the on the screen, depending on the type. If its newer phased arrays, software may be able to see real signal.
Regarding jamming, what about the "Untamed Ermine"(a.k.a. Wild Weasel"), equipped with anti-radistion missiles. I believe they can home on jamming. Some air-to-air missiles have the same capability.
"...a technology called chaff..." :D Yes, it one of my favorite technologies right together with gunpowder and internal combustion engine :)
I'm a big fan of the flush toilet. Also a fan of electric fans.
Dude plays a banjo, so he must be a stand-up fellow! 🙂
May be actual interview was way longer than this clip is . I'm not blaming him .i would have done the same if i was in his place ( if u guys will blame me 4 some reason i won't fight back no time 4 that . Loads of things to do ) & It's a great idea to slice the whole interview in to many small EPs and release them in random weeks and pretend host is busy doing lots of face2face . ( i would have done like that like 😂 ) Great way to keep the channel 😅 active and to keep subscribers happy enough ! But if from a channel owner's perspective ( here i mean from his view point & my guess about the behind the scenes situation ) : 1 . It's hard to get face2face from these experts for once & multiple times is kind of hard to do . We have to remember its not Netflix or prime . Nobody can pump content that fast on a specific topic . 2. May be he doesn't have enough time or persons in his team ( many are just 1-2 man shows). He is a real person with a real life like all of us off-screen . Can't blame him . Even we would have suffered or planned like him 😅. So why release the whole film in 1 go . Short clips or EPs are good 3. May be they get in to finer details which he thought was to valuable to give in go so " cut it here leave it here for now . " Let me later on review , censor some parts , edit & then release some of it at a later date " kind of situation
What about the Bleeps the sweeps and the creeps?
That's not all he's lost.
✌️
Good example of countering Electronic Warfare is what Serbia did to counter NATO aircraft. Turn the radar on for 20 seconds, just enough to scan the sky, then turn it off for like 10 seconds. Then they literally took microwave ovens, yanked off the door, removed the safety and then just stuck them in a field. Once the NATO aircraft launched an AGM 88 it would just home in on the microwave oven then a SA-2 (weapon from the 1960s) would have its partner radar turn on and launch a missile at an attacking aircraft. Serbian air defense though with such old systems could not adequately reach the NATO aircraft since they were strictly ordered to stay above 5KM minimum.
They got two F117's. Which is why all those stealth fighters are parked in the desert.
@@bruceparr1678 they were retired nearly a decade later, and are still doing flights for testing and aggressor purposes
The microwave oven thing seems like the electric shaver myth from WW2. A microwave is often 1kW or even 800W. That's too low power. Besides that, AGM-88s know what kind of radar they're seeking and narrow their seeker to that specific band.
@@bruceparr1678 They got 1 F-117. The other one was damaged but return to base safely. Out of 850 sorties. Stealth does and will work, poor mission planning was the cause (they used the same flight path multiple time 🤦).
The first rule of EW is you don't talk about EW. Anyone who knows about the state of the art will never say anything. You will get only the most casual view of jamming about how it is can be used but you will never get information on the actual technology being used.
"Raspberry."
I like strawberry jam
"Raspberry. There's only one man who would dare give me the raspberry, Loan Star"
Edna Mode
My German is not bad but reading a tweet on electronic warfare -- ich weiss nicht.
Asking a German to pronounce "Withington" is an act of cruelty.
Particularly one that can't remember most intonations.
@@MilitaryHistoryNotVisualized:) Well, speaking a foreign language is fine, but you may as well improve it while you're at it. ;)
42th
EW > Stealth.
¿Porque no los dos?
Why not both? EF-35
Is this a reupload or did you make a video about this topic recently?