Russian Attacks On UAVs

Here’s some confirmation of one of the themes that I continually harp on.  The Russians are disrupting UAVs via electronic countermeasures.  C4ISR Net website reports,

“In one of the more startling displays of Russia’s capabilities, they have disrupted the unmanned aerial vehicles tasked by the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe’s Special Monitoring Mission to Ukraine to chart the conflict.”

”These UAS [UAVs] were disrupted via surface-to-air missiles and military-grade electronic jamming, …”

“Live fire and GPS jamming were the two main factors for the loss of the drones.” (1)

What have we harped on?  -that UAVs are not survivable and subject to jamming.  Here is Russia showing us exactly that action and outcome.

True, these are not US UAVs and there are undoubtedly those who will blindly and naively claim, with no supporting evidence, that US UAVs are superior and will be immune to disruption but the evidence is clear that UAVs are just target practice and those that are not casually destroyed will be rendered ineffective due to electronic countermeasures.

We need to devote some serious effort to hardening the UAV communications (including GPS).  We also need to give some serious thought to rethinking our doctrinal and tactical use of UAVs relative to the threats they’ll face.

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(1)C4ISR Net website, “Threat From Russian UAV Jamming Real, Officials Say”, Mark Pomerleau, 20-Dec-2016,

http://www.c4isrnet.com/articles/threat-from-russian-uav-jamming-real-officials-say

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