Another look at Russia’s radio-electronic combat - TTG

In October 2015 I put up a post largely about the Richag-AV and Krasukha-4 jamming systems then appearing with the Russian forces moving into Syria. It sparked a good discussion that cut through a lot of the techno-hype. One thing that became clear was that Russia developed and employed a broad family of radio-electronic combat (REC) technologies. Another point made was that these jamming technologies do not form an impenetrable force field. They work together as a “system of systems” to create an extremely hostile electro-magnetic environment for enemy weapons and surveillance systems. It’s not voodoo magic.

As a review of this subject, South Front put out an excellent summary of Russian REC capabilities. Although the article has a sensational title, “Ultra-Secret Weapon that Allows Russia to Assume His Supremacy in Electronic War in Syria” and it has been translated from Romanian to French and then to English, it is both readable and informative.

To continue the review, I took a look at some of the stories out there about the Cook/Su-24 incident. They run the gamut. A lot of the stories seem to conflate two different ECM systems. The Su-24 accounts from the Cook describe a single, basket-like pod under the belly of the fighter-bomber. Other stories describe the Khibiny as torpedo-like pods attached to the wing tips of many of the newer generation Russian aircraft, but not the Su-24. The Su-24 mounted system supposedly shut down, degraded or jammed the Aegis radars and/or fire control systems, but not the engines of the Cook. The wing tip mounted Khibiny system mounted on newer Russian aircraft is said to jam the ability of missiles to lock on and hit the aircraft. Sounds like two different ECM systems to me.

Another ECM incident involved a drone flown out of Syria towards Israel. The drone "deflected" two Iron Dome missiles and one missile fired by an Israeli F-16. This last incident is from a blog by Brad Cabana, a Canadian who posted reliable info during the louder parts of the war in Ukraine along with a thought provoking story of an incident surrounding the coup attempt in Turkey. 

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“In fact, Erdogan was scheduled to meet in Moscow with Russian President Putin just two days before the coup. However, all that came to a sudden end when Erdogan was spirited out of his vacation home just prior to an attempt on his life by a platoon of Turkish special forces. Somehow he had gotten wind of it, boarded his jet, and jettisoned off toward Turkey's capital. While enroute to the capital his plane was "locked onto" by two Turkish F-16's. Despite locking onto Erdogan's jet the Turkish fighter pilots could not fire and bring it down - for whatever reason. The bottom line is that al the evidence points toward a very important Russian intervention in the coup - to stop it that is. It appears that Russian intelligence intercepted the coup plotter's communications and plans, alerted Erdogan in advance, and saving his life in the process. It likely also proved very clearly to Erdogan who his friends were, and who they were not. In any case, the mysterious escape from the lethal missiles of those two Turkish F-16s is really what this article is about.

Funny enough, Erdogan's saving grace seems to be a part of another trend that has raised its head for at least the last few years. Simply put, the Russians have developed technology that renders all missile systems, nuclear or conventional, useless. In November, 2014 the first high profile incident occurred when a Russian SU-24 fighter bomber shut down all systems on the USS Donald Cook in the Black Sea. The only armament the plane carried was a small basket - an important little basket known as "Khibiny" - perhaps named after the Russian mountain of the same name. In any case, the entire state-of-the-art destroyer was rendered unable to defend itself while the SU-24 flew eleven simulated bombing runs over it before flying off. The Cook's Aegis system (most modern US defence system) was shut down completely. 

Then, just three weeks ago a military drone entered Israeli airspace from Syria. The Israeli military fired two Patriot missiles at the drone, but the deadly accurate missiles could not hit the slow and plodding drone. Then an Israeli fighter pilot fired an air-to-air missile at the drone, but the missile would not strike it. It appears quite obvious that the Russian drone had on board a system similar to the Khibiny electronic warfare device that shut down the Cook. However, this system appears to not jam the firing systems, but just the missiles themselves. That would be a variant of the system and essentially render anti-aircraft systems and fighter jets obsolete. It seems clear the Russians used the air-tight "Iron Dome" Israeli anti-missile system as a test for this technology. Not a bad choice considering Israel's small land mass and therefore concentrated air defence systems. Or, in other words, no better place to test it in the world.” (Rock Solid Politics)

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Cabana’s account of Erdogan owing his life to Russian ECM is interesting, but I haven’t found any other accounts of the incident. It might be true. It might be myth. Perhaps some of our august fellow correspondents can shed some light on this story.

I did find several other references to this last incident that corroborate Brad Cabana’s account. This sounds like a well planned field test of a Russian ECM system. I’m sure there were some Russian REC technicians shouting “Eureka” at the results of this experiment. I’m also pretty damned sure there were a lot of Israeli military officers and politicians crying “Ooooh Shiiit! We’re scrooowed!” It doesn’t take much imagination to understand the ramifications of just the possibility of such a lightweight, low power ECM becoming available to Hezbollah missile forces.

