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Stealth Aircraft Useless?
HughsOnFirst writes "Roke Manor Research, ( part
of Siemens ) has
announced that by using one of its sensor technologies in
conjunction with mobile phone basestation networks, stealthy aircraft
will be rendered useless. They point out that 'Many countries are spending large amounts of their defence budgets designing stealthy aircraft.'"
Knowing that the "bird" is doing Mach 2 will indeed identify the object as a military aircraft.
However, with the radar return the size of a bird, the aircraft would have to be extremely close to be painted on the radar screen (read: you're dead or it's passed before you can react), and the missile/gun you attempt to fire at it would need very sophisticated guidance to hit a radar target that small.
I spent 17 years attempting to do the above while stationed aboard several different guided missile cruisers/frigates (the last time during the Gulf War).
Sigs are for wussies.
Maybe I'm nuts, but was this article complete fluff or what? They seem to be saying that the cell phone transmitters can be used to work like radar, execpt that they have recievers scattered across the landscape instead of back at the source. I don't see the advantage here.
Besides, if it is merely a matter that the current stealth technology doesn't do a very good job of absorbing or directionally reflecting cell phone radiation, then you can bet the next generation (and the upgrades on the current generation) will. I think this story is just sensationalism. Besides, wasn't Doppler radar supposed to render stealth useless too? I don't remember hearing much about that other than a short blurb on the evening news back in '95. Somehow I doubt this is the end for stealth technology.
Down that path lies madness. On the other hand, the road to hell is paved with melting snowballs.
I read the internet for the articles.
Interesting, but it sounds like it has not yet been demonstrated. Stealth aircraft work by reducing the radar return back to the originating radar station (by scattering it in other directions). This is the equivalent of having a single radar station with a huge network of receiving stations, trying to receive the scattered radar pulses. It might work.
...phil
...phil
"For a list of the ways which technology has failed to improve our quality of life, press 3."
Hmm... Well, the claims differ depending on whether you're counting total losses, or just USAF losses.
The Mirage was definately not USAF, and the Harrier may have been British...
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
It's not, well NASA has one or two, but the SR-71 was used by the USAF for recon until the late 1990s, I think it was 96 or 97.
Why Mylar?
From what I remember from reading Crusade, the Mylar and now it's coiled ceramic and metal strips, are blown up over the sub station generation site, and then the pieces settle over the wires and cause a short when they touch the ground. And it doesn't blow up residental areas.
As fr timing, it's pretty easy to time your planes when you know that the cruise missiles are going to hit at 8.15 pm, have the planes there at 8.16 pm.
Chaff worked better when there wasn't Doppler Radar, now it's alot harder to hide behind chaff than use it for taking out sub stations, actually the Navy got the idea in the 70s after some chaff from an exercise knocked out the power in a Southern California powerstation.
Why do this instead of using an Anti-Radiation missile? Because you can launch a cruise missile from 1,000 km away, but a HARM or ALARM anti-radiation missile only has a range of 30-60 km. In the first wave, you're SEAD planes will get SAMs fired at them before they get in range to fire *ARMs at the targets.
You'll get much higher civilian casualties from bombing a power sub station or cruise missiling it, than you will from using Mylar.
B-17s usually flew at 25,000 feet.
B-29s at 25-32,000 feet.
They didn't practice pin-point bombing, the would plaster the country-side with bombs in hopes of hitting something.
The raid on Plosisti in Romania was done at low altitude, as were some of the later firebombing raids on Japan.
The F-22A isn't just about stealth.
r /i dr010529_1_n.shtml
The F-22A is also about high altitude and high speed.
While the F-22 has a lower radar and infrared cross-section than most production aircraft, it hasn't sacrificed performance to gain that cross section like the F-117A did.
A recent piece by Jane's on the future of combat fighter tactics talks about advantages the F-22A has.
http://www.janes.com/aerospace/military/news/id
"Earlier this year, F-22 chief test pilot Paul Metz confirmed that the F-22's speed and altitude capability acts as a booster stage for the common-or-garden AMRAAM. At M1.5 and at greater altitude than the target (the F-22 has a very fast climb rate and a service ceiling well above 50,000ft), AMRAAM's range is 50% greater than is the case in a subsonic, same-altitude launch."
