WASHINGTON (NYTIMES) – American intelligence officers have found that the barrage of ballistic missiles Russia has fired into Ukraine comprise a shock: decoys that trick air defence radars and idiot heat-seeking missiles.
The units are every about 30cm lengthy, formed like a dart and white with an orange tail, in accordance with an American intelligence official. They are launched by the Iskander-M short-range ballistic missiles that Russia is firing from cell launchers throughout the border, the official mentioned, when the missile senses that it has been focused by air defence methods.
Each is full of electronics and produces radio alerts to jam or spoof enemy radars making an attempt to find the Iskander-M, and incorporates a warmth supply to draw incoming missiles. The official, who was not authorised to talk publicly about intelligence issues, described the units on the situation of anonymity.
The use of the decoys could assist clarify why Ukrainian air defence weapons have had problem intercepting Russia’s Iskander missiles.
Powered by a solid-fuel rocket motor, the Iskander can attain targets greater than 320km away, in accordance with United States authorities paperwork. Each cell launcher can fireplace two Iskanders earlier than it have to be reloaded.
Photographs of the dart-shaped munitions started circulating on social media two weeks in the past. They had stumped specialists and open-source intelligence analysts – lots of whom mistook them for bomblets from cluster weapons based mostly on their measurement and form.
Mr Richard Stevens, who spent 22 years within the British Army as an explosive ordnance disposal soldier and later labored as a civilian bomb technician for 10 years in southern Iraq, Africa and different areas, mentioned he had been uncovered “to plenty of Chinese and Russian munitions, but I had never seen this”. Mr Stevens posted pictures of the munitions to a web site for army and civilian bomb disposal specialists that he began in 2011, and located that nobody else appeared to have seen these thriller munitions earlier than both.
“That Russia is using that size of weapon – the Iskander-M – and quite a few of them I believe, that’s why we’re seeing this now,” Mr Stevens mentioned. “It’s just that, post-conflict in the past 10 to 15 years, no one has had the opportunity to see this.”
The units are just like Cold War decoys referred to as “penetration aids”, the intelligence official mentioned, which have accompanied nuclear warheads for the reason that Nineteen Seventies and had been designed to evade anti-missile methods and permit particular person warheads to succeed in their targets. The incorporation of the units into weapons such because the Iskander-M which have typical warheads has not been beforehand documented in army arsenals.
“The minute people came up with missiles, people started trying to shoot them down, and the minute people started trying to shoot them down, people started thinking about penetration aids,” mentioned Dr Jeffrey Lewis, a professor of non-proliferation on the Middlebury Institute of International Studies in Monterey, California. “But we never see them because they’re highly secret – if you know how they work, you can counteract them.”
The use of the decoys could level to some degree of carelessness or urgency by Russian army management, Dr Lewis mentioned, provided that Russia is aware of they may inevitably be collected and studied by Western intelligence companies in order that North Atlantic Treaty Organisation air defences will be programmed to defeat the Iskander’s countermeasures.
And it’s extremely unlikely, he mentioned, that the model of the Iskander that Russia has offered to different nations would comprise these decoys.
“That suggests to me that the Russians place some value on keeping that technology close to home and that this war is important enough to them to give that up,” Dr Lewis mentioned. “They’re digging deep, and possibly they now not care, however I might care if I had been them.
“I think that there are some very excited people in the US intelligence community right now.”
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