Advanced Russian Electronic Warfare Capabilities

LTG Ben Hodges, Commander of U.S. Army Forces Europe, has frequently commented over the past year on the high degree of offensive Electronic Warfare (EW) proficiency demonstrated by the Russian Army against Ukrainian forces in Donbas. While most of this Russian EW usage was likely intended to support combat operations, it is quite possible that some of it had a secondary objective of intimidating NATO audiences. Likewise, the Russians may have also directly demonstrated a new EW system against U.S. forces on at least one occasion following the seizure of Crimea, though Russian propaganda claims regarding the system’s effects upon the USS Donald Cook were laughable. All the same, the Russian military has long appreciated that “radio-electronic combat” is integral to modern warfare, and accordingly that it offers a set of relatively inexpensive weapons that can potentially cripple an opponent’s ability to sense, communicate, and exercise command and control within a battlespace.

With that in mind, it’s worth examining a Russian propaganda piece from earlier this spring regarding a new Russian EW system dubbed Richag-AV. The article describes how Richag-AV will be integrated with a Mi-8 helicopter variant, then goes on to assert that the system can also be integrated with warships, ground vehicles, and other aircraft. Richag-AV is developed by Russia’s Radio-Electronic Technology Concern (KRET), which also produces several other prominent EW systems. One such KRET product is the aircraft-carried Khibiny that was allegedly used against the USS Donald Cook. It is noteworthy that KRET has claimed elsewhere that at least one variant of its truck-mounted Krasukha series EW systems will be mounted on aircraft and ships as well. A cursory search for pictures of Krasukha series systems online indicates that their size, weight, power, and physical antenna design attributes are vastly larger than anything that a Mi-8 might carry. Krasukha series systems’ physical attributes certainly differ drastically from Khibiny’s as well. Taken together, it seems likely that the claims that all these KRET products are equally extensible to different platforms aren’t fully true. Rather, it is quite possible the Russian claims actually signify that these different products share some common internal design approaches or underlying technologies and techniques.

The Sputnik News piece on Richag-AV contains another detail I find interesting:

In a combat situation, the system would operate as part of an aviation shock attack group aimed at breaking through virtually any defense system, blinding everything up to and including the US MIM-104 'Patriot' anti-aircraft missile system.

This immediately made me think of the opening hours of the First Gulf War when U.S. Army Apache attack helicopters struck Iraqi radar sites near the border with Saudi Arabia in order to create air defense coverage gaps the first waves of F-117s “going downtown” could exploit. The Apaches’ attacks, combined with Project SCATHE MEAN’s use of decoys to lure Iraqi air defenses into lighting off radars and expending precious Surface to Air Missiles, landed debilitating blows against Iraq’s integrated air defense system.

Now, it’s far from clear that Russian doctrine actually envisions using armed Mi-8s equipped with Richag-AV to achieve similar war-opening effects in a notional conflict with NATO. The Apaches’ nighttime nap-of-the-earth approach to their targets in Desert Storm was difficult enough over the desert; an equivalent raid into Poland from Kaliningrad, for example, would have to deal with much more complex terrain and might also have to contend with the coverage provided by NATO Airborne Early Warning (AEW) aircraft. Nevertheless, U.S. and NATO planners ought to be thinking about how they might parry such a gambit.

It stands to reason, though, that Russian combined arms ground operations would likely feature use of aircraft-carried and vehicle-borne EW systems to blind, disrupt, deceive, or exploit U.S. and NATO sensor, communications, and command and control coverage within an objective area. Low-flying Russian helicopters would certainly be a plausible platform for suppression of the mobile air defense systems supporting NATO ground forces. Vehicle-borne Russian EW systems would likewise be plausible platforms for shielding Russian ground forces from NATO attacks.  

There’s obviously no way to be certain how Russian electronic attack capabilities actually stack up against U.S. and NATO radiofrequency systems. Such questions could only be answered in war, and that’s a ruinous proving ground one hopes the Putin regime and Western leaders equally want to avoid. It’s nevertheless worth pointing out that the Russian propaganda articles are incorrect in intimating that the edge in electronic attack is determined by an offensive EW system’s transmit power and raw coverage. Those are certainly important variables, but what matters even more is the adequacy of the targeted radiofrequency system’s electronic protection features and the comprehensiveness of the defending unit’s conditioning for operations under electromagnetic opposition. LTG Hodges has observed as much with respect to the U.S. Army. These observations urgently need to be translated into doctrine, operating concepts, tactics, force-wide training priorities, interim electronic protection upgrades to existing systems, and fielding of relevant ‘off-the-shelf’ EW technologies not only in the Army, but also across the U.S. armed services and their NATO counterparts as well.

The views expressed herein are solely those of the author and are presented in his personal capacity. They do not reflect the official positions of Systems Planning and Analysis, and to the author’s knowledge do not reflect the policies or positions of the U.S. Department of Defense, any U.S. armed service, or any other U.S. Government agency.