Killer airwaves: Russia starts trial of electromagnetic warfare system

Factory testing is underway for components of the new system, capable of protecting troops and civilian facilities from air and space attacks, a representative of Russia’s leading producer of electronic warfare systems, Radio-Electronic Technologies Concern (KRET), told TASS. The tests are expected to be completed by the end of 2016.

Integrated with air defense systems and networks, the new complex “maintains automated real-time intelligence data exchange with the airspace defense task force” to facilitate centralized target distribution, the source said.

Solutions realized in the new complex ensure secure suppression of any existing and perspective airborne electronic equipment, making it impossible for the aircrafts and satellites to proceed with their missions.

It uses brand-new algorithms of electronic jamming with expanded combat capabilities and modernized command module design. The complex consists of multiple jamming modules exercising long-range impact on enemy command system with a powerful and complex digital signal.

“We’ve created multichannel information transmission system ensuring simultaneous electronic jamming of various systems,” KRET’s representative said.

Jamming modules serve as elements of a hierarchically-organized multilevel system, which “optimally distributes its energy, band and intellectual resource,” KRET’s press service cited the deputy general director, Igor Nasenkov.

Besides that, all modules are equipped with means of electronic self-defense, because they “they come as top-priority target for enemy’s primary attack,” Nasenkov said.

In November 2015, Nasenkov said that a new upcoming ground-based electronic defense system integrated with air defense system is going to be incorporating antisatellite capabilities.

The new jammer would render enemy precision weapons useless by suppressing guidance systems, including those relying on satellite signals.

“The system is meant to jam enemy aviation, carrier-launched, tactical and strategic, and jam the signals of foreign military satellites,” Yury Maevsky, deputy head of KRET, told TASS also last November.

Maevsky said elements and modules of the upcoming electronic warfare system are going to be deployed at will on various land-based, airborne and naval carriers.