A KAB in mid-flight.
Wikimedia Commons
Fighterbomber, the unofficial Telegram channel of the Russian air force, has claimed the air force’s widely feared KAB or UMPK satellite-guided glide bombs are accurate to within 15 feet of a target.
So it’s noteworthy when one of the winged bombs, which can glide 25 miles or farther and deliver hundreds or even thousands of pounds of explosives, misses by a wide margin.
A miss might mean that Ukrainian jamming, which can disrupt the radio signal between a KAB and its associated navigation satellites, is working—and proliferating.
A recording of a Russian drone feed, posted online on or just before Saturday, seems to depict the effects of Ukrainian jamming in real time. In the video, the drone is circling a structure somewhere near the front line in Ukraine—potentially a base for Ukrainian troops—and apparently preparing to assess the damage from a KAB strike that’s already underway.
The drone has its crosshairs over one particular structure. But when the KAB explodes, it’s hundreds of yards away—and in an open field.
Wide misses are reportedly becoming common all along the 700-mile front line as more and better Ukrainian jammers cover more of the most important sectors.
A KAB explodes harmlessly.
Russian defense ministry capture
End of an era
“The golden era of the divine UMPK turned out to be short-lived,” Fighterbomber noted last month.
“The bombs are still flying,” Fighterbomber reported. “But there’s a catch. All satellite-guided correction systems have left the chat.” And for one main reason: Ukrainian radio jammers have become so effective, and so numerous, that they “saturate the front line.”
The glide bombs can’t communicate with the GLONASS satellite constellation, Russia’s less sophisticated and less expansive answer to the United States’ own GPS satellite constellation. Without a steady connection for course correction, the glide bombs tend to stray and harmlessly explode on some field—just like that one video depicts.
It seems Ukraine is deploying more than one type of jammer. KABs may be losing accuracy all along the front line, but one leading Ukrainian jammer manufacturer has copped to covering just a few key sectors, including Kharkiv in the north and Zaporizhzhia in the south.
Night Watch’s new Lima jammer isn’t a traditional model that simply blasts radio noise toward the enemy. “We use digital interference,” a representative of the 10-person Night Watch electronic warfare team told Forbes. It’s “a combination of jamming, spoofing and information cyber attack on the navigation receiver.”
“After the deployment of the [electronic warfare] system, the accuracy of the bombings first decreased and then, realizing the ineffectiveness of this method of destruction and the impossibility of achieving the goal, the enemy stopped shelling regional centers altogether,” the rep claimed.
Some KABs are still flying, of course—the recent video proves that. But they may be targeting sectors where the Ukrainians haven’t yet deployed their best new jammers.
As the jammers arrive, the bombs should begin to stray off course—and blow up fields instead of buildings full of Ukrainian troops.
