Russians Claim To Develop Smartphone App To Locate Ukrainian Artillery

The Russian military has developed software for networked smartphones to locate Ukrainian artillery, reviving a technology first used over a century ago in WW1.

Artillery duels have become an important aspect of this conflict. Russia’s initial massive advantage has greatly diminished, partly due to the destruction of ammunition stockpiles by HIMARS but also because of Ukraine’s success in what are known misleadingly as artillery duels and better described as counter-battery fire. When one side’s guns fire, the other side attempts to locate their firing position and destroy it with their own artillery.

The preferred way of spotting artillery firing is with counter-battery radar, which can detect and track artillery shells in the air and trace them back to their firing point. These are rare and expensive – over $12m each for the latest U.S. system — but can locate the firer before a even shell lands. The U.S. and U.K. have supplied counter-battery radar to Ukraine, and Russia has its own Zoopark-1 counter-battery system. However, any radar has a significant drawback. The radar emitter can be detected by the radio waves it produces, so it can be located and becomes the target of artillery fire itself. Both sides have located and destroyed counter-battery radars.

Hence the need to return to an earlier technology. The boom and flash produced by heavy artillery are both obvious from some miles away, and gave rise to various systems of sound and flash ranging during WW1. As with thunder and lightning, the flash moving at the speed of light is visible long before the rumble is heard, as this only moves at about one mile per five seconds. The position of the firing battery can be triangulated by comparing the notes of several observers recording exact times, but the system was only approximate.

William Lawrence Bragg, who won a Nobel Prize in Physics for his work on X-ray diffraction, revolutionized sound ranging in 1915. Working for the British Army, Bragg used widely-spaced microphones to automatically record distant gunfire via a galvanometer, with a pen leaving traces on an unspooling roll of paper similar to a seismograph. Bragg’s microphones were made of old ammunition boxes and wrapped in fabric to remove high-frequency noises like wind. Ultimately this could locate a firing position to within 10 meters.

According to the Russian military journal ‘Arsenal of the Fatherland,’ their military have developed a technique to locate Ukrainian artillery based on sound ranging similar to Bragg’s WW1 setup. Their approach uses four smartphones with a special app located four to six kilometres back from the frontline. Data from the smartphone microphones is sent to a central tablet computer with another app to calculates the firing position.

Smartphones have previously been used for experimental sound ranging, but only to locate gunshots from relatively close range, in particular sniper-location systems, such as this system created by a team at Vanderbilt University in 2013 or this 2017 one from the University of Maryland. Smartphones offer a handy combination of multiple distributed microphones, computing power and precise GPS location, making them useful for this sort of task. In practice however, the gunshot location systems deployed so far have been based on dedicated hardware with specialist microphones to detect the firer to within a few meters.

The new Russian system is not considered to be completely reliable; the developers say that it may suffer from unexpected errors. These might be the result of atmospheric conditions, or the reflection of sound from terrain features, so it is only considered a general indication. When the app locates a possible firing position, drones will be dispatched to scout the area and confirm before a counter-battery strike is launched.

It is not clear whether the Russian system is actually operational, and any Russian claims about new military technology should be approached with caution – they have quite a track record for vaporware. It is also worth bearing in mind that while one Russian team is trying to harness smartphones to locate artillery, the leadership is trying ban them from the frontline altogether because, ironically enough, Ukraine has been detecting Russian cellphone signals and using them to direct its artillery strikes. So the two may simply cancel out.