I’ll be jammed: electronic warfare in Ukraine

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The Economist. Hello and welcome to the Intelligence from the Economist. I'm your host, Jason Palmer. Every weekday we provide a fresh perspective on the events shaping your world. Elite athletes need their blood to take on as much oxygen as possible. There are plenty of ways to cheat that, like hormones that stimulate red blood cell production or as the current buzz around cycling has it, inhale just a bit of poison. And quite a lot of Britain's politics used to hang on debate and oratory in the close quarters of the House of Commons. But our analysis shows the speeches are getting shorter and in the age of social media, fewer people are around to hear them. First up, though.

Everyone understands by now that drones are absolutely vital for a whole range of things on the modern battlefield. What they might not understand as well is just how fundamental the contest for the electromagnetic spectrum is to make that happen. And that's basically what we call electronic warfare.

Shashank Joshi is our defense editor.

Electronic warfare is about making sure that you can send radio waves to send messages, control drones, but also that you can deny your opponent the use of the same thing, jam their GPS signals, block their pilot communication links to a drone. And that contest for the electromagnetic spectrum can be hugely consequential. So last summer, for instance, Russian drones switched from a higher to a lower frequency. They bamboozled Ukraine's electronic warfare systems, the drones could reach. And Ukraine found over a period of weeks that hundreds of their vehicles were destroyed.

So the principle is clear here, but what does that actually mean in practice?

Well, it's basically a continuous cat and mouse game. So what's happening in practice is that each side is hunting for gaps in the spectrum. Right. If Ukraine jams one frequency, you might have to build a Russian drone with an antenna that can fly and be piloted on a different frequency. Ukraine then has to find that. So this is a continuous hunt for those increasingly rare gaps in the spectrum where signals can still get through. If you look at an electronic map of Ukraine from above, Jason, and you can do this with radio frequency satellites, the whole thing is lit up like a Christmas tree. There is gigantic amounts of jamming going on everywhere.

And the incident last summer that you mentioned where Russia had seemingly found a gap in the spectrum that was useful, is that a suggestion more broadly that Russia is better at this cat and mouse game?

Russia undoubtedly started the war with big advantages in electronic warfare. It invested a lot in this area over the preceding decade. And indeed, it did jam Ukraine's communications initially. But what happened is a couple of things. Ukraine got the Starlink Constellation access to satellite based communications that were much more difficult to jam than radios, for example. And Ukraine's ability to strike Russian positions using precision bombs and drones meant that these big Russian trucks with the jamming equipment had to move back away from the front line, about 10 or 15 kilometers back. So it's become a more even playing field. Russia has caused huge problems for many of Ukraine's American supplied precision guided rockets, that's undoubtedly a problem. But Ukraine has also ramped up its EW capacity. I spoke to one company that said they were making about 100 devices at the beginning of 2022, and now they're making about 5,000 or so a year.

So the warfare as you describe it really is just two sides of a conflict chasing each other around the electromagnetic spectrum. There's not a sort of innovation in the way this is being done.

Well, a basic jammer is a metal box with some aerials which makes electromagnetic noise at the target frequencies. That would be familiar to some people looking at this from World War II. There's nothing dramatically new about that, but there is also a definite shift in the way this is done. Right. So right now you have a lot of these Ukrainian vehicles going around. They look like porcupines. They have all these antennae protect from different frequencies because you need a different box, a different antenna for each frequency a Russian drone may be operating on. What's increasingly happening is that like with many things in the military world, it's being done via the software, the code rather than the hardware. So the same little box can have code inside it, something called a software defined radio that can generate frequencies of all different kinds so it can protect against a Russian drone operating at 700 MHz and one operating at 400 MHz. And you, you can streamline all of this.

But if innovation is happening as fast as you say, sooner or later the entire spectrum is covered. And is there space left to hide?

