Ukraine managed to jam Russia’s “superweapon” by playing a song
If you’re following the Russia’s illegal invasion of Ukraine, you’ll know that Ukraine has been putting up far, far more of a fight than Putin expected. Every once in a while, Putin bloviates about some new superweapon that will wipe out Ukrainian forces and beyond, if necessary.
One alleged threat is the new Kinzhal hypersonic missile. At first blush, it looks like a formidable piece of gear that was deemed “impossible to stop” because it flew so far and fast.
Ukraine, however, would have none of that bullsh*t. It’s knocking the Kh-47M2 Kinzhal ballistic missile out of the sky by jamming it with some music. I’m not entirely how it works, but by directing a song at the missile, it’s tricked into thinking that it’s in Lima, Peru. It gets lost and tries to quickly change direction. But at Mach 5.7, that causes tremendous stress on the an already-stressed airframe. The missile breaks up and crashes.
The site 404 Media explains:
“Kinzhals and other guided munitions navigate by communicating with Russian satellites that are part of the GLONASS system, a GPS-style navigation network. Night Watch uses a jamming system called Lima EW to generate a disruption field that prevents anything in the area from communicating with a satellite. Many traditional jamming systems work by blasting receivers on munitions and aircraft with radio noise. Lima does that, but also sends along a digital signal and spoofs navigation signals. It “hacks” the receiver it’s communicating with to throw it off course.”
“Radio noise” can be a song. Which song or songs are being used is unknown. I can tell you that in the last two weeks, 19 of these things have been intercepted.
