On April 15, 1904, two days after the tragic death of Admiral Makarov, the Japanese fleet began shelling Port Arthur. However, this attack, later dubbed "third flip-fire", was unsuccessful. The reason for the failure is revealed in the official report of the interim commander of the Pacific Fleet, Rear Admiral Ukhtomsky. He wrote: “At 9 o'clock. 11 minutes In the morning, the enemy armored cruisers "Nishin" and "Kasuga", maneuvering south-south-west from the Liaoteshan lighthouse, began flip fire at the forts and the inner roadstead. From the very beginning of the firing, two enemy cruisers, choosing positions against the passage of the Liaoteshan Cape, outside the fortress's shots, began to telegraph why the battleship Pobeda and the Golden Mountain stations immediately began to interrupt the enemy telegrams with a big spark, believing that these cruisers were informing the shooting battleships of the hit their shells. The enemy fired 208 large-caliber shells. There were no hits in the courts. " This was the first officially recorded fact of the use of electronic warfare in hostilities.
Weak link
Modern electronic warfare, of course, has gone far from the "big spark", but the main principle underlying it remains the same. Any organized area of human activity provides for a hierarchy, be it a factory, a store, and even more so an army - in any enterprise there is a "brain", that is, a control system. At the same time, the competition is reduced to a competition of control systems - information confrontation. Indeed, today the main commodity on the market is not oil, not gold, but information. Depriving a competitor of the "brain" can bring victory. Therefore, it is the command and control system that the military strives to protect in the first place: they bury it in the ground, build echeloned headquarters defense systems, etc.
But, as you know, the strength of a chain is determined by its weakest link. Control commands must somehow be transmitted from the "brain" to the performers. “The most vulnerable link on the battlefield is the communications system,” explains Andrei Mikhailovich Smirnov, a cycle teacher at the Interspecies Center for the Training and Combat Use of Electronic Warfare Troops in Tambov. - If you disable it, the commands from the control system will not pass to the performers. This is what the electronic warfare is doing."
From intelligence to suppression
But in order to disable the communication system, it must be detected. Therefore, the very first task of electronic warfare is technical reconnaissance, which studies the battlefield using all available technical means. This makes it possible to identify radio-electronic objects that can be suppressed - communication systems or sensors.
Not only communication
Training class of the Inter-Service Center of Electronic Warfare Troops
The electronic warfare vehicle "Rtut-BM" (center) is designed to fight not with communication lines, but with guided weapons and ammunition with radio fuses. In automatic mode, the system detects the ammunition and determines the operating frequency of its radio fuse, after which it puts a high-power jammer The Infauna electronic warfare complex (right) protects the equipment on the march, suppressing the communication and radio control lines of explosive devices
Suppression of electronic objects is the creation of a noise signal at the input of the receiver, which is larger than the useful signal.“People of the older generation probably still remember the jamming of foreign short-wave radio stations in the USSR, such as the Voice of America, by transmitting a powerful noise signal. This is just a typical example of radio suppression, - says Andrei Mikhailovich. - The installation of passive interference also belongs to electronic warfare, for example, the release of foil clouds from aircraft to interfere with radar signals or the creation of false targets using corner reflectors. The sphere of EW interests includes not only radio, but also the optical range - for example, laser illumination of optoelectronic sensors of guidance systems, and even other physical fields, such as hydroacoustic suppression of submarine sonars”.
However, it is important not only to suppress the enemy's communication systems, but also to prevent the suppression of their own systems. Therefore, the competence of electronic warfare includes electronic protection of its systems. This is a set of technical measures, which include the installation of arresters and systems for blocking the receiving paths for the time of exposure to interference, protection from an electromagnetic pulse (including a nuclear explosion), shielding, the use of packet transmission, as well as organizational measures such as operating at minimum power and the shortest possible time on air. In addition, electronic warfare also counteracts enemy technical reconnaissance, using radio camouflage and various cunning types of signal coding that make it difficult to detect (see the sidebar "Invisible Signals").