There is space left to hide because you're not just jamming all the time. If you jam all the time, you're just spewing out all these radio waves that say, hey, I'm a big jammer. Please come and find me and blow me up. So the cat and mouse game is not just hunting for the right frequency. It's also knowing when you should switch on in the first place. And that's when spectrum analyzers come in, which is the things that say, I'm not sure where the drone is. Let me turn this on. Work out where the Russian drone is, what frequency it's flying on, and then that tells me where to point my jam at, what frequency it needs to use. So this is a multifaceted orchestra of technologies keeping you alive. The question is, why does any of this matter to anybody else? Isn't it all quite arcane and technical? And the answer is that this is, as in so many other things in Ukraine, a warning for the rest of us. This is the kind of war we would have to fight. If we were fighting Russia or China, it would be a war that involved electronic warfare of a very intense and difficult kind. NATO has fantastic electronic warfare capabilities in the air. It has great fighter jets and things with jammers on them. It has some very clever capabilities. It can deliver cyber payloads via electronic attack in unbelievably sophisticated ways. But at the end of the day, is it ready for a conflict in which every soldier in a trench, on the front line, every platoon needs to have, have some kind of electronic warfare capability, needs to be able to stave off swarms of drones coming his or her way, needs to be able to be proficient with the technical engineering aspects of frequencies and the competition finding any gap in those frequencies to get your drone in the air or blast the Russian drone out of the air? And I think right now we are still well behind in that effort.

Shashank, thanks very Much for your time.

Thank you, Jason.

Is he gonna crash?

Get back on board, Restwick the chain.

And bring home the victory here. You've gotta pray for this.

Surely everybody.

Competitive cycling has to rank as one of humanity's most physically demanding sports. In this year's Tour de France, riders will race 3,000km across three weeks, climbing in total more than 50km in altitude. So it's sort of unsurprising that the sport has a notorious history of doping scandals as riders have looked for any edge in strength or endurance.

Lance Armstrong will be stripped of his Tour de France titles and banned from cycling for life after the sport.

Spain's Alberto Contador has been given a two year ban for failing a dope test during the 2010 Tour de France, ruling him out of this year's competition and the Olympic Games.

After much soul searching, cycling is cleaner than it used to be. But rumors and insinuations persist. One of the latest allegations is about the judicious use of a poison.

Most people know carbon monoxide is a deadly gas which kills around 30,000 people every year.

Tim Cross is a senior science writer for the Economist.

It also seems that in small doses, it might be a doping drug that can give athletes an advantage. And in fact, the UCI, which, which is the international governing body of professional cycling, is so worried about this that it's just banned its inhalation by riders.

So wait a minute, talk me through this. For a start, how is it that something that most people know as a poison can be a performance booster?

So it comes back to that medical phrase that you sometimes hear where it's the dose that makes the poison. It all depends how much carbon monoxide you inhale. So the reason that carbon monoxide is poisonous is to do with the way it interacts with something called haemoglobin. And this is a molecule that in red blood cells, and its job is to bind with oxygen in the lungs so that the red blood cells can carry the oxygen all around your body. The thing with carbon monoxide is it binds to hemoglobin even more strongly than the oxygen does. So it forces the oxygen out almost. If you inhale some, you end up with some proportion of your red blood cells carting carbon monoxide around your body instead of oxygen. And if that proportion is high enough, your tissues can't get enough oxygen and effectively you asphyxiate. But if you inhale a bit less than that, it's not fatal. It just makes you mildly hypoxic. You have a sort of system wide Small oxygen shortage. And that's something that's potentially of interest to endurance athletes, because if you have an oxygen shortage for long enough, your body will start to try and compensate. And one of the main ways it does that is it stimulates your bone marrow to produce more red blood cells, because the body thinks, hang on, I'm not getting enough oxygen here. We need some more carrying capacity. Let's make some more red blood cells. Once you have those extra red blood cells, that means your blood has a higher capacity to ferry oxygen to your muscles. So you put the carbon monoxide pipe down, you wait a few hours, and suddenly your athletic performance is greater than it was before.

