You Thought Western Weapons Would Prove To Be A Silver Bullet In Ukraine. Russians Are Proving Otherwise

The Russia-Ukraine war is exposing the perceived superiority of Western-origin ‘wunderwaffe’ or wonder weapons.

Weapons like Excalibur 155mm GPS-guided artillery shells, Switchblade suicide drones, joint direct attack munition (JDAM) aerial bombs, and guided multiple launch rocket systems (GMLRS), initially performed well but have since performed poorly in the war.

When these weapons were donated to Ukraine, they were touted as game changers.

Western commentators and military experts were roped in to glorify these weapons. They were sold to the general and the Ukrainian public as ‘silver bullets’ that would turn the tide of the war in Ukraine's favour.

And, they were successful too.

Initially, when the Excalibur GPS-guided shells were deployed, they made precise hits, destroying Russian targets with pinpoint accuracy. But this unravelled quite quickly as the Russians adapted.

Their Electronic Warfare (EW) troops rose to the occasion and started intense jamming. They deployed their EW complexes on a 65-kilometre-wide and 1200-long frontage. This not only degraded Ukrainian satellite communications but also knocked out GPS receivers of Excalibur shells, throwing them astray, far from the target.

The biggest hit was to Ukrainian drones, with almost 90 per cent either crashing or being shot down.

They arrived amid much hype, but this quickly faded when they encountered Russian jamming. Aside from one or two videos of successful strikes, they largely proved to be a failure.

Another system — the Turkish Bayraktar TB-2 drones, although not Western, suffered a similar fate.

Fresh from the hype created in the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan, the Turkish TB2s came to the scene with much promise.

In the initial days of the war, several pieces of footage of TB2s destroying Russian armour came out. However, as the Russian EW systems stabilised, the TB2s started dropping from the sky.

The American high mobility artillery rocket system (HIMARS) — which admittedly played a key role in pushing Russians back in 2022 by destroying hardened targets like ammunition, petrol, oil, lubrication dumps, and command centres — also started having trouble with its GPS-guided rockets falling 15-20 meters away from the target.

Even aerial bombs launched by fighter jets, like the joint direct attack munitions (JDAMs), failed to make an impact in the face of extensive Russian jamming.

The only ones that have performed as per expectations were British and French-supplied SCALP-EG stealth cruise missiles, American ATACMS, and Javelin and NLAW anti-tank missiles, all of which have minimal dependency on GPS signals.

This shows the importance of using indigenously designed weapons systems instead of imported ones.

During a war, only equipment and systems with in-house intellectual property (IP) can be modified. Imported systems do not offer this flexibility.

The Ukrainians suffer from the same problems.

Russians were able to modify, add new capabilities and adapt when a new weapon system was introduced. The Ukrainians, on the other hand, cannot.

A Ukrainian intelligence official elaborating on this says that the systems that used to work a few months earlier have stopped working.

“It’s like updating software on your phone — we and the Russians need to update ours every month to keep up, but when we get weapons from the West, the manufacturer’s software, installed years ago, rarely gets updated,” an official said.

That’s why, instead of importing weapon systems from the West, the Indian armed forces should focus on purchasing domestic products.

Recent decisions, such as the army opting for American Stryker infantry fighting vehicles over the indigenous WhAP and choosing Javelin anti-tank guided missiles (ATGM) instead of DRDO's MPATGM, raise doubts about whether the correct lessons are being learned from the Russia-Ukraine war.

Overall, Western weapons are not a class apart, and certainly not a silver bullet.

To effectively counter China in the Himalayas, all of India — including DRDO, Ministry of Defence, defence public sector undertakings (DPSUs), academia, and private firms — must fully commit to the Atmanirbhar Bharat program, or risk meeting the same fate as Ukrainians.