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Comment by aliljet | Hacker News Reader

I'm a little baffled by this, 'Russia has deployed big ew systems for every 10km stretch of the front. They are largely aimed at drones. And they work: Ukraine is losing a staggering 10,000 drones per month, says the report, amounting to over 300 losses daily. ew is responsible for around half of those losses, a Ukrainian official tells The Economist.'

What Electronic Warfare is going to pull 5,000 drones a month out of the sky?

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That seems astonishingly high, but on second thoughts the whole point of drones is that they're effectively an expendable munition, and if you lose one it counts as having advanced to contact.

Drones are really limited in their autonomous abilities and vulnerable to GPS jamming. Someone needs to work on image-based return to base navigation.

A large number of these drones are just regular civilian models. Those are likely easy prey for electronic warfare.

especially if your supplier country is secretly rooting for your enemy.

The sellers on AliExpress tend to cheer for and sell to both teams.

Jam GPS, jam transmitters, drones "get lost", fall down.

Yep. You're right. It's really just nav blocking that's killing the drones. I wonder if there's a way to have these drones operate without a need for GPS. Instead, use cameras to read terrain and map that against the known terrain...

Tomahawk cruise missiles originally used terrain following. (1983) Now they have GPS capability but I think terrain following is still an option.

It’s insane to me they had stuff like terrain following working in the early 80’s

A fairly in-depth explanation of one part of the system from a 1994 paper: https://secwww.jhuapl.edu/techdigest/Content/techdigest/pdf/...

Or at least something slightly lower tech like an electronic compass that will keep a back bearing and fly the reverse course if signal is lost.

But it has to be a question of cost too. Drones are attritable by their nature and there may be no more reason to try to recover one than you would recover a discharged bullet.

Usually for tactical drones they get fitted with an IMU (Inertial measurement unit / gyros) for when GPS signal is lost. That way the drone can continue operation but do suffer from drift the longer the GPS signal is not available. But cheap IMU's fitted on smaller drones has very poor accuracy / drift.

A bigger upset is loss of communications, very few if any drones operate autonomously currently, and if there is loss of communications they may try to return to base. Off course it is more difficult to jam line of sight or drone to satellite communications than GPS.

> if there is loss of communications they may try to return to base.

I wonder if either or both sides are patching this out of software - otherwise, communications jamming becomes a quick way to make the drone lead the enemy straight to your base.

> What Electronic Warfare is going to pull 5,000 drones a month out of the sky?

If they can jam their control link and GPS, wouldn't they just crash?

IIRC, Ukraine (and Russia) are using a lot of civilian-grade drones, which I would assume would be very vulnerable to military electronic warfare.

Why should they crash? It's not like operation of motors and avionics depends on navigation or control link.

> 'Russia has deployed big ew systems for every 10km stretch of the front.

I assume Ukraine would be trying to blow these EW systems up using HIMARS/GMLRS/etc? I wonder how hard that is.

They can be far more mobile than, say, an artillery piece, as they're just spewing out interference. HIMARS is much more useful for targeting things like ammo depots or fixed positions.

This issue is EW is wreaking havoc on these GPS guided systems (as are S-400 & BUK interceptions). Not to mention munition supplies for them are dwindling.

- https://militarywatchmagazine.com/article/himars-less-effect...

- https://www.japantimes.co.jp/opinion/2023/05/03/commentary/w...

They are also inertia guided, as to be a way to hardened against attacks like this it makes them less accurate but still probably enough to hit with a missile if you know the coordinates.

You can also attack EW systems with RF seeking missiles.

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