What is a Krasukha-4 mobile electronic warfare system? Why a country losing it is a big deal?
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Not specifically for the Kra-4 (AFAIK it has not yet been confirmed), but in general for Electronic Warfare EW, Electronic Counter Measures ECM, and Electronic Counter-Counter Measures.
– Electronic Warfare (finding, exploiting, jamming, spoofing the enemies radio signals, countering enemy attempts to do the same … and vise versa) a force multiplier. More than ever before effective communication, sensor usage and *communicate* this data effectively to different units is absolute key to have a working military force. Take away their sensors, from drones to satellites and AWACS surveillance systems, their radio communication, their tactical networks, or at least negatively influence them and you are not only hampering a single unit, but far more units … potentially setting up deadly traps, outmanoeuvre the enemy, surprising it etc.
– EW in all its form is one of the better secrets kept, as it involves a lot of work behind the scenes. The thing is: a tank with a 120mm L55 cannon has a certain set of physical limitations and a lot of people can make educated guesses what kind of armour penetration you can achieve. Or how much weapons and fuel a F35 can carry, leading to guesses where an aircraft carrier is located etc. But the ability to influence enemy communication, to corrupt enemy command & communication system, to detect enemy formations, including HQs or logistics by listening to radio waves, is king, when it comes to strategic consequences. However it is not easy to put in numbers, depends on your ability for encryption and decryption and often involves the full suite of intelligence and technological knowledge of a force in order to make the system effective against the enemy.
– Consequently: capturing and analysing such a system can be a devastating blow if your own forces now can analyse what the enemy knows about you, where the enemy assumes your strengths & weaknesses are, and how to counter it. It enables researching enemy weaknesses while closing your own holes in your EW system.
Not directly EW/ECM/ECCM (because it was code decryption) but a good example how dangerous a corrupted communication can be: the US Navy broke the Japanese Navel code partially in WW2 – able to listen to Japanese communication and make assumptions about their next target. When they concluded this was Midway, they were able to lay a trap for the unsuspecting Japanese. What followed was one of the most important turning points of WW2. Nations defeated, nuclear bombs dropped, new world wide power struggles and dominance … all because *Information* got corrupted. EW on a battlefield is perhaps not that dramatic like code breaking of high level government communication, but still: enemy HQs really do not like to be shelled by heavy artillery, just because some EM guy looked hard at their screen.
With he current war between Russia and Ukraine still going on it will take years if not decades, to analyse what *exactly* went wrong. But from todays point of view it shows that an army well lead, with spirit and determination, and clear command & communication systems, can outfight a theoretically far superiour army with a, at least at a superficial look, disastrous command & communication system.
Having more and better information than your enemy cannot be overestimated.
Stats vs invisible soft skills.
SYL
The big deal is once you have their system you can counter it leaving the troops without protection. the US can reverse engineer and learn how they plan to jam systems, which give you clues to how they are defending against US EW attacks. This reduces the Russian EW back to a low level.
The lost means that they will not get back to parity with current system for five to twenty years depending on how much money and brainpower they throw at EW.
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