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What’s New: A Ukraine-developed GNSS jamming system used for protection primarily against drones.

Why It’s Important: Navigation warfare – using, denying, spoofing, navigation systems – has become a prominent feature of modern combat. This is exemplified in conflicts in Ukraine and Israel.

What Else to Know:

• The article says that all GNSS signals, including Russia’s GLONASS, are denied by the new system. This makes sense for a couple reasons:
  • Drones and other guided munitions can potentially use any of the GNSS. So better safe than sorry.
  • It is much easier to deny all GNSS signals, since they are in the same frequency band, than to deny signals from just one of the four systems.
•  The effective range of the system is 600 meters. It must be a relatively low power system and intended just for anti-drone, then.
  • A stronger signal and longer range would run the danger of interfering with other friendly systems. See the article about Russian forces having to use Pole-21 only intermittently because it interfered with their own operations.
• Jammers like this are relatively easy to build and easy to acquire ready-made. Interesting that Ukrainian officials made this announcement about developing a capability that has been commercially available for quite some time. Could be just wartime propaganda to help lift spirits…

In Ukraine, a successful test was conducted on a defense system that suppresses the Russian GLONASS