US intelligence officials have discovered that the flurry of ballistic missiles fired by Russia into Ukraine contains a surprise: decoys that fool air defense radars and heat-seeking missiles.
Each of these devices is about a foot long, shaped like a dart, and is white with an orange tail, according to a US intelligence official. They are fired by Iskander-M short-range ballistic missiles, which Russia launches from mobile launchers across the border when the missile detects it is being targeted by air defense systems, the official said.
Each of them is electronically equipped and emits radio signals to suppress or deceive enemy radars trying to locate the Iskander-M, and contains a heat source to attract incoming missiles. The official, not authorized to speak publicly about intelligence matters, described the devices on condition of anonymity.
The use of decoys may help explain why Ukrainian air defenses had a hard time intercepting Russian Iskander missiles.
Powered by a solid rocket engine, the Iskander can hit targets over 200 miles away, according to US government documents. Each mobile launcher can fire two Iskanders before it needs to be reloaded.
Two weeks ago, photos of dart-like ammunition began to circulate on social media. They baffled open source intelligence experts and analysts, many of whom got it wrong for cluster bombs depending on their size and shape.
Richard Stevens, who served 22 years in the British Army as an explosive ordnance disposal soldier and then spent 10 years as a civilian explosives specialist in southern Iraq, Africa and elsewhere, said he was exposed to “a lot of exposure to the Chinese and Russians.” ammo, but I’ve never seen it.”
Mr Stevens posted pictures of the munitions on a site for military and civilian bomb disposal experts he started in 2011 and found that no one seemed to have seen the mysterious munitions before.
“The fact that Russia is using a weapon of this size, the Iskander-M, and I think there are quite a few of them, is why we are seeing this now,” Mr Stevens added. “It’s just that in the post-conflict period over the past 10-15 years, no one has had the opportunity to see it.”
The devices are similar to Cold War-era decoys called “penetration devices” that have accompanied nuclear warheads since the 1970s and were designed to evade anti-missile systems and allow individual warheads to reach their targets, an intelligence official said. The inclusion of these devices in weapons such as the Iskander-M with conventional warheads has not previously been documented in military arsenals.
Updated
March 14, 2022 6:58 pm ET
“The minute people came up with missiles, people started trying to shoot them down, and the minute people started trying to shoot them down, people started thinking about means of penetration,” Geoffrey Lewis, professor of nonproliferation at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies. in Monterey, California, said in an interview. “But we never see them because they are very secret – if you know how they work, you can counteract them.”
The use of decoys could indicate a certain level of carelessness or urgency on the part of the Russian military leadership, Mr. Lewis said, given Russia knows they will inevitably be collected and studied by Western intelligence services so that NATO air defenses can be programmed to kill. . Iskander’s opposition.
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American journalist killed. Brent Renault, an award-winning American filmmaker and journalist who drew attention to human suffering, was fatally shot while reporting in a Kyiv suburb. Mr. Renault, 50, has contributed to The New York Times in previous years, most recently in 2015.
And it is extremely unlikely, he said, that the version of the Iskander that Russia has sold to other countries will contain these decoys.
“It tells me that the Russians place a certain value on keeping this technology close to home and that this war is important enough for them to abandon it,” Mr. Lewis said. “They dig deep and maybe they don’t care anymore, but I would care if I were them.”
“I think there are some very excited people in the US intelligence community right now,” he added.
William J. Broad contributed reporting.