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Comment by mrweasel | Hacker News Reader

So in the article, they talk about the AN/ALQ-131 jammer. It needs to be updated by the US, to keep up with the Russia counter measures, that's what's stopping. At least the F-16 donated by Denmark will most likely have pylons from Terma (ECIPS), which should work with the CJS from Leonardo (ECIPS/CJS).

Shouldn't be to hard for Europe to make the required pylons for the planes who don't have the ECIPS and for those that do, some of them might already have CJS installed.

It's a problem for sure, but it's a manageable one.

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Well it's always good to be specific, but I think it was the only thing that the US did for the F-16, wasn't it? They didn't exactly support sending planes in the first place. And it's not gonna be the last wrench the US will throw into Ukraine's (and Europe's) gears. It all piles up.

And the article itself appears to be making some logical leaps. It says it's getting its information from a Forbes article, but the information in the Forbes article is simply this[1]:

> But the Russian air force could sidestep the jamming by reprogramming their radars to operate at slightly different frequencies. Under Biden, the USAF team might’ve kept pace with Russian adaptation by constantly adjusting the AN/ALQ-131s own frequencies. Under Trump, Ukrainian airmen are stuck with pods whose programming may soon be out of date.

Some people were asked why this got flagged, by I think there's some justification for that given the fact that it's a misleading headline for an article editorializing another article, and that most people here used it as a jumping off point to talk about politics and not what was actually being discussed.

[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidaxe/2025/03/07/france-to-t...

The Forbes article also says:

> U.S. President Donald Trump has halted U.S. aid to Ukraine, including vital support for the F-16s’ radar jammers.

> That could deprive the Ukrainian air force of its most important aerial countermeasures at a critical moment

That does sound really bad, I think.

Yes. The problem seemed to be the lack of continued updates that evolve with the Russian radar changes. This sounds like an anti-virus paradigm: base software plus signature files.

Can’t the Ukrainees (?) reverse engineer the update format and make their own on the down-low?

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