On the night of April 5-6, Russian forces conducted the latest in a series of missile and drone strikes against Ukraine, targeting residential and civilian infrastructure in Kyiv, Kharkiv, and five other Ukrainian regions. The electrical grid has been a prime target for many of these Russian strikes. According to the Institute for the Study of War, the Ukrainian Air Force reported that Russian forces launched 17 cruise missiles, 6 ballistic missiles, and 109 Shahed and decoy drones in an attempt to overwhelm Ukrainian air defenses. The Ukrainian Air Force reportedly destroyed 12 cruise missiles, 1 ballistic missile, and 40 Shahed drones, while veering 53 decoy drones off target due to electronic warfare measures.
The Ukrainian air defense system is one of the most sophisticated in the world today. It uses a combination of radars, various air defense missiles and guns, and electronic warfare measures to destroy incoming missiles and drones or veer them off target. One particularly thorny problem is destroying one-way attack drones without using expensive surface-to-air missiles, which are in limited supply. Ukrainian forces are attempting to solve this challenge through a combination of guns for point defense, electronic jamming and spoofing, and, most interestingly, the creation of guided unmanned aerial vehicles to intercept incoming drones.
The first use of an integrated air defense system occurred 85 years ago during the Battle of Britain. The creation of the system that defended the British Isles from German attack was largely the brainchild of Royal Air Force Air Chief Marshal Hugh Dowding, who as head of RAF Fighter Command championed research into and deployment of radar, production of advanced fighters such as the Spitfire and Hurricane, and the creation of a centralized control center at Bentley Priory, a country house on the outskirts of London, to vector fighters to intercept incoming bomber groups.
As the Battle of Britain commenced, the British learned of the German use of the Knickebein(dog-leg) radio beam system, which guided Luftwaffe bombers to their targets. British scientists created electronic countermeasures to jam the beams, foreshadowing the use of electronic measures to veer drones off course in Ukraine today. The give-and-take of scientific measures and countermeasures in the air war continued throughout World War II and indeed continues to this day.
The air war over Ukraine is the continuation of strategic bombing campaigns that began in World War I with German bombing raids over London, and continued with the Battle of Britain in 1940, the Combined Bomber Offensive over Northwest Europe from 1942 to 1945, and the American bombing of the Japanese home islands in the Pacific War. The U.S. Air Force, supported by U.S. Navy and Marine aircraft, also waged strategic bombing campaigns in Korea, Vietnam, and Iraq.
