U.S. intelligence officials have made a surprising discovery about the ballistic missiles that Russia is deploying in Ukraine. The New York Times reports that decoys are hidden within the barrage, which deceive air-defense radars and heat-seeking missiles.
An American intelligence official told the Times that the decoys are about a foot long, shaped like a dart and painted white with an orange tail.
When the Iskander-M short-range ballistic missile detects that it has been targeted by air-defense systems, the official told the Times, it releases a decoy.
The official, who was not authorized to speak publicly about intelligence matters and spoke on the condition of anonymity, said that each decoy is loaded with electronics and produces radio signals to disorient enemy radars trying to locate the Iskander-M. The decoys also contain heat sources to attract incoming missiles, the official said.
Richard Stevens, who served for 22 years in the British army as an explosive disposal soldier and worked for 10 years as a civilian bomb technician in southern Iraq, Africa and other regions, said he has seen ''plenty of Chinese and Russian munitions, but I had never seen this.''
After posting photos of the decoys to a website he created in 2011 for military and civilian bomb disposal experts, Stevens found that no one seemed to have encountered them before.
''That Russia is using that size of weapon — the Iskander-M — and quite a few of them I believe, that's why we're seeing this now,'' Stevens added. ''It's just that, post-conflict in the past 10 to 15 years, no one has had the opportunity to see this.''
Citing U.S. government documents, the Times reports that the Iskander can hit targets more than 200 miles away and that each mobile missile launcher can fire two Iskanders before it needs to be reloaded.
Ukrainian air-defense weapons have struggled to intercept Russia's Iskander missiles, and the use of the decoys could help explain why.
Photos of the dart-shaped devices began appearing on social media two weeks ago, the Times reports, and had puzzled experts and analysts, who had mistaken them for bomblets from cluster weapons.
The U.S. intelligence official said that the devices are similar to Cold War decoys called ''penetration aids,'' which were designed to allow warheads to reach their targets by eluding anti-missile systems.
''The minute people came up with missiles, people started trying to shoot them down, and the minute people started trying to shoot them down, people started thinking about penetration aids,'' Jeffrey Lewis, a professor of nonproliferation at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies in Monterey, California, told the Times.
''But we never see them because they're highly secret — if you know how they work, you can counteract them.''
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