Armada recently examined Russia’s P-324 Smalta airborne electronic attack system. In this article we look at its Rychag-AV successor.
Last month Armada launched its new ‘Beating the System’ article series profiling electronic warfare and military communications systems. Our focus is to demystify materiel used by United States and allied near-peer adversaries. The series commenced with an examination of the P-324 Smalta airborne jamming system believed to be in service with Russian Aerospace Forces (RASF). As we mentioned in our previous article, despite its age, Smalta appears to have supported Russia’s ongoing war in Ukraine. Nonetheless, it is being replaced by the Rychag-AV airborne jamming system.
Concept of operations
Like the Smalta jammer family, the Rychag-AV architecture is deployed onboard dedicated Mi-8 (North Atlantic Treaty Organisation reporting name ‘Hip’) medium-lift helicopters flown by the RASF. Specifically, the system outfits Mi-8MTPR-1 rotorcraft. The Rychag-AV is believed to have entered Russian Aerospace Forces’ service from 2016. Much like the erstwhile Smalta system, its replacement is designed to detect, locate and identify, henceforth known as process, and jam ground-based air surveillance and fire control/ground-controlled interception radars. These radars are routinely used to support tactical and operational Ground-Based Air Defences (GBAD) protecting the hostile land manoeuvre force.
Russian military doctrine places a significant emphasis on employing airborne troops delivered by helicopter and/or fixed wing aircraft to support a desant, as vertical envelopment operations are known in anglicised Russian. The importance of airborne operations is reflected in the fact that Russia’s airborne troops are an independent service. In wartime, Mi-8MPTR-1s would fly either with, or ahead of a desant to jam radars and thus inhibit GBAD that could threaten either the operation or fixed and/or rotary wing aircraft providing Close Air Support and Battlefield Interdiction (CAS/BI) assistance.
Official Russian language documents seen by Armada state that the Rychag-AV attacks radars transmitting in frequencies of 5.1 gigahertz/GHz to 10.95GHz. This waveband encompasses C-band (5.25GHz to 5.925GHz) and X-band (8.5GHz to 10.68GHz) radar signals. The jammer produces up to 105 Watts (50.21 decibels-per-milliwatt) of effective radiated power. Jamming signals are transmitted from active electronically scanned arrays mounted on the port and starboard side of the helicopter’s fuselage enabling Rychag-AV to process and jam simultaneous radar threats. Alongside jamming, Rychag-AV performs radar spoofing enabled by the system’s digital radio frequency memory.
History
According to an excellent article by The War Zone, 18 Mi-8MTPR-1s were ordered by Russia’s Ministry of Defence (MOD) in 2013 with the first three examples entering service in 2015. As of 2022, around 20 of the helicopters were believed to be in service with the RASF. This complement may have equated to an average of four in each of Russia’s five military districts. The first combat deployment of the Rychag-AV was thought to include a single Mi-8MPTR-1 sent to Syria in 2016 to support Russia’s intervention in the former’s civil war. Russia had started deploying forces to the war-torn Mediterranean country one year earlier.
Some Russian media reports claim the system helped to significantly degrade the effectiveness of a United States Navy Raytheon BGM-109 Tomahawk series surface-to-surface missile strike. On 7th April 2017, the US performed missile strikes against the Syrian government’s Shayrat airbase in the west of the country. The attack was mounted in retaliation for a Syrian government chemical weapons attack three days earlier. Russian claims appear to be inaccurate: 59 BGM-109s were launched according to reports, with 44 aimpoints being struck, some of which were hit several times, according to independent open-source analysis. It is difficult to see how the Rychag-AV system could have jammed the missiles performing the strikes. Open sources state that these weapons do not depend on C-band or X-band radar and/or radio navigation systems for guidance.
Status
The War Zone article continued that at least one Mi-8MT helicopter equipped with Rychag-AV had been acquired by the Vietnamese military. Beyond Vietnam, exports of the system have not been forthcoming. For now, Rychag-AV appears to only be in service with the RASF. According to the authoritative oryxspioenkop.com website, Russia’s military has lost 161 fixed-wing aircraft to date to hostile action in the ongoing war in Ukraine. Helicopter losses equate to 140 destroyed by the Ukrainian military. The attrition experienced by the Mi-8MTPR-1 fleet is particularly instructive: Seven aircraft have been documented as destroyed, equating to around 35 percent of the total fleet size.
At first blush, it could be argued that such losses are unsurprising: The air defence suppression mission is inherently dangerous. Rychag-AV equipped rotorcraft would be priority targets for air defenders. Nonetheless, significant losses of other helicopter types including platforms associated with desants like Mi-8 series aircraft, and various attack helicopters including Mi-24/35 (‘Hind’) series and Ka-52 (‘Hokum-B’) gunships have been documented. These losses are in addition to significant attrition experienced by the RASF CAS/BI fleet with up to 41 Su-25 (‘Frogfoot’) series ground attack jets also being destroyed. One key shortcoming of the Rychag-AV is that its effectiveness is most likely limited to radars operating in the wavebands the system can process and attack. Radars operating outside these wavebands may well find themselves immune to Rychag-AV jamming.
Given its apparent lack of effectiveness in Ukraine, questions will invariably be asked about the long-term future of the Rychag-AV in RASF service. Will Russia’s defence industry be tasked with overhauling the system based on lessons learned from Ukraine? Alternatively, will a new airborne radar jammer be developed? The latter option may prove a safer bet as the attraction of the Rychag-AV for export is likely to have diminished based on its combat record in Ukraine.
by Dr. Thomas Withington