Since the USAF and US Navy are working on a number of Uninhabited Combat Air Vehicle projects, that if succesful, will be used to replace the F-117A in the SEAD (Supression of Enemy Air Defences) role, that was demonstrated in Jan of 1991 during the Gulf War. Even with an ad hoc "stealth detector" it will be very hard to track and shoot down hordes of uninhabited LO aircraft and missiles intent on knocking out your air defence infrastructure.
In the Gulf War, the first wave of Tomahawk Land Attack Missiles carried strips of Mylar instead of explosives. These missiles blew up over substations and shorted them out, depriving the local radar a few moments of power till backups could be started, letting the F-117s and F-15Es through the air defences, I'm sure if someone comes up with another defence, planners will have a way to take them out to, a defence system is as only good as it's power source.
B-2A Spirits and F-22A Raptors do fly high, the B-2A has very high lift and low drag and it gets to 40,000 or 50,000 feet easily. I talked about the F-22A up above in a post.
The F-117A doesn't fly at nap of the earth, simply because it doesn't have radar to allow it to avoid the groud in front of it, and because it's high drag and low thrust.
The old F-111 Aardvarks did fly at very high speed at low altitude, but that was a swing-wing with huge engines and afterburners.
For things like laser guided bombs, normal bombs, air to surface missiles, you need some altitude to get some distance for your tosses and launches.
I'd argue about the "altitude has not been a viable defense since 1960 when Francis Gary Powers had his U-2 shot out from underneath him." Since the SR-71 was designed after that and it's high altitude, as is the replacement for the U-2, the TR-1, and the F-15 has very, very good high altitude abilities, as do the Russian Su-27, MiG-31 and to a lesser extent the F-18 and MiG-29.
If you are in a plane at altitude, it's much harder for the missile to get you if you have manouvered because the missile usually has used it's fuel during the boost stage and is now coasting. You also have more time to react, fire counter-measures and to move, while at low altitude, if a...ohh...SA-12 or Rapier gets you, you might hear a tone and look up, then the missile explodes.
If AA guns are useless against high flying aircraft, how did B-17s, B-29s and Lancasters get knocked down by German and Japanese flak during the second world war?
At one British airshow, a Stealth Bomber was successfully targetted and tracked by a British missile system.
When an F-117 is not on a military mission, it's going to have its Mode C transponder on, the same as my Piper Archer. If it didn't, it couldn't participate in civillian air traffic control, since civillian radars can't even see something as unstealthy as a Cessna 172 unless conditions are right. Not participating in civillian ATC is frowned on because of the risk of running into a 747 full of nuns, which could be bad for business. So this boast was probably prime PR luserishness.
When conditions are right, however, ATC can see "wakes", which are atmospheric disturbances behind moving objects. I've had ATC point out flocks of geese that they were tracking by wakes. I bet that if they saw a 600 knot wake, they'd probably guess it was a stealth aircraft, but they'd never be able to target it.
During Desert Storm, the Iraqi radar did see wakes from the F-117s and send up aircraft with hastily attached search lights to try and find them. The problem is that a wake (and probably a track from this cell phone thing) just tells you that an aircraft is up there, but it doesn't allow you to target it. You'll know it's up there soon enough when your stuff starts exploding, so why bother?
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The next Cmdr Taco duplicate will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and see it early!
You could encode a base station signature in a modulation of the radar frequency. Straight AM could easily and reliably encode at least thousands of signatures. Also, the modulation technique could be designed to not significantly reduce the average radiated power. Moreover, it might be good to frequency-hop to make it harder for the enemy to target and kill the base stations. Also, that would make it difficult for the enemy to use the system against you. The "listener" would need to know which stations were using which frequency and when in order to track anything.
Of course, what do I know?
True, the Americans are unlikely to invade England any time soon (they already have, if the TV is anything to go by!) but that does indicate that Stealth technology - at least, as of the Stealth bomber - has been within the ability of single RADAR systems to track, successfully, for at least the past 3 years.
Now, using "cheap" distributed technologies may prove to be "budget" solutions for some nations, but that simply widens the scope, rather than creating it.
The -real- danger is that such technologies exist at all. If the British can invent Stealth-tracking devices, then so can any other nation, provided they can get the parts. And those can probably be ordered from Maplin. However, I don't see any Middle East countries admitting to what they can (and cannot) do, any time soon. These -unknowns- are the real threat. You can't allow for something that you cannot know.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Stealth is for minimizing the effectiveness for someone else's detection measures. So if smart figure out a reasonably effective way to find stealth planes and use that information in real time to track them and shoot them down then the burden shifts to stealth planes to devise effective countermeasures like the concept of 'chaff'. After all if you can't reliably aim at a plane it's almost as good as not being able to see it - unless you use massive weapons.
