Western precision weapons, once hailed for their effectiveness in Ukraine, are now failing against Russia’s advanced electronic warfare tactics. The Excalibur artillery round, Himars missiles, and other high-tech arms that initially gave Ukraine an edge are now being jammed and rendered useless. While some newer weapons still hit targets, experts warn it’s only a matter of time before Russia adapts again. This technological cat-and-mouse game highlights a critical flaw in NATO’s strategy and raises questions about the future of modern warfare against sophisticated adversaries like Russia and potentially China.
When the Excalibur artillery round was deployed on the Ukrainian front in the summer of 2022, it performed admirably. Drones flying overhead captured the fireballs that resulted from the shells’ precise strike of Russian tanks and artillery, guided by GPS.
That was short-lived.
The Russian army began to adjust in a matter of weeks, utilizing its strong electronic warfare capabilities. It was able to tamper with the GPS guidance and fuzes, causing the shells to malfunction, go off course, or fail to explode altogether. Ukrainian commanders claim that by the middle of last year, the RTX and BAE Systems-developed M982 Excalibur ammunition was virtually worthless and had been discontinued reports WSJ.
Several other weapons that demonstrated the technological might of the West have met a similar end. According to Ukrainian military officials, Russian electronic countermeasures have greatly decreased the accuracy of GPS-guided missiles fired by Himars systems, the weapon that is believed to have turned the tide of the war in Ukraine’s favor in the summer of 2022.
According to Ukrainian and Western sources, a brand-new system called the Ground-Launched Small Diameter Bomb Munition, made by Boeing and Sweden’s Saab, has completely failed since its introduction in recent months, partly due to Russian electronic warfare. In Ukraine, it is no longer in use while undergoing renovations.
For reasons of operational confidentiality, the Pentagon would not comment on the effectiveness of individual US weaponry systems.
Some of the other more contemporary precision weapons from the West still hit important Russian targets. This year, MBDA, a Franco-British-Italian military business, has destroyed numerous airfields, command centers, and communications facilities in Russian-occupied Crimea and other regions of the country with its ATACMS ballistic missiles and Storm Shadow cruise missiles. Successful hits included some of Russia’s renowned S-400 air defense systems.
According to Ukrainian military officials and Western defense experts, it’s only a matter of time until Russia figures out how to lessen the effectiveness of these weapons and increase interception rates.
The Russians have adapted to a range of circumstances, so we should expect that adaptation will always happen, according to Rob Lee, a senior researcher at the Foreign Policy Research Institute. “The capabilities will be most effective immediately after they are introduced, and adversaries will develop countermeasures over time.”
Accuracy vs. Volume
The U.S. and its allies face a strategic dilemma as a result of Russia’s success in developing electronic countermeasures. China, who is thought to be sharing some of Moscow’s battlefield lessons in dealing with Western weaponry, is keenly monitoring this development.
The foundation of Western military doctrine for many years has been the idea that mass can be defeated by precision, i.e., that a more numerous enemy may be rendered crippled by well-targeted strikes, negating the need for significant investments in troops, tanks, and artillery.
But until Ukraine, the theory had not been put to the test in a significant conflict. The introduction of Western weapons there demonstrated that an advanced military like that of China or Russia would not always be able to defeat insurgents like the Taliban or Islamic State, even if their tactics were effective against Saddam Hussein’s army.
“We have probably made some bad assumptions because, over the last 20 years, we were launching precision weapons against people that could not do anything about it,” said retired Lt. Gen. Ben Hodges, a former commander of the U.S. Army in Europe. “Now we are doing it against a peer opponent, and Russia and China do have these capabilities.”
Lt. Gen. Esa Pulkkinen, the permanent secretary of Finland’s defense ministry, stated that one of the lessons learned in Ukraine is the continued significance of traditional unguided artillery shells, the production of which is only now starting to resume in the U.S. and Europe after decades of decline. He declared, “They will go to target regardless of what type of electronic warfare capability there may be. They are immune to any type of jamming.”
The U.S. deputy secretary of defense for acquisition and sustainment, William LaPlante, highlighted Russia’s accomplishments in obstructing precise bombs in recent remarks. He declared, “The Russians have gotten really, really good.”
Game of Pursuit
Every time a new weapon system is introduced into a conflict, the opposition responds by creating countermeasures to lessen its impact, starting a creative cycle that dates back to the creation of the spear and shield.
As the Ukrainians developed new methods for locating and taking down the Iranian-designed Shahid drones, Russia improved and modified its own version of the drones. According to Ukrainian Air Force spokesman Yuriy Ignat, Russia is also continuously enhancing its ballistic and cruise missiles to make it harder for Ukraine’s air defenses that are supplied by the West to intercept them. This comes after a Russian barrage that killed 33 people in Kyiv on Monday.
Time is a crucial component for Ukraine, and Russia has been able to lessen its impact by deliberately limiting and introducing numerous Western systems gradually. Retired Air Marshal Edward Stringer, a former head of operations at the British Ministry of Defense, stated that “warfare is about the speed of adaptation.” “If you drip-feed an antibiotic weekly, you’ll actually train the pathogen—and we have trained the pathogen….We didn’t need to give them that time, but we did.”
The deputy minister of strategic industries in Ukraine, Anna Gvozdiar, expressed her frustration with certain Western businesses’ unwillingness to adjust. Her ministry is in charge of the nation’s defense industry. “We learn faster because we are on the front line, we have to make decisions to survive,” she said.