TTG 

http://www.timesofisrael.com/russia-not-hezbollah-sent-drone-into-israel-report/?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=twitter

https://www.rt.com/news/351844-israel-drone-missiles-intercept/

http://nationalinterest.org/feature/israel-almost-shot-down-russian-drone-17390

 

Comments

[mike]

Thirdeye -

I'm no expert on geese. The article I referenced stated two other avian navaids besides magnetic fields and landmarks. Those are:

QUOTE A young bird imprints on the sun and stars to help orient it.ENDQUOTE

and

QUOTE Most surprisingly, a bird’s beak helps contribute to its navigational ability. The beak helps birds determine their exact position. Some researchers think a bird can smell its way across a flyway.ENDQUOTE

[Andy]

"So, you think the SU-24 shutting down the Aegis-equipped Donald Cook was less impressive than shutting down a Camry?"

No, I think the entire notion that the SU-24 shut down an Aegis cruiser is nothing more than Russian propaganda and they didn't even get the fictional details correct.

[Andy]

The DNA tests are getting to be pretty impressive. I've done several as I'm adopted and trying to determine my genetic ethnic history and potentially find biological relatives. Turns out my genetic geographical lineage is very close to my adoptive family history, at least on the paternal side.

Supposedly I have 2.5% neanderthal DNA. My wife thinks it should be higher.

[Ivan]

For every attempt to "idiot proof" software, nature comes up with two or more better idiots. I can relate to this as I.struggled for years on the factory floor to automate machines. Another factor is as noted by a computer way, if we already making software to the best of our abilities then whatever defeats is largely beyond our ability to resolve. After a certain level of complexity, software engineering is all about error control. Given that the defender has to be right all the time, while an attacker has to get it right only once, the odds stack up in favor of an adversary. Like everything thing else made by human effort software succumbs rapidly to diminishing returns.

[alba etie]

Third Eye
I thought the US Air Force lost a F -117 over Kosovo and not a B 2 .
And IIRC the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade was "mistakenly " bombed in Belgrade the next night after the F 117 was shot down . There was some reporting in the alter MSM that the PRC had deployed a ' phase arrayed radar suite " to that Embassy site - that may have helped down the F 117 ..

[sillybill]

OM,
I agree that EMP could be a factor in some of these incidents.
To be effective on an aircraft's limited power supply the offensive EM blast must be focused on the target. Perhaps they've made something like a maser that fits into an avionics pod, it pumps out very fast high power pulses, timed to efficiently interfere with info transfers on computerized systems. The idea is not to hack or spoof the computers (which of course would require intimate knowledge of the system being targeted at the moment) but to merely induce enough noise onto the buslines to cause a crash and reboot.
In the Cook incident the Russian jet made repeated low level passes which would enable the pilot to effectively point such a beam on the ship.
Ships have enough capacity to install Tempest like shielding once this threat is known but missiles and small jets are more constrained.
The guidance electronics on an IR missile would of course be as susceptible as any other kind.
Just me WAGing of course.

[user123]

Well total speculation, right? My wild fantasy-guess, just for fun (radar isn't my thing, at all):

If an ECM incident with the Donald Cook really took place as described, I'd guess the ship shut down once it realized it was being played with. The equipment on the Su presumably found a way to fake out its observed position and speed. Would really need to do both of those things - modest uncertainty in apparent position and big uncertainty in apparent speed should be enough to create difficulties for a fire control system. Perhaps using different methods for tricking the position and speed sensing. The position, perhaps by playing games with rapidly varying the Su's reflectivity via whatever's in the pod, timing the variations vs the ship radar's scanning. The trick would be to for the target to observe the radar's scan pattern, which of course should be a semi random scan of the space around each target (e.g., the Su) to combine those scans into a precise position. For In the vertical dimension, there is a useful thing here -- the reflection off the sea! Processing of this may allow the target to determine whether the scan is pointed directly at it, or whether the target's real position off-center vs the radar beam). Alter reflectivity in response to this (more reflective when beam is off-center) (in a *very* fast analog kind of way) to increase uncertainty in target position as observed by the ship. Wild fantasy.

This trick would only work a little bit, however. Will also need to fool the speed, otherwise the speed data can be used to correct the position data. How speed sensing works for radar is over my head, so I'm just going to wave my hands and say wacky crystal physics.

The aegis is made to track large numbers of fast targets, right? It wouldn't have much time to scan each target's space, so perhaps some compromise in robustness is made to achieve that performance, which the ECM takes advantage of.

So again, if this all is true, fun work for the radar people. Detective work to figure out how it's done, and then clever software fix to defeat it.