Aviation Leak reported sometime in the last several years that Lockheed and someone else both had projects using reflections from commercial radio stations to detect stealth aircraft. They were in a cheap demo phase and worked.
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Infuriate left and right
All the Military needs to do is pass legislation that makes it illegal to detect stealthy aircraft. SAD (Stealthy Anti-Detection) Act. If it works for the MPAA, why not for defense?
Oh, wait. Armies don't fight with lawyers, they have bullets. That might not work...
The American Civil War featured the first instance of germ/biological warfare, as a ship full of fever victims' blankets was sailed into a harbor in the hopes of touching off an outbreak of the disease.
Can't remember which harbor or who did it to whom, though...
Jon Acheson
All opinions expressed herein are my own, and not those of my employers, who are appalled.
It seems the whole idea of stealth reached its hey-day prior to cheap, ubiquitous computing power. Nowadays it seems that detecting stealth aircraft should be just a firmware upgrade away (in a manner of speaking). If the F/A-117 has a radar signature the size of a large bird, the only problem would seem to be to be able to track a large enough amount of birds just long enough to differentiate those that fly at 400+ mph from those that don't. Some SAMs should be able to be retrofitted for ground vectoring into the general vicinity of the plane, at which point its on-board radar should be able to finish the job. I'm sure the plane will appear bigger than just a bird to a missle 200m on its tail. And even if it doesn't, small enough computing power to do stealth tracking on-board is readily available, to say nothing of optical tracking.
And this still isn't going to make that huge of a difference, because I seriously doubt that the technology could be used with the pinpoint accuracy needed to direct weapons fire.
/. effect, I would surmise that this technology would be QUITE accurate. The reason for this is triangulation. If you are trying to pinpoint your location with a map and compass, you take bearings on the surrounding land and draw lines on the map as to your location. The more reference points you take, and the more lines you draw the greater accuracy you have in pinpointing your location.
I don't know about that... While I cannot read the article because of the
This is triangulation. If you were to use a bevy of cell towers, each one pointing out a direction where the reflection was spotted, your accuracy would be high.
Try to hack my 31337 firewall!
One by one, our new high tech miltary tricks are being nuetralized, either by selling the secrets to the Chinese for a few million and a blowjob (thanks Bill) or by cunning high tech ingenuity.
Far be it from me to jump into a political minefield, but you do realize that the nuke secrets were actually stolen during the Reagan and Bush administrations, and the theft was discovered during the Clinton administration?
You also should realize that there has always been a see-saw effect between military offense and military defense. The European fiefdoms needed castles to maintain their military control; in reaction to the immense defensive structure of a castle, militaries developed the siege engines such as the trebuchet and early demolitions (fire in the hole!). The primacy of the castle-based military was only for a couple of hundred years. Technology moves much faster today.
To believe that nuclear secrets could be held forever, or that stealth aircraft would never be detected, is to ignore history.
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lake effect weblog
lake effect weblog
{Network engineer in Chicago--looking for work!}
Stealth technology is nothing compared to the George Washington project. New US currency has a small magnetic strip embedded in the paper, when thousands or hundreds of thousands of these bills are dropped over a battlefield they act as paper maché radar chaff. The system was actually designed during the 1950s but deemed not expensive enough for development. The US attack bombers of the 21st century will fly hidden behind a screen of paper currency. Go America!
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
Can you imagine how cool the phones will be when this technology is deployed?
-jon
Remember Amalek.
I don't know if you realize it, but launching Scuds at Israel was incredibly popular in Iraq. If you're going to cheer while your country attacks civilians, taking a few bombs on your own head shouldn't lead to much complaining.
And who exactly makes up the Iraqi army? That's right, the citizens of Iraq. Trying to make some sort of artifical separation between the people and their leaders is a game for armchair warriors. In the end, the Iraqis could overthrow Saddam. There are 22+ million of them; Saddam and his henchmen couldn't kill them all. They don't. Draw your own conclusions.
We need to learn to tell the difference between the actions of a government and keep the blame off the people living under that government, especially in undemocratic countries.
So you wouldn't have fire-bombed Dresden? Nuked Hiroshima and Nagasaki? I realize I'm edging close to Goodwin's Law territory, but what parts of Nazi Germany would you have considered off-limits to attack? Should we have stopped when most of Europe was free and the German troops were only within the borders of Germany? Were the Japanese civilians not responsible for making war goods for the Japanese military?
