Watch The Ukrainian Air Force Lob American Missiles At Russian Radars

The Ukrainian air force has armed some of its surviving MiG-29 fighters with American-made High-speed Anti-Radiation Missiles—and is firing them at Russian air-defenses in occupied Ukraine.

But Ukrainian pilots apparently are firing the HARMs blind, using a mode that requires no new hardware in the single-seat, supersonic MiG’s cramped cockpit.

This “prebriefed” mode allows for quicker and easier integration of the U.S.-made missiles on the Soviet-made fighters. But it also means worse accuracy.

To be clear, that doesn’t mean the HARM-flinging MiGs aren’t destroying or damaging—or scaring the crews of—Russian radars and radar-equipped surface-to-air missile vehicles.

“The Ukrainians in recent weeks have been using the HARM missiles to great effect to take out Russian radar systems,” Colin Kahl, the U.S. undersecretary of defense for policy, told reporters.

A video that the Ukrainian air force posted online Tuesday—the first actually to depict a HARM-armed MiG-29—seems to provide an abundance of new detail about the Ukrainians’ American-aided suppression of enemy air-defenses campaign.

In the video, a pair of MiG-29s apparently belonging to the 204th Tactical Aviation Brigade—one of four Ukrainian air force MiG units—takes off at Kulbakino air base in Mykolaiv, in southern Ukraine.

The camera ship clutches an 800-pound HARM under each wing in addition to infrared-guided air-to-air missiles for self-defense. It’s unclear what armament the second plane in the formation carries.

Clear shots of the camera ship’s cockpit appear to confirm the Ukrainians have not added to the MiGs any special displays or interfaces for the HARM. The only new equipment that’s visible is a pair of GPS navigation aids.

The MiGs fly low to the south before climbing to medium altitude, at which point the camera ship fires both of its HARMs, likely at the same target somewhere in Russian-occupied Kherson Oblast.

The location makes sense. The Ukrainian armed forces for more than three months has been waging a campaign of SEAD and deep strikes against Russian air-defenses and logistics in order to weaken and isolate the Russian 49th Combined Arms Army in and around Kherson, a strategic port with a pre-war population of 300,000.

Liberating Kherson is Kyiv’s top priority as Russia’s wider war on Ukraine grinds into its sixth month. Hanging on to Kherson is Moscow’s top priority.

To bolster the 49th CAA, the Russians have been shifting forces from eastern Ukraine to the south—but perhaps too late. Yesterday, officials in Kyiv announced the launch of a long-anticipated counteroffensive in the direction of Kherson. MiGs firing HARMs aim to clear the air for other Ukrainian aircraft to support the counteroffensive.

But it seems those MiG pilots are firing blind at prebriefed targets.

The HARM has several modes. The most accurate mode combines the missile with sensitive passive sensors aboard dedicated SEAD aircraft such as the U.S. Air Force’s F-16CJ and the U.S. Navy’s EA-18G. The crew searches for enemy radars using the plane’s passive sensors, designates a target on a special display in the cockpit then feeds, by way of a databus, targeting data to the missile.

The simplest alternative, for an air force without the time or resources for a close integration of missile and airframe, is to locate enemy radars before a SEAD sortie—using satellites, drones, ground-based sensors or even human spies in the target zone.

Ground crews load target coordinates into the missile ahead of the sortie. The plane flies to within 80 or 90 miles of a target, climbs and accelerates and fires the HARM. The missile’s inertial guidance system maneuvers it to the target’s vicinity, at which point the anti-radiation seeker in the missile’s nose activates—and, in theory, guides the weapon to impact.

A lot can go wrong. If the pilot doesn’t nail the launch position, direction and speed, the HARM might not get close enough to the target to detect it and home in.

Prebriefed mode isn’t the best way to use the HARM, but it’s the easiest. Especially for an air force that operates only Soviet-style aircraft and which, so far, has not convinced a foreign ally to provide modern Western jets.

The Pentagon has been clear, in the weeks since revealing it’s been supplying HARMs to Ukraine, that it prefers to improve rather than replace Ukraine’s existing warplanes.

The former is cheaper and faster, as it involves small changes to in-service equipment during routine maintenance. The latter risks grounding the Ukrainian air force while it transitions to new aircraft requiring new training, new processes and new support equipment.

“Our current priority as it relates to aircraft is making sure that Ukrainians can use the aircraft they currently have to generate effects in the current conflict,” Kahl said.

Prebriefed HARMs might not hit every time, but they don’t have to in order to generate an effect. That is, chipping away at Russia’s air-defenses.