Thought about posting this in the "
Iranian Military News, Reports, Data, etc." or the "
Russian Military News, Reports, Data, etc." thread, but not sure which thread, if either, would be (more) appropriate.
So will leave it to the moderators to see if there's a need to move this post, as that's their domain, prerogative and problem.
Geran and Shahed drones have ECM capabilities? First time I heard of it.
1. From Jon Norman's verbiage, doubtful he was principally referring to or thinking of Gerans and Shaheds:
It’s, across all cases, not just the heart of the envelope, but the very, very edge cases against, you know, significant counter measures. The preponderance of the shots that, that have been taken recently.
By "
very, very, edge cases," Norman was likely referencing relatively more expensive cruise missiles of the "traditional variety" like the Kh-101 which are manufactured and employed in significantly smaller quantities.
Nevertheless, the total impact and relative sophistication, especially vis-a-vis cost, of such loitering munitions intercepted by the AIM-120
may have further eased Norman's rationalization of his inflated assessment of said Raytheon product.
2. IIRC, the Russians have or had sought to improve the Geran family's survivability against SAMs and presumably AAMs since 2023.
Technically speaking, it should be plausible to integrate an active ECM system analogous to the SP-504 into newer iterations and evolutions of the Geran, as well as their Iranian counterparts:
However, given Ukraine's priorities for its finite interceptor stockpile — on top of the fact that the Geran reportedly costs an order of magnitude less than the AIM-120, and was designed to economically deplete adversarial interceptor magazines — a bit doubtful that the Russians or Iranians will integrate
significant active jamming capabilities or "anything too fancy" into widely manufactured Geran or Shahed variants in the foreseeable future.
3. More broadly speaking, both Geran and Shahed loitering munitions incorporate a host of what most would consider ECM capabilities intended to improve survivability and/or accuracy in contested EMS environments, especially in comparison to legacy weapons designs that may not have accounted for modern(ish) EW threats.
According to ISIS, the
, which it describes as:
Iranian designed electronic warfare system: Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA); seven transceivers, high frequency clock generator, flash memory, three microcontrollers, etc. This module is also identified in other documents as calculating electromagnetic emissions from enemy radio electronic warfare stations and working to suppress their signals while preserving the desired GPS signal. Simultaneously, an inertial guidance system in Sadra ensures the drone remains on its pre-programmed course.
I'd rather just categorize the Nasir as a jamming resistant GNSS receiver, but can't blame ISIS for offering a more substantial description.
More recent iterations of said loitering munition — exploited by Ukrainian military intelligence — incorporate
, as well as
as a redundancy for contested EMS environments.
4. Furthermore, Gerans are deployed in the Ukrainian theater in conjunction with decoys like the Gerbera which
:
No idea how much American taxpayers have contributed to downing such Russian decoys, as well as whatever Iranian analogues that may have been launched in the direction of Israel. However, with the AIM-120 costing $1mm+ a piece and the AIM-9X at a healthy ~$400k USD AIM-9X, we've probably spent a pretty penny.
At the end of the day, the fancier these "adversarial threats" get — as individual systems or as systems of systems — the more defense contractors like RTX will be able to milk and squeeze out of Uncle Sam for requisite counter-weapons.