I know that the Gulf War wasn't WW II, but the point of war is to win. When you are facing an opponent who will do anything, trying to play by "civilized" rules will get you killed. Ask the British, who stood around in their pretty red coats while the American rebels shot them from cover. They kept complaining the colonists weren't fighting fair. They also lost.
In war, everyone is a target. War "crimes" are the winners trying the losers for losing the war, nothing more. Once upon a time, you just beheaded the losing leader and took his concubines. Now you put him on trial in the Netherlands. The only difference is the lawyers are involved...
-jon
Remember Amalek.
I'm always amazed at how anti-Israeli ranters can't spell Israel correctly...
If Israel wanted to "commit genocide" against the Palestinians, they'd be long gone by now. Say Israel wanted to kill, oh, 1 million Palestinians. How long would it take? An hour of heavy bombing of Gaza? Gaza is one of the most densely populated areas in the world. There's a large sea on one side of it, and large fences on the other three. There'd be nowhere for anyone to run, and if you believe what the Palestinians say, they have no weapons which could mount a credible counter-attack. I believe the technical term would be "shooting fish in a barrel."
Heck, in Rwanda, Hutus managed to kill 500,000 to 1 million Tutsis in a month, using nothing more than machettes. After 37 years of Israeli control, there are more Palestinians than there were in 1967. I guess the Israelis must not have this genocide stuff figured out yet.
-jon
Remember Amalek.
Well, the US did destroy an amazing amount of Iraqi civilian infrastructure in the Gulf War, precision weapons or no. Water purification facilities are still kaput. That probably has a lot more to do with the rise in Iraqi infant mortality than depleted uranium.
Vietnam was another case of the US' enemy not exactly fighting according to the Geneva Convention. Whether or not you thought the US should have been in Vietnam, the Viet Cong were using civilians as cover, sending women with babies wired with bombs at US troops, etc. The enemy was fighting dirty. The US fought dirty in its own way (carpet bombing, several massacres of Vietnamese villages), but not as dirty as it could have (nuclear bombs, for example, or a massive invasion of the North, forcing them to battle on two fronts). The end result: the US lost. You can be quite sure that the US military is aware of this lesson.
Cambodia is a much murkier area. From what I know, we supposedly attempted to bomb Viet Cong bases in Cambodia. We also killed a hell of a lot of civilians who had nothing to do with it. But if the Cambodians didn't allow the Viet Cong to establish bases in the first place...you can go on and on with this. I don't know a lot about the war in Cambodia; anyone who can provide me with some accurate info will be greatly appreciated.
-jon
Remember Amalek.
Maybe in Europe, but that's still happening in the Sudan, Congo, and Sierra Leone. And some of the events in the Bosnia war were pretty close to the old "rape, pillage, and burn" method of war.
It's dangerous to pretend that the world is a civilized place. Peace and prosperity is not the normal condition for humans. Abject poverty and perpetual war are much more common. Right now, those of us in the western, first-world countries are very lucky and most don't appreciate how good we have it. Maybe the people of the world are slowly getting tired of stupidly killing each other. But take a look through most of the third world and you'd be hard-pressed to come to that conclusion.
-jon
Remember Amalek.
That's debatable. There's a lot of evidence that support for the Palestinians is more lip service than actual support. The other Arab nations talk a lot about monetary aid for the Palestinians, but they rarely actually send any. Jordan threw out a bunch of PLO supporters after the Black September uprising in the early 70's. Between 1948 and 1967, Egypt and Jordan didn't allow the creation of Palestinian state; they kept the West Bank and Gaza as their own. Other Arab nations didn't absorb Palestinian refugees the way Pakistan absorbed millions of Muslims who fled India when the subcontinent was partitioned. Doesn't quite sound like care to me.
What it does sound like is that the Palestinians are being used by the other Arab nations. By keeping the Palestinians in a squalid condition, Israel becomes the target of hate by the Arab "street". By directing the commoner's hate at Israel, they pay no attention to how crappy their lives are, and they support whatever horror their government will inflict on them, as long as it is in the name of defeating the "Zionists." Orwell described the technique quite well in "1984." He even picked a Jewish target for the Five Minute Hate sessions; he knew how these things work.
it would destroy ties with benefactor usa
Part of the whole "Israel is committing genocide" paranoid fantasy is that Jews (and through them, Israel) control the US government. If the Israelis were going to kill all the Palestinians, why wouldn't the Zionist Occupied Government of the US let them?
not to mention millions of palestinians rushing into israel to escape the bombing
There are heck of a lot more hiding spaces in Rwanda than there are in Gaza. Didn't help there. The sad lesson about genocide is that those who are committed to it often succeed quite well.
