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Picture: Mil.ru via Wikimedia Commons

Throughout the war in Ukraine, reports have periodically emerged suggesting that Ukrainian electronic warfare systems have successfully jammed Russian ballistic missiles, causing them to miss their intended targets.

Most recently, the Kyiv Independent reported that one electronic warfare project claimed to have downed 58 out of 59 Kh-47M2 Kinzhal air-launched ballistic missiles. “Downed” is somewhat of a misnomer here, but likely refers to an electronic warfare system degrading the missiles’ navigation sufficiently to render them militarily ineffective.

This post discusses what an electronic warfare system designed to defeat incoming ballistic missiles might look like, the technical and operational challenges of deploying such a system, and the implications for the ongoing war.

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The electronic warfare vulnerability of ballistic missiles

Conventional short- and medium-range ballistic missiles, including those used by Russia against Ukraine, typically rely on a guidance architecture combining an inertial measurement unit (IMU) with a global navigation satellite system (GNSS) receiver.

The IMU is a self-contained navigation system that tracks the missile’s movement and orientation from launch to calculate its position throughout flight. Its primary advantage is that it requires no external signals, making it immune to outside interference and undetectable by an adversary. Its primary limitation is integration drift: small measurement errors that accumulate over time, producing progressively larger position errors that degrade accuracy.

For example, it is estimated that at a 300 kilometers range, the 9M720 short-range ballistic missile — the export version of the 9M723 employed in the Iskander-M system that Russia uses itself — relying entirely on its inertial measurement unit, achieves a circular error probable (the smallest radius within 50 percent of launched projectiles are expected to fall) of up to 200 meters.

To address integration drift and maintain higher accuracy over long distances, ballistic missiles — like other types of long-range strike weapons — rely on GNSS corrections, which periodically update the IMU with satellite-derived position fixes. Combining the two systems can substantially reduce the missile’s circular error probable. Modern conventional short-range ballistic missiles can credibly strike within 5 to 10 meters of their intended target, with even smaller deviations feasible in high-end systems.

Jamming ballistic missiles

Electronic warfare can exploit the dependency of ballistic missiles on GNSS for high accuracy. Russia relies on its GLONASS satellite constellation for position fixes of its missile systems. Like GPS, GLONASS transmits on two frequency bands simultaneously — L1 (centered around 1602 MHz) and L2 (centered around 1246 MHz) — which allows receivers to correct for ionospheric signal delays and improve positioning accuracy.

This dual-band design defines the jammer’s task. By broadcasting noise across both frequency bands simultaneously, a ground-based jammer can overpower the GLONASS signal at the missile’s receiver, leaving the navigation system unable to distinguish satellite signals from interference. At that point, the navigation system is forced to fall back on inertial guidance for the remainder of the flight, or until the satellite signal is reestablished. Given integration drift, this progressively degrades accuracy the longer the missile flies without a GNSS-enabled position fix.

The satellite signal reaching a ballistic missile is generally weak. GPS and GLONASS signals arrive at roughly -130 dBm at the Earth’s surface. They are somewhat stronger at altitude due to reduced atmospheric attenuation, but the jammer enjoys a significant power advantage by operating far closer to the missile than the orbiting satellites.

The 9M723 short-range ballistic missile, for example, typically reaches an altitude of 50 to 60 kilometers during a standard midcourse trajectory, and up to 100 kilometers on a lofted trajectory. By contrast, the GLONASS constellation operates at an altitude of 19,140 kilometers. High-power ground-based jammers of the kind already deployed by Ukraine and Russia, positioned within a few hundred kilometers of the missile’s trajectory, can, in principle, achieve the jamming-to-signal ratios necessary to overwhelm the receiver and deny satellite correction.

That said, jamming effectiveness also depends on several other factors, notably whether the missile’s GNSS antenna incorporates anti-jamming measures such as null-steering — which suppresses signals arriving from the direction of the jammer while maintaining reception from satellites above — and how the antenna is oriented relative to the jammer at any given point in flight.

Technical and operational considerations

Several technical and operational conditions must likely align for the jamming operation against incoming Russian ballistic missiles to have a reasonable chance of success.

First, the jammer must achieve line-of-sight to the missile at high elevation angles. Conventional ground-based jamming antennas are optimized for near-horizontal emission geometries — typically designed to jam relatively low-altitude aerial vehicles — and perform poorly against targets at steep elevation angles, where ballistic missiles spend their midcourse phase. Effective GNSS jamming of ballistic missiles therefore requires a phased-array antenna capable of electronically steering its output toward high-elevation angles, or, alternatively, a high-altitude platform such as an aircraft or UAV, though I consider the latter is less likely in the Ukrainian context.

Second, the jammer must be active and within effective range before the missile completes its midcourse phase. The 9M723 and Kh-47M2 Kinzhal travel at high subsonic to low hypersonic velocities during midcourse, resulting in flight times of only a few minutes. The window during which satellite correction is most critical is a subset of that, placing stringent demands on effective early warning and requiring the jammer to be in position before the missile is launched. Relocation after launch is not an option.

Third, jamming must be sustained long enough to prevent meaningful position correction. A brief interruption in the GNSS signal matters little if the missile reacquires the signal in time to offset the degradation before impact. The jamming operation must therefore cover enough of the midcourse phase for inertial drift to accumulate beyond the missile’s ability to compensate in the later phases of the flight.

Fourth, creating the interfering signals needed to jam a hardened military-grade GNSS receiver puts a strong demand on hardware and supporting infrastructure, requiring a high-power transmitter, a dedicated radar-tracking system to maintain a focused beam on a fast-moving target, substantial power-generation equipment, and a sizable antenna array. Together, these components produce a substantial physical and electronic footprint, which can render the system vulnerable to counterattacks.

Implications for the war

As the war in the Middle East has accelerated the global ballistic missile interceptor shortage, further straining Ukraine’s ability to maintain an effective ballistic missile defense, an electronic warfare system capable of complementing that defense architecture could hardly be more timely.

Whether Ukraine has fielded such a system remains unclear from open sources. As outlined above, however, it appears at least feasible, even if doing so entails significant technical and operational challenges. It is also worth noting, if somewhat speculatively, that more effective enforcement of Western sanctions could have aided Ukrainian jamming operations.

It is well established that, despite significant import substitution efforts, Russia has failed to effectively replace advanced Western components in its long-range strike weapons, including their guidance systems, which continue to rely heavily on Western electronics typically imported through third countries. If sanctions enforcement has tightened, further curtailing Western supply and forcing Russia to resort to domestic or lower-quality foreign components, Russian IMUs could become progressively less accurate, while GNSS receivers may grow more vulnerable to Ukrainian jamming. In theory, this could greatly enhance the chances of success for Ukrainian electronic warfare efforts.

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