A few Western allies of Ukraine are paying attention. A government initiative was introduced in Stockholm in January to ensure that Sweden’s military producers respond more rapidly to the lessons that have been learnt in Ukraine. The speed at which Ukrainian invention cycles progress and their capacity for innovation are among their truly remarkable qualities. In a recent interview, Sweden’s Defense Minister Pål Jonson stated, “Things that would take five years to develop in Sweden are done in five weeks in Ukraine.” “Aggressively attacking bureaucracy is vital if you want to be good at innovation.”
Because technology is always changing, types of Ukrainian-made weaponry, such as drones, that were effective only a few months ago are no longer effective on the battlefield, according to a Ukrainian intelligence official. “It’s like updating software on your phone—we and the Russians have to do it every month, to keep up,” the official said. “But when we get weapons from the West, the manufacturer put in its software many years ago, and rarely wants to change anything.”
A significant portion of the U.S. weaponry sent to Ukraine, particularly under the presidential drawdown authority, are outdated systems that the military is gradually replacing with more contemporary—and typically more costly—items that aren’t always shared with Kyiv. This gives manufacturers little motivation to modernize their outdated precision munitions, according to a U.S. defense firm executive.
Prominent American military contractors Boeing and RTX sent all inquiries to the Pentagon. When asked about how well these weapons work in combat, a representative for Lockheed Martin—which produces GMLRS missiles for Himars—replied, “Questions about U.S. or foreign military operations are best addressed by those governments.”
According to a U.S. defense official, the Pentagon has worked closely with partners in the defense industry and Ukraine to quickly address threats and make sure that American precision weapons continue to be effective in a complex electronic warfare environment. The Pentagon is “very aware” of the continuously evolving threat that Russia poses to electronic warfare in Ukraine. The person continued, “In certain instances, the U.S. has been able to provide options for Ukrainian forces within hours or days by working with industry.”
Although Moscow has had success with older Western precision weapon generations, military insiders claim that some of the more advanced systems are being kept secret in order to prevent China and Russia from coming up with useful counters. The United States and its allies would be far more potent in a possible conflict, beginning with huge air power.
“We don’t want to overlearn lessons from Ukraine,” LaPlante, the deputy secretary of defense, said at a presentation in April. “They are fighting, necessarily so, in the way that we would not necessarily fight.”
However, some Ukrainian authorities and Western military analysts express dismay at what they see as a reduction in the seriousness of the issues facing Ukraine’s precision-guidance systems by American military officials and defense contractors, or an assignation of the difficulties to inadequate training of Ukrainian forces.
Michael Kofman, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment who has visited Ukrainian front-line units on multiple occasions, stated, “There is quite a bit of learning, but unfortunately the U.S. military is also learning things about this war that are not necessarily true, and what is being learned is filtered through the conceit that many of the problems faced by the Ukrainian military would not be faced by the U.S. armed forces, or could be easily overcome.”
Cold War Advancements
Russia has been concentrating on electronic warfare since the latter part of the Cold War when the West developed precision weapons that upset the nuclear balance of power between the West and the Soviet Union.
Excalibur and the GMLRS missiles are examples of weapons that were designed decades ago, so it is not surprising that Russian electronic warfare technology, which was developed expressly to counter this danger, showed effectiveness once it was widely deployed.
To hit their targets, many contemporary Western precision weapons rely, at least partially, on satellite guidance. By the summer of 2023, the Russians had concentrated on jamming or spoofing satellite navigation inside a 40-mile-wide zone along the 800-mile front line, utilizing their vast electronic warfare capabilities.
Russia’s precise weapons, including Krasnopol shells, depend on Orlan-30 drones that continued to fly without GPS guidance to identify targets with lasers. Similar M712 Copperhead artillery rounds have been sent by the United States to Ukraine, however, according to the Ukrainian military, these are rarely used by the country’s forces due to a lack of appropriate drones for target designation.
More recently, Russia mass-produced the improved Kometa-M satellite guidance system, which is significantly more resilient to Ukrainian jamming and has made it possible to utilize Russian glide bombs against Ukrainian positions with catastrophic results.
According to Ukrainian troops, Russian intervention was especially effective with Excaliburs, which had fuzes that were designed to detonate at a specific altitude but, due to GPS hacking, failed to detonate at all. The effectiveness of other precisely guided artillery shells, like the Bonus rounds made in Sweden and France, has also been diminished by Russian jamming.
With GMLRS bombs for Himars, the situation becomes more complicated. According to Ukrainian soldiers, the deviation varies with distance, with shorter-range hits being more vulnerable to GPS spoofing. It can be as much as several dozen yards. This is a major problem for the unitary warhead-equipped M31-type GMLRS missile, which was successfully deployed in 2022 to target Russian bunkers, command centers, pontoons, weapons depots, and hardened infrastructure.
For such munition, a variation of about 10 to 30 yards makes the difference between a hit and a miss. The M30-type GMLRS missile, which showers a large area with tungsten balls upon impact, is less affected by the decreased precision. As part of its counterbattery, Ukraine is still using the munition to target Russian artillery sites.
More sophisticated tactics and stronger electronic warfare reconnaissance can increase precision for both types of missiles, according to soldiers.
The commander of a Ukrainian reconnaissance unit, who led over 300 Excalibur rounds against Russian targets in 2022 and 2023, recalled with nostalgia the destructive might of the weaponry. “It’s affordable, adaptable, and the true tool of triumph,” he declared. The battlefield has changed, therefore if it were updated, it may become that once more. However, from what we’ve heard, it’s not being updated.
Recently, GreatGameIndia reported that Russian experts have discovered a critical flaw in the U.S.-made ATACMS missiles, revealing that their cluster munitions sometimes fail to detonate upon landing.
