The electronic warfare fight along Ukraine’s front line in 2024 is no longer an auxiliary effort. It is central to everyday survivability on both sides. What we see on the ground are two parallel trends. First, Ukraine has moved from improvised, ad hoc jammers to coordinated, networked interference architectures deployed where they matter most. Second, adversaries have responded by hardening navigation and communications hardware with multi element CRPA arrays and redundant guidance. The result is a rapid, iterative cat and mouse contest in jamming, spoofing, and countermeasures.
At the tactical level Ukraine’s approach emphasizes distributed, low-footprint jammers and scalable sensor-to-effector links. Small, battery powered units and man portable rifles that attack FPV control and video channels are now in widespread frontline use to break the operator link that guides most low cost loitering munitions and FPV attack drones. Those devices are effective because they exploit a simple fact: the radio link between pilot and drone is fragile and narrowband, so a properly aimed jammer can sever command and control long before kinetic systems can react. The same approach scales up. Ukrainian companies and field teams have talked about creating dense detection and jamming grids that hand off targets between nodes rather than relying on single large emitters.
One of the most visible innovations is the move toward coordinated antidrone networks. Ukrainian industry is prototyping and fielding systems that combine wide area detection with localised jammers that can be cued and managed from a safer rear position. The architecture is simple conceptually: distributed ESM sensors detect and classify drone control and telemetry emissions, a command layer performs prioritization, and local jammers execute targeted suppression on the offending links. This reduces collateral disruption to friendly systems and lets defenders concentrate effects on the highest risk threats. The network idea also enables economies of scale: many cheaper jammers working in concert can cover the same frontage an expensive single system would.
Complementing jamming density are sophisticated spoofing capabilities intended to defeat GNSS dependent weapons. Ukrainian leadership publicly referenced a nationwide capability that can replace or falsify the satellite navigation field in a contested area. Where a jammer simply removes a satellite signal, a coordinated spoof can feed false position data that accumulates small errors over time and causes loitering munitions or guided kits to miss their aim points. In practice this requires precise timing, frequency control, and careful management of civilian impacts, but on the battlefield it is a decisive tool when applied selectively against weapons that do not carry robust inertial or terrain reference backup.
Russia’s straightforward counter to this pressure has been navigation hardening. Controlled reception pattern antennas or CRPAs, sold under names like Kometa or Kometa-M in open reporting, use multiple antenna elements and adaptive combining to null jammers and pull weak satellite signals out of a noisy environment. In simple terms each additional antenna element buys resistance to an additional localized jammer source. Open source observers documented an iterative increase in element counts on recovered navigation modules in 2023 and into 2024. The practical implication is that Ukrainian teams must either concentrate more jamming sources in the engagement area, employ spoofing to defeat the navigation stack, or force the weapon into environments where inertial drift grows and accuracy degrades.
That dynamic drives the operational tradeoffs you see on the ground. A single high quality CRPA equipped glide bomb or drone may shrug off a lone jammer, but it is vulnerable to a coordinated footprint of several jammers or to deliberate spoofing uplinks timed across the weapon’s flight. Conversely, building and deploying dense jammer coverage costs manpower, logistics, and spectrum management. Ukraine’s solution in 2024 has been pragmatic: lean on swarms of cheap, well placed emitters for the tactical belt while investing in sensor-jammer networks to protect key territory and supply nodes.
There are important limitations and risks. Broad GNSS suppression or unsophisticated wideband jamming can degrade civilian navigation and friendly systems at scale. Spoofing requires careful legal and policy consideration because of potential collateral effects outside the immediate battlefield. And the escalation cycle is real. As adversaries add antenna elements, diversify guidance, or move to wire or optical links for critical missions, jamming alone loses some effectiveness. That means EW must be part of a layered defense combining passive signatures reduction, kinetic interceptors, and active sensing.
Operational takeaways for engineers and field units: focus on integration, not just power. Detection-first architectures that enable cueing reduce wasted emissions. Prioritize modular jammers that can be reprogrammed to new waveforms quickly. Where possible, combine narrowband protocol attacks on control and video channels with higher level GNSS spoofing to produce both immediate and cumulative target degradation. Finally, measure effects in the field and iterate. The technical arms race in Ukraine is fast moving and tactical feedback will beat theoretical perfection every time.