Ukraine Losing as U.S. Military Tech Lags… the Russians!

Ukraine is losing the war for many reasons including the all-too-familiar cycle of Russian military ventures: corrupt, politicized, and incompetent. The Russians start out failing pathetically, hold on in the interim by massive blood sacrifices of untrained troops, and finally, battle-hardened and led by officers competent enough to have survived, use their massive advantages in manpower and their disregard for human life to win in the end.

To these familiar woes Eric Schmidt, (yes that Eric Schmidt), writing in Foreign Affairs, adds yet another. Ukraine is losing because it relies on U.S. technology that is proving embarrassingly inferior to Russian technology. In particular, the drone war, which initially helped Ukraine against Russian armor, had begun to go badly.

This should not be a shock. The Russians, so accustomed to win by losing, excel on defense. In particular, they have long been fanatical about anti-aircraft defense.

Innovative as the Israeli Defense Force is, Israel came perilously close to losing the 1973 Yom Kippur war because the Russians had simply moved in and taken over Egyptian and Syrian air defense.

The Israeli air force essentially won 1967’s Six Day War on the very first of those days by destroying the Egyptian and Syrian air forces on the ground. In 1973, they were no match for the Russians who, among other tactics, brought sophisticated electronic countermeasures to the battle that had Israeli pilots chasing shadows and exposing themselves to deadly missile and anti-aircraft fire.

In Ukraine today, the Russians are doing it again, and again with electronic countermeasures. U.S. drone guidance systems and even our more sophisticated missile systems have proved vulnerable to Russian defenses. U.S. supplied drones, the HIMARS missile system, so effective early in the war, and even the much longer ranger ATACMS missiles, Schmidt points out, all depend on GPS based guidance systems that the Russians can jam or spoof into hitting the wrong targets.

Other countermeasures jam the remote links between Ukrainian drone “pilots” and their craft, disrupting communications of Ukraine’s ground forces and “help Russia find drone operator stations and make it hard for Ukraine to pinpoint the location of Russia’s headquarters.”

Moreover, the Russians are now fielding both more and better drones than Ukraine. For more than a year now, Schmidt writes, “Russia has used a combination of two domestically produced drones, the Orlan-10 (a surveillance drone) and the Lancet (an attack drone), to destroy everything from high-value artillery systems to combat jets and tanks. Ukraine… has no combination of drones that match Russia’s dangerous new duo.” Russia may be producing 100,000 drones a year.

Ukraine meanwhile has relatively little by way of electronic countermeasures. Only a “limited number of Ukrainian brigades have acquired jamming equipment from U.S. suppliers or domestic startups. … Although Ukraine and its partners have worked hard to keep up, they still lag behind Russia’s electronic warfare capabilities.”

Ukraine seems to have realized its chief ally is behind the times. “Recognizing that U.S. weapons that rely on GPS may not stand up well to Russian electronic warfare, Ukrainian startups are working around the clock to develop advanced drones that can resist spoofing and jamming.”

How has it happened that the United States has lagged behind the Russians in technology of all things? Part of the explanation is that, as Edward Luttwak has pointed out, in war failure is a better teacher than success. In the wake of three decades of war against primitive Middle Eastern tribes, we seem to have underestimated the threat of electronic countermeasures. Not a conspicuous strength of desert nomads, electronic warfare, as Schmidt points out, is a traditional strength of the Russians.

More dangerously U.S. weapons development has become so mired in regulations meant to prevent corruption that systems take decades to develop typically at a multiple of estimated costs. We’ve abandoned more weapons projects as obsolete before complete than our enemies begin.

As Luttwak points out in this brilliant new book “The Art of Military Innovation,” the United States suppresses the entrepreneurial instincts that have enabled Israel to develop in years and for millions of dollars systems the United States has failed to build in decades for billions.

Perhaps if we spent less energy on complaining that other countries steal our obsolescent technology and put more effort into learning from them, we might be able to win a war.

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