Last week the Ukrainian Shadow drone group hunted down, and blew up, a very new and very rare RB-109A Bylina electronic-warfare command-and-control system.
Bylina is a set of sophisticated receivers, packed into five trucks, that detects and pinpoints enemy radars and radios and, thanks to a built-in artificial intelligence, automatically cues linked electronic jammers to target the radars and radios. A Bylina’s receivers can sense emitters from hundreds of miles away.
All that is to say, Bylina isn’t a jammer. It’s an A.I.-powered command system that makes jammers more effective. Fifty-percent more effective, according to one assessment.
The electronic front might be the most important front of the wider war right now. That’s because small explosive drones are among the most important weapons, and they hit or miss depending on whether the enemy can jam them.
It’s because of Ukraine’s successful jamming campaign that a small unit of marines hangs onto its narrow bridgehead on the left bank of the Dnipro River in southern Ukraine. The marines can fly their drones; Russian troops can’t fly their own drones.
And it’s in large part because of the failure of Russia’s jamming campaign that Russian troops haven’t been able to capture the city of Avdiivka in eastern Ukraine. Again, the Ukrainians can fly their drones—and swarm every Russian assault.
So it makes sense that, last fall, the Russian army rushed the first operational Bylinas to the front line following years of increasingly realistic testing. Bylina should have made it “easier to jam enemy signals by selecting the best targeting devices,” according to the Kremlin.
Instead, at least one of the rare Bylinas—they’re brigade-level systems so there probably are only a few in Ukraine—got found out, hit by a drone and burned to the ground, reportedly in Donetsk in eastern Ukraine.
The ironic strike—a drone knocking out a counter-drone system—is consistent with a broader trend.
https://youtu.be/FOuNBBsDirI
Ukraine plinked one of Russia’s best GPS-jammers with a GPS-guided bomb. Ukrainian drones blew up Russian drone-jammers. Ukraine’s cruise missiles struck Russian air-defense sites whose missions included, you guessed it, shooting down cruise missiles.
Most recently, in early January, Russian media announced the deployment to Ukraine of Russian forces’ latest high-tech counterbattery radar, which detects incoming artillery. A few hours later in southern Ukraine, the Ukrainians blew it up … with artillery.
The Russians aren’t just losing hundreds of tanks and fighting vehicles and thousands of troops in their costly, but so far failing, winter offensive. They also are losing more and more of their best and hardest-to-replace battlefield enablers. Radars. Jammers. Command-and-control systems such as the Bylina.
The effect of these losses won’t immediately be obvious. But over time, it will become harder for the Russians to defend themselves against Ukraine’s artillery, missiles and drones—and equally more difficult to deploy their own artillery, missiles and drones.