An Israeli Merkava tank manoeuvres towards the southern Gaza Strip border near Khan Yunis. Merkavas equipped with Active Protection Systems and backed by sophisticated electronic warfare and drones have operated against Hamas and Hezbollah without trouble Credit: Atef Safadi/EPA-EFE/Shutterstock
The Strategic Defence Review, which should shape the UK’s military capability for the next decade, is set to drop at last next week. It is critical that the Review incorporates the lessons being learned in the Ukraine war, which is probably the most intense and prolonged “warfighting”-level conflict since WWII. It must drive much of our thinking when it comes to major combat operations in future. The delay to the Review is, I expect, due to the complexity, density and pace of change of modern war fighting, rather than political dithering and confusion amongst the Review team.
The key factor today is the electromagnetic spectrum – he who controls this, controls the battle space and will win the war. The ability to jam the enemy’s signals, and to push your own signals through enemy jamming, confers the ability to operate the most common kinds of drones in any given area. Often a nearby transmission relay – perhaps carried by a “mothership” drone higher above the battlefield – will let drones operate even inside the enemy jamming envelope, as the relay is nearer to the drones than the jammers are and has line of sight to them. In general the Ukrainians have tended to have the upper hand in this electromagnetic struggle, aided at times by harder-to-jam satellite communications such as Elon Musk’s well-known Starlink. But that doesn’t mean they’ve had things all their own way.
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