-jon
Remember Amalek.
Another one who can't spell "Israel." Sheesh.
The "vast majority" of world governments aren't what I'm talking about. I'm talking about the Muslim countries. If you don't believe that they are using antisemitism to rile up their masses and deflect attention from their own bankrupt policies, you aren't paying attention.
Two easy examples: Indonesia's former finance minister claimed that the economic problems of Indonesia were due to "Jewish bankers" in the US; i.e., Jews control the world economy. Egypt's newspapers constantly talk about the Jewish control over the US government, especially during Colin Powel's trip to the region. Spend some time reading the newspapers from Arab and/or Muslim countries if you want to see more examples of what I mean.
And by the by, the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza aren't Israeli citizens. Most of them hold Jordanian passports; some hold Egyptian. The Arabs who are Israeli citizens are the only Arabs in the region who can vote for their governmental officials, who have freedom to worship (or not) as they choose, and who live under a (more or less) free market economy. Yes, there is discrimination against Arabs in Israel, but the Israeli Supreme Court (which includes an Arab as a justice) has made repeated rulings to end the biases.
As for Israel's "criminal actions," I maintain that Israel is no worse than every other country on the planet, and in many cases a heck of a lot better. Israel didn't level a town and kill 25,000 people, like Syria did in the early 80's. Syria is still occupying Lebanon, despite UN Resolutions telling it to get out (550, I believe). Funny, Hezbollah isn't shooting rockets at Syria over that. Must not be any Jews in Syria.
What's even funnier is the way that Hezbollah and Hamas will take money from Iraq, which spends a lot of time trying to kill Shi'ites. I guess the Shi'ite Hezbollah and Hamas find it OK for Iraq to gas Shi'ites, as long as Iraq will help them kill Jews.
I'm not even going to get into European colonization of Africa, Asia, America, and Australia. But I'm sure that if you can find a Native American or an Australian Aboriginie, they'll tell you all about it.
-jon
Remember Amalek.
And in the case of Iraq, it launched missiles at civilian targets in Israel, a country not even involved in the hostilities. The fact that Israel didn't remove Baghdad from the map is remarkable. I'd say that any country which targets civilians for no good reason deserves to have its own civilians attacked.
-jon
Remember Amalek.
I suppose that puts an emphasise of using computer viruses in warefare. If you wanted to ensure that you planes stayed stealthly then you would simply have to create virus that rendered cell-phone base stations inoperable. This way there would be no signal upsetting your planes.
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
OK, wiseguy. I'm going to put a multi-frequency RF receiver inside my house. Now, I want you to detect it....
Done yet?
How 'bout now?
Right, and it better not have a 50-foot sign outside saying "Acquire target here."
I read about something similar about a year ago, being developed by China. The basic idea seems to be to use existing civilian radio sources that span multiple frequencies - TV, radio, and now cell phones. The receiving stations are completely passive (this is important); all they do is detect the strength of radio signals at all these frequencies, compare that information to the known quantity of an empty sky, and calculate where in the sky pieces of metal are altering the radio signal.
Here's why it's a bad idea:
It turns CIVILIAN installations into MILITARY installations. Right now, it's considered really bad form to blow up TV or radio stations, or to destroy a civilian communication network. (Doesn't mean it won't be done, of course). However, if an opposing force is using TV stations to blow up your jets, then those TV stations become legitimate target.
But why, you ask, would the military not target the receiving station? Because they're PASSIVE. They are not emitting enough of a signal to be differentiated from the background noise of 100,000s of TVs, radios, and cell phones. The receivers can't be targetted, but the transmitters can.
So in essence, deploying a system like this gives your opponent carte blanche to destroy your civilian wireless communications network. This is a bad, BAD idea.
A smaller version will be made available for use in restaurants.
Cluster-bomb variants will be designed for use over LA.
-- "I am disrespectful to dirt. Can you not see that I am serious!"