I mean, to a degree, this is the same kind of mechanism as training at altitude to get your body used to working with less oxygen.

Biochemically, it's almost exactly the same. The sort of chemical changes that happen when you're at altitude are the same as the ones that happen when you inhale carbon monoxide. It's just that the cause of the oxygen shortage is different. So when you're on a mountain, there's just less air, there's fewer oxygen molecules floating around. When you're inhaling carbon monoxide, your body can't make use of the oxygen that's there, if you like. And this kind of attempt to boost the power of your blood, as it were, has been a focus of doping in cycling for a long time. So the best known doping drug in cycling is epo. EPO is the chemical that your body makes to signal to your bone marrow that, hey, it's time to make some more red blood cells. So if you take artificial epo, if you just inject it directly into you, then the same thing will happen.

And so the idea here is that people are essentially using just the right dose of carbon monoxide to effectively to dope without using EPO without going to altitude.

Well, that's what's been alleged, and that's what I think the UCI is worried about. I mean, we should say that officially, the UCI have banned it on health grounds rather than on doping grounds. But they have also asked the World Anti Doping Agency, wada, whose rules they follow, to decide whether deliberately inhaling lots of carbon monoxide should count as doping. And if WADA says it does, then I suspect you'll see the reason for the ban change. But all this came out of a report that was published last year by cycling news website called Escape Collective, which cited a whole bunch of anonymous sources to say that some pro cycling teams were using this to try and enhance the performance of their athletes, although they didn't name any names.

I suppose the question here is why carbon monoxide, though, when things like altitude training and, if you dare, EPO would do the same sort of thing?

Well, I guess there are two reasons. One is there is some scientific evidence to suggest it works. So there's been a couple of studies, one which found if you take five small doses a day for three weeks, you could see roughly a 5% increase in haemoglobin and then about a 3% increase in something called VO2 max, which is a measurement of how much oxygen your body can use at sort of maximal effort. And it's something that every sort of endurance athlete tries really hard to maximize. And then another study that found that combining carbon monoxide with altitude training seemed to be more beneficial than just altitude training by itself. It has other advantages as well. One is it's cleared from your body pretty quickly, like within a few hours. Whereas if you take EPO or anabolic steroids, which are another popular class of doping drugs, some of them can be detected weeks or even months later. If it is detected in your blood somehow, there's loads of ways you could explain it away. You could say, oh, you know, the driver of the team bus left the engine idling in the garage this morning, or something like that. This stuff is ubiquitous. But maybe the biggest advantage is that carbon monoxide is already widely used by pro sports teams for completely legitimate reasons. Giving your athletes a little puff of carbon monoxide is the gold standard medical way of measuring how much haemoglobin is in their blood. So if the equipment to do this is kind of ubiquitous, it makes it very easy for you to just move the needle from just monitoring to outright performance enhancement.

So, as somebody who watches this doping stuff a lot, are we already seeing an improvement to performance that might be attributable to that? Are we waiting for that to happen? Do we expect that to happen?

Well, that's the $64 million question. If you talk to the cycling aficionados, they'll say that speeds at some of the big races are really high now and back to levels that cause people to look at them a bit dubiously. But that doesn't necessarily mean doping is the reason. I mean, bikes get better all the time, training gets better all the time. In fact, there's a lot of research being done just in the last few years on what's the best way to get as many calories as you possibly can down a Tour de France cyclist in the course of a six hour road stage because that turns out to be a very non trivial problem. So you know, there are other explanations for this, but I think given the history of doping in cycling, people are always going to look at this with a skeptical eye.

Tim, thanks very much for your time.

Thanks Jason.

In Britain we take politics very seriously. There are heavy restrictions on the editing and alteration of pictures and sound recorded in the House of Commons. So if the music in this stops and then starts and sounds a little bit odd, that's why. The problem is the post Its Catherine.

Nixie is a culture correspondent for the Economist.