Jammers
“The short-wave“enemy voices”were analog signals with amplitude modulation at known frequencies, so it was not so difficult to drown them out,” explains Andrey Mikhailovich. - But even under such seemingly greenhouse conditions, in the presence of a good receiver, listening to forbidden transmissions was quite realistic due to the peculiarities of the propagation of short-wave signals and the limited power of the transmitters. For analog signals, the noise level should be six to ten times the signal level, since the human ear and brain are extremely selective and allow even noisy signal to be disassembled. With modern coding methods, such as frequency hopping, the task is more complicated: if you use white noise, the receiver of the hopping frequency hopper simply will not "notice" such a signal. Therefore, the noise signal should be as similar as possible to the "useful" signal (but five to six times more powerful). And they are different in different communication systems, and one of the tasks of radio intelligence is just the analysis of the type of enemy signals. In terrestrial systems, DSSS or frequency hopping signals are commonly used, so a frequency modulated (FM) signal with a chaotic pulse train is most often used as a universal interference. Aviation uses amplitude modulated (AM) signals because FM from a fast moving transmitter will be affected by the Doppler effect. To suppress airborne radars, impulse noise is also used, similar to the signals of guidance systems. In addition, you need to use a directional signal: this gives a significant gain in power (several times). In some cases, suppression is quite problematic - say, in the case of space or radio relay communications, where very narrow radiation patterns are used.
One should not think that electronic warfare is jamming "everything" - that would be very ineffective from an energy point of view. “The power of the noise signal is limited, and if we distribute it over the entire spectrum, then this will not affect the operation of a modern communication system operating with frequency hopping signals,” says Anatoly Mikhailovich Balyukov, head of the testing and methodological department of the Interspecies Center for the Training and Combat Use of Electronic Warfare Troops. - Our task is to detect, analyze the signal and literally “point” it suppression - precisely on those channels between which it “jumps”, and not on any more. Therefore, the widespread opinion that no communication will work during the operation of the electronic warfare system is nothing more than a delusion. Only those systems that need to be suppressed will not work."
War of the future
In the 1990s, the military around the world started talking about a new concept of warfare - network-centric warfare. Its practical implementation has become possible due to the rapid development of information technology. “Network-centric warfare is based on the creation of a special communication network that unites all units on the battlefield. More precisely, in the battle space, since the elements of such a network are also global satellite constellations, - explains Anatoly Mikhailovich Balyukov. - The United States has made a serious bet on network-centric warfare and has been actively testing its elements in local wars since the mid-1990s - from reconnaissance and strike UAVs to field terminals for each soldier receiving data from a single network.
This approach, of course, allows for much higher combat effectiveness at the expense of significantly reducing Boyd's loop time. Now we are talking not about days, not about hours or even minutes, but literally about real time - and even about the frequency of individual loop stages in tens of hertz. Sounds impressive, but … all these characteristics are provided by communication systems. It is enough to deteriorate the characteristics of communication systems, at least partially suppressing them, and the frequencies of the Boyd loop will decrease, which (all other things being equal) will lead to defeat. Thus, the whole concept of network-centric warfare is tied to communication systems. Without communication, coordination between the elements of the network is partially or completely disrupted: there is no navigation, there is no identification of "friend or foe", there are no marks on the location of troops, subunits become "blind", automated fire control systems do not receive signals from guidance systems, but use many types of modern weapons in manual mode is not possible. Therefore, in a network-centric war, it is the electronic warfare that will play one of the leading roles, recapturing the air from the enemy."
Big ear
Electronic warfare methods are actively used not only in the electromagnetic range (radio and optical), but also in acoustics. This is not only anti-submarine warfare (jamming and false targets), but the detection of artillery batteries and helicopters by an infrasonic trail that spreads far in the atmosphere.
Invisible signals
Amplitude (AM) and frequency (FM) modulation is the basis of analog communication, however, they are not very noise-immune and therefore can be easily suppressed using modern electronic warfare equipment.
Scheme of pseudo-random tuning of the operating frequency (PFC)
Boyd's loop
John Boyd began his career as a US Air Force pilot in 1944, and at the start of the Korean War he became an instructor and earned the nickname "The Forty Second Boyd" because no cadet could hold out against him in a mock battle longer than that.
