Air traps: the United States supplied Ukraine with emitters of decoys and threats

Alexander Sychev

In the United States, these emitters are used to train military pilots. JTE, like a mockingbird, imitates the signals of radar stations, electronic warfare equipment, anti-aircraft artillery radars, homing surface-to-air missiles used by the armed forces of various countries and, above all, the most likely opponents of the United States - Russia and China.

The Pentagon signed its first large, $450 million contract for the supply of emitters with Northrop Grumman in 2018. Further purchases followed. Currently, according to Northrop Grumman, 28 JTE systems are in service with US and foreign armed forces. In the United States, they were deployed in stationary or mobile versions at training grounds in Alaska, Guam, in the states of Louisiana, Washington and Nevada.

In Ukraine, they decided to test these training systems as setters of multiple false targets and threats in order to deceive Russian aviation pilots, distract them from real targets or force them to make unnecessary maneuvers, evading non-existent attacks by Ukrainian anti-aircraft missile systems.

The JTE is an installation consisting of two subsystems: a Threat Emitter Unit (TEU) and a Control Unit (C2U). The whole system can be placed on trailers, which makes it quite mobile.

Threat Emitter Pack - A collection of antennas and other emitters that can simulate various types of radar, electronic warfare, and other threats. When operating at full effective radiated power, each TEU is capable of simultaneously reproducing six types of electromagnetic signals. This makes it possible to simulate large integrated air defense networks with multiple threat levels.

Each C2U control unit can simultaneously control 12 TEUs.

JTEs linked to the Air Combat Maneuvering Instrumentation (ACMI) system can simulate both long range search and short range fire control radars. There is also a broadband kit, known as WTEU, which is spoofed as electronic warfare.

The collection of electromagnetic radiation has been collected by American specialists for a long time. Some of them were obtained by buying air defense systems, some by espionage methods. And in 2018, the US Army simply took away from Ukraine the 36D6M1-1 radar, which is used in some versions of the Soviet-made S-300 anti-aircraft missile system. Features of the electromagnetic signal of this radar are also included in the collection, and now the JTE is able to imitate the S-300.

The system created by an American company not only “clutters up the air”, but is also capable of responding to the actions of attacking aircraft crews, repeating the tactics and tricks of the enemy: change the location or features of the signal, temporarily turn off the radiation ... Operators can also program the TEU for autonomous operation, add new threat profiles. The system has the ability to record high-resolution video and electronic countermeasure signals used by attacking aircraft to replenish its archive.