Ukraine’s security service, SBU, had halted the operations involving the Altius series of UAVs produced by Anduril, which exhibited subpar jamming resistance.
Wall Street Journal reported that SBU, known for its surgical strikes using UAVs and USVs on important assets of the Russian forces, had laid off the Altius tube-launched loitering munitions after consistent connection losses and target misses in the presence of jamming.
SBU abandoned the tube-launched loitering munition that the US Army also intends to use, as early as 2024, according to the report. In addition to this, Reuters reported that some of the Altius loitering munitions crashed due to control system failures during trials at the Eglin Air Base.
Both Russia and Ukraine widely employ jammers of different sizes and purposes in the field, let it be to defeat the navigation or the control links of the UAVs. Thus, SBU specialising in critical strikes requires UAVs with high standards when it comes to jamming resistance.
While Ukraine has received similar systems to the Altius family, like Switchblade, it has brought up a large portfolio of systems and sometimes new concepts (Example: Using USVs as motherships for FPVs to strike shoreline targets).
It can be said that the majority of SBU’s strikes already involve locally-produced systems of different types, which can be adjusted against countermeasures that Russia comes up with more easily compared to foreign-supplied systems, even if they start to lose success rates.
Author: Kaan Azman
Editor: Özgür Ekşi