[The Twisted Genius]

In the early 90s I collected a lot of information about several countries R&D efforts in battle management systems. The Aegis system is a prime example of these battle management systems. The way these systems work is that sensors, often radars, key in on specific signals in an effort to identify targets. Once the signals from the sensors matches what the system expects for a target, the system keys alarm systems or weapons systems into action. If the signals captured by the sensors does not match what the system's database expects, an anomaly can occur. The anomaly can be simply a failure to trigger the associated alarm or weapons system or, perhaps, this unexpected series of signals may trigger a system error or system shutdown/reboot. This was the state of the art in the early 90s. R&D in countermeasures to these battle management systems began focusing on how to finesse the signals picked up by sensors into causing the systems to malfunction or, at least, perform in less than an optimal manner. In a way, this approach was similar to hackers discovering vulnerabilities in software in order to exploit that software. This, I believe, is how these various Russian REC systems work. It's not simply a matter of trying to overpower the signals of the enemy systems, it's a matter of engineering finesse.

[The Twisted Genius]

J,

Thanks for that. I was intrigued by the illustration, but I didn't look for the article. My oldest son is an amateur radio operator. When he was still living with us, we had several antennas in the back yard and one under the eaves of the house. He speaks Russian and has contacted other radio operators in Russia. He's also still doing the morse code events with ARRL. It all reminds me of SF communications with the AN/PRC-74. We also got hold of a couple of old AN/GRC-109 sets to use in what we called guerrilla operations in urbanized terrain (GOUT). My radiomen said that 109 could "load a tin roof." Both sets used the same burst device with a spring loaded magnetic tape.

[turcopolier]

TTG

I was trained to send and receive on the 109. It is true. It would load for the ground lobe just about any metal object big enough. It was developed by an SF enlisted man. I used it with a "bug," a semi automatic side by side horizontal key that sent dots on one side and dashes on the other. It took skill. I worked for days on that before I could do that to the satisfaction of the training people at Bragg. A burst device would have made the thing much better as a defense against triangulation. pl

[The Twisted Genius]

pl,

The only good thing about having a lieutenant as XO on a team was that he was always made to jump with the generator seat for the radio. It had a tendency to act as a weathervane and cause a twist in the risers. Now that the XO is an experienced WO, there's no way he can be bullied into jumping with the seat. Although I doubt that seat is still in the inventory.

That burst device was simple. It still required the message to be encoded on a one time pad, tri-graphed and manually pounded onto the tape. It took a lot of pressure to ensure it transferred to the tape. I think there's a digital device that does all that now.

My son now uses a paddle to send. It sounds like your bug. I found this curious article that distinguishes the differences among a bug, paddle and key. Perhaps it will interest you. I hope it doesn't give you a flashback ;)

http://www.amateurradio.com/dont-bug-out-when-hearing-a-vibroplex-semi-automatic-key/

[turcopolier]

TTG

Much better idea IMO to have a WO as XO. I was never very good but the comms sergeants were always willing to let me play with it as part of the cross training process. pl

[Clonal Antibody]

You might find this interesting and relevant - This is from today - Multiple Russian Jets Buzz US Destroyer In "Unsafe" Encounter

Of particular interest -

According to the Free Beacon, the Russian aircraft operated without their electronic identifying transponders activated. Transponders on aircraft are monitored closely by air defense officers charged with protecting the ship and identifying hostile and friendly aircraft on radar. The Russian aircraft also failed to respond to several radio requests from the Porter to halt the overflights.

Surprisingly, Russia denied the close encounter had ever occured. "There were no incidents of any kind on Feb. 10, related to flights by Russian military jets in the Black Sea near the U.S. Navy destroyer Porter," Russian news agencies cited a spokesman for the Russian Defense Ministry, Major-General Igor Konashenkov, as saying.

[Keith Harbaugh]

A 2017-04-29 article at Tass makes explicit claims for what the Khibiny did to
the Cook's AEGIS combat system and/or AEGIS Ballistic Missile Defense System:
“Russia’s cutting-edge weaponry capable of ‘blinding’ enemy's army”
http://tass.com/defense/942027

Here is the relevant part of that article (with emphasis added):

Khibiny EW system

The Khibiny electronic warfare system was made operational in the Russian Armed Forces in 2013 to defend aircraft against air defense systems.

The Khibiny EW system differs from the previous-generation technology by its increased power and intelligence capability. It can assist in aircraft weapons control, create a deceptive electronic environment and help break through an enemy’s layered air defenses.

This is what happened with the US destroyer Donald Cook in 2014 when the warship’s air defense systems locked on a Russian Su-24 plane.

The data appearing on the warship’s radars put the crew at a loss:
the aircraft would now and then disappear from radar screens
or suddenly change its location and speed
or create electronic clones of additional targets
while the destroyer’s information and weaponry control combat systems
were actually disabled.
Considering that the warship was in the Black Sea some 12,000 kilometers away from the US territory,
it was not difficult to imagine what the destroyer’s crew felt.

Now a new complex, the Khibiny-U, is in development for frontline aviation, in particular, for Su-30SM aircraft.

My (Keith Harbaugh's) thanks to "irf520" for pointing out that Tass article:
http://turcopolier.typepad.com/sic_semper_tyrannis/2017/04/open-thread-18-april-2017.html#comment-6a00d8341c72e153ef01bb09931b29970d