Ukraine plinking a Russian GPS-jammer with a GPS-guided bomb. Ukrainian drones blowing up Russian drone-jammers. Ukraine’s cruise missiles striking Russian air-defense sites whose missions include, you guessed it, shooting down cruise missiles.
Russia’s 23-month wider war on Ukraine has seen a lot of ironic, darkly-hilarious clashes. The latest was also one of the quickest between setup and punchline.
On Tuesday morning, Russian media announced the deployment, to Ukraine, of Russian forces’ latest high-tech counterbattery radar. A few hours later in southern Ukraine, the Ukrainians blew it up … with artillery rockets.
The irony deepens. In theory, a Russian Yastreb-AV radar would help to protect Russian troops from Ukraine’s American-made High-Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems launchers—its HIMARS. Now guess what the Ukrainians used to destroy that first Yastreb-AV.
That’s right: HIMARS.
The same holds for radar. A radar literally shines a light that anyone looking for it can see. Pinpointing a radar is trivial. Mobile radars can’t stay and detect from a location for very long, without risking an artillery strike. Fast setup and teardown times are crucial, along with a strategy where multiple mobile radars cover for each other, so detection is never offline for long.
Speed is the essence of war, and speed has definitely been the deciding factor. That and logistics. Last I read, Russia was still supplying their military with unpalletized, man-portable crates that take teams of men hours to unload, while Ukraine has their goods loaded onto pallets that take a couple guys with forklifts a couple minutes to get off the trucks and to the people who need them.