Many criticisms have been made of Prime Minister's questions. It has been called boorish, childish and rude. Tony Blair thought it unforgiving. David Cameron called it Punch and Judy Politics, it can be cruel. It was at PMQ's that Boris Johnson called Sir Keir Starmer great pointless human bollard.

Mr. Speaker, that's what he is. And Captain Crasheroonies snooze fest.

But PMQ's is changing. Captain Krashiruni does not bring insults to PMQs. He does not bring unruliness. Instead he brings a nice neat a4 file flagged with post it notes and then he opens it and says things.

Like clean energy is at the heart of this mission driven government.

Zakir is not boorish or childish or rude or indeed interesting, but he does have a splendid collection of stationery. And this actually is also a problem because there is a worry in the corridors of power in Britain not just that our finest hour is over, not just that the cradle to grave NHS is in its own grave. Not just that even the white heat of AI technology can't save us. But there is a worry that politicians can't even articulate our own inadequacy, that phrases such as finest hour, which was Winston Churchill, or the white heat of technology, which was Harold Wilson, and even the corridors of power, which was the novelist C.P. snow, are no longer being coined. There is a very deep seated fear in Britain that the day of oratory is passing. This might sound trivial, it is not. Britain has long prided it itself on its oratory. Its whole politics is shaped by competitive debate. The whole week is defined by that joust. PMQ's only lasts for half an hour in total, but Margaret Thatcher, it is said, spent almost eight hours preparing for it. But what the Honourable Member is saying is that he would rather the poor were poorer, provided the rich were less rich. Debate also defines who becomes a politician. Look at a list of former presidents of the Oxford Union, a debating society, and it's a who's who of British politics. Everyone is on it. William haig, Michael Gove, Mr. Johnson. From the Victorian era onwards, to be able to debate an issue became seen as the mark of a gentleman. So students in Eton, Oxford and Cambridge stood at ballot boxes to debate the issues of the day. The titles of those debates offer an index of each era's anxieties. So in early 20th century, Oxford students considered such pressing topics as pacifism. This House will under no circumstances fight for its king and its country. As well as the rise of socialism, this House deplores it. And delicate questions of feminism, angel or idiot. These debates might sound absurd and anachronistic, but they're also excellent preparation for Western Westminster, because according to the rules of university debating, points aren't awarded for factual knowledge and they're not deducted for ignorance. Instead, victory comes just as in politics with a vote. So the smoothest talkers and the people with the best jokes win. It is a great training ground for Westminster, or at any rate, it used to be. Westminster's changing. Go to the press gallery now and you can sit close enough to hear the PM turn the pages with those. Post it. But what you won't be able to hear, probably, are long speeches. If you look at a century of parliamentary speeches, you will find that a striking pattern emerges. In 1938, the average speech in Parliament was almost 1,000 words long. In 1965, James Callaghan delivered a budget speech that was almost 19,000 words long, which is really more a novella than a speech. Until 1970, the average was still almost 900 words, but then they start to shrink dramatically. So after 2015, when video functionality appears on Twitter, last year the average was 460. More A tweet than a novella. To understand why this is happening, just go to the Parliamentary press gallery. But don't look at the Prime Minister below you. Instead, turn around and look at the press gallery behind you. It will, except in BNQ's, be almost entirely empty. Because the real problem with Parliament is not that people can't speak, it's that nobody's listening to them. The benches of the House of Commons have become a place to pose for pics for Twitter, rather than a place to pose hard questions to MPs. Debating is odd, but Britain should be wary of celebrating. Although it's also worth remembering that the death of oratory is often exaggerated. The MP who declared that the day of oratory is passing was a young Winston Churchill.

We shall fight on the beaches. We shall fight on the landing grounds. We shall fight in the fields and in the streets. We shall fight in the hills. We shall never surrender.

And if which I do not for a moment believe.

This island.

That's all for this episode of the Intelligence. Let us know what you think of the show. You can get in touch@podcastseconomist.com we'll see you back here tomorrow.

Sam.