Russia has the capability to jam our smart bombs being used in Ukraine.

 

File photo of JDAM's. Politico/US Navy photo.

Russia has the capability to jam our smart bombs being used in the Ukraine War. Politico. The information was revealed among many other secrets in the recent leak that spread from Discord. The JDAM system converts "dumb" bombs into semi-guided smart bombs and have been issued to Ukrainian fighters. However, many of the bombs failed or did not land where they were aimed. The dud issue has since been corrected, but the bombs still were not landing where they were supposed to land. US forces did not confirm that Russian jamming was responsible for the high failure rate, but the leaked documents did and other sources have seemingly confirmed the failures. 

My Comment:

This is a fairly major revelation that is only really getting attention now. Russia is able to jam our JDAM's which means they could probably jam much of our other weapons that rely on GPS. Given how utterly dependent on GPS technology this means that Russia may have a major advantage over us thanks to their electronic warfare abilities. 

This is a huge deal because it also signals to our actual enemies, like China, that our weapons can be defeated. This means that if a conflict erupts over Taiwan they could possibly hard counter our weapons with the same kind of electronic warfare. Does China have that capability? I don't know. But Russia does and that means they could transfer the ability to China. That's a major advantage for China, one that might even win them any war with us. 

I do think that this leak is legit. Given the utter panic that the Pentagon is in right now and how angry they are I do think that at least some of these leaks are real. And I do think that this one is one of them. The anonymous source from the Politico doesn't mean much but I think if this was false the Pentagon would have actively denied it instead of going the no-comment route. 

I do wonder how they even gathered this data. Ukraine's air force has not been used much, and they don't have much left. Russia's air defenses are very good, just like Ukraine's, so air power has not had much of an impact on this war. Of course Ukraine might be using the same tactics that the Russians do, firing long range while still over their own territory and thus being protected by their own air defenses. Still, they must not have been happy for the few operations they have launched have failed like this. 

I still think that it is hilarious that all this damaging information has come out not because of high minded ideals, political outrage or even desire for money. It was because someone wanted to impress people on Discord on the Ukraine war. And now the whole world knows that Russia can jam our weapons. It's absurd.