Ukraine's 'Miracle Weapon' Is a Cheap, Hard-to-Jam Glide Bomb
After 10 more tests, the Ukrainian KAB-clone should be ready for mass production
The KAB glide bomb—a 1,100- or 2,200-pound gravity bomb with add-on satellite guidance and pop-out wings—is a “miracle weapon” for Russia, to borrow the Ukrainian Deep State analysis group’s phrasing.
Lobbing more than 100 KABs a day all along the 700-mile front line of their wider war on Ukraine, Russian forces blast gaps in Ukrainian defenses, suppress Ukrainian drone operators and threaten the flow of supplies to Ukrainian brigades.
Desperate to do to the Russians what the Russians have been doing to them with their $25,000 KABs, the Ukrainians are developing a virtual copy. A recent video (see above) depicts a Ukrainian air force Sukhoi Su-24 bomber dropping a KAB-clone during testing.
The KAB-clone isn’t Ukraine’s only glide bomb. It has a stock of American-made Joint Direct Attack Munitions and Small Diameter Bombs—and also gets Hammer glide-bombs from France. The Ukrainian military is developing a boutique glide-bomb that can be produced locally. But none of those winged munitions possess the one quality that makes the KAB-clone so attractive: its low cost.
According to the Medoid Design Bureau, the KAB-clone’s developer, one of the munitions should cost just $25,000. That’s roughly the price of a Russian glide-bomb —and just 60% the price of an American SDB.
At that price point, Ukraine could buy many thousands of KAB-clones—and bombard Russian forces at nearly the same pace Russia bombards Ukrainian forces.
The bomb is almost ready. “Around 10 more test drops are required, after which the product must pass a Ministry of Defense evaluation,” Medoid Design Bureau rep Oleh Vostrykh told Defense Express. “Right now, the main barrier to rapid progress is funding.”
Ukraine’s own miracle weapon
The stakes are enormous. Dropping KABs from as far away as 40 miles, Russian warplanes can stay out of range of Ukraine’s most numerous air-defenses. The only realistic countermeasure is radio jamming that can interfere with a KAB’s satellite guidance.
The problem, for Ukrainian troops, is that they can’t surround themselves at depth with jammers that broadcast in all directions, as the Russians control the terrain opposite them.
Jammers work best when they can create a wide zone of radio interference emitting from multiple directions. They work much less well when targeting a missile, bomb or drone from just one side as the munition barrels toward its target. The munition might maintain its comms from the unjammed hemisphere long enough to zero in.
Ukrainian electronic warfare team Night Watch has developed a new version of its Lima jammer that the team claimed works from one direction. But this Lima Focus jammer costs $1.2 million. It may be an effective defense—but it won’t scale quickly.
With KAB-clones, the Ukrainians could at least bomb back. Vostrykh told Defense Express the Ukrainian KAB is more resistant to jamming than Russian KABs are.
It takes just a few dozen Russian air force Sukhoi Su-30s and Su-34s, each lobbing two or four KABs every other day, to expend all 3,000 bombs the Russians typically fling at Ukrainian positions every month.
The Ukrainian air force should have enough planes to match that effort. In 2023, American, French and Ukrainian technicians worked together to arm the roughly 100 surviving Ukrainian Mikoyan MiG-29s and Sukhoi Su-25s and Su-27s with U.S.-made JDAMs and SDBs and French-made Hammers.
Ukraine’s ex-European Lockheed Martin F-16s and Dassault Mirage 2000s—a few dozen F-16s and a dozen Mirage 2000s are already in Ukraine—should only add to the substantial glide-bombing force.
It should go without saying that completing development of the KAB-clone should be a top priority in Kyiv.
Read more:
To Deflect Russia's 'Miracle' Glide-Bombs, a Ukrainian Team Invented a New Jammer: One That Blasts Radio Noise In a Powerful Stream
In early 2024, Russian engineers modified the Russian air force’s KAB glide-bombs with more channels for their satellite radios. This made them harder to defeat by electronic means, as a jammer would have to interfere with each Controlled Reception Pattern Antenna channel to send the bomb off course. (Watch a Russian munition miss its target in the video above.)