... just to remind people why stealth was originally developed. The Soviet tactics was to advance their tanks underneath a SAM umbrella (c.f. 6 day war, etc). The stealth concept was to reduce radar cross-section and turn the overlapping fields of acquisition radars into more point-sources. This was to enable the US AirLand attack concept where you strike simultaneously at targets in the rear. e.g. if you expect a major tank tank in n days, you hit their reinforcements at n-1 day, their air support at n-0.5 day, etc ... The stealth aircraft are not wonder woman invisible planes, designed to penetrate high urban density regions (use cruise missiles for those). Mobile C3I posts yes ..., deep surprise raids OK, maybe some photo-reconaisance. Trying to enter a firezone ... most definitionly NO as they're subsonic and would be toast for any interceptor squadron with look-down/up radar. Any idiot wanting to use their stealth fighters as CNN cannon fodder (flying down streets to wow armchair generals) should be court martialed (3rd world countries with no tech (cough*sudan*cough) excepted). Now that the emphasis is moving towards infowar, expect to see stealth applied to small semi-intelligent observation planes. Afterall, if you can see a target you can usually nuke/gass/bomb it.
... who in the world wants to pick a fight with the US? Are you expecting the chinese to row across the pacific (bypassing Hawaii with a non-existant blue-water carrier fleet)just to prevent the hordes wanting a green card? Or do you expect the Arabs to suddenly become outright stupid in killing off their biggest customers. If the Qubecans dediced to take over Canada and make war on the Hollywood english, it might be a shock but anyone else has got to first build a navy and space network. What is much more likely (as shown with Australian refugees) is for a major disaster to happen (drough in Mexico, volcano in caribean, etc) and the borders get swamped by panicked survivors (the US social system is not exactly reknown for being robust). Buying a bunch of mobile phones to ward off stealth plane ad-spams to go home is likely to be the least of their worries.
Realistically
In summary, the stealth concept was to solve a specific problem of penetrating SAM envelops. Creating a defnce against a non-existant threat sounds like a marketing tactic than hard-nosed military thinking. and the US should be more worried about other matters (cough*Kyoto*cough) such as global reputation before junking a valuable asset on the basis of a defense manufacturer with evident self-interests in propagating an arms race.
LL
Technology-wise, China is not a joke. Likewise, Iraq isn't left in the stone-ages either. Don't assume that because a country has little to no consumer technology, that their military must be "primitive" as well. Keep in mind that the UN is still monitoring Iraq to make sure that they do not develop nuclear or biological weapons, which they have the brain-power to do so.
Huh? I'd say that any government that puts military targets in concentrated civilian areas is monstrous. Or, more to the point, using the civilian population as a shield to hide weapons behind is a pretty low tactic. The only way to make sure that governments don't do this is to systematically destroy such installations, preferably with smart weapons to moderate (though not eliminate) civilian casualties.
War is monstrous. It's also inevitable. The only question is how to decrease its cost...sometimes, being monstrous is the only way to do it. (ref. Hiroshima and Nagasaki)
Why yes, I AM a rocket scientist!
I do see your point, but I still disagree. The problem with fighting non-Geneva Convention signatories is that they don't play by the rules of "civilized" warfare. Specifically, prisoners of war are routinely mistreated, hospitals and the like are used to camouflage legitimate military targets, and we (the "Good Guys") care more about our enemy's civilian populace than the enemies do.
I submit that this is an untenable situation. For the same reason that we cannot allow terrorists to get what they want, we cannot tolerate a foreign power that strikes from behind cover of their civilian populace. I argue that this sort of power is MOST likely to start aggressive wars (like, say, the Gulf War) and they're by your argument the least "attackable". What do you propose? What tactics can be employed that will accomplish the mission, but not offend our sensibilities? I'm really interested in any thoughts you may have.
Why yes, I AM a rocket scientist!
We have cool technology, but our stock price is down. Maybe this will help us.
That's about it.
Twoflower
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Twoflower
A single object travelling ~800 knots would stand out, however a stealth bomber wouldn't appear as a single object, rather a series of seemingly unrelated, extremely small objects - ie. noise.
What about the doppler effect? A moving object will slightly alter the frequency of the reflected radar wave.
If J.K.R wrote Windows: Puteulanus fenestra mortalis!
It's not the underlying tech that the two countries you specified are lacking, it's the communication and control networks and experience that would be needed to deploy the anti-stealth cell phone network, not to mention the immense cost of doing so.
I seriously doubt that buying Playstations to run a military computer network is the answer to Iraq's problems either. Also, the plan doesn't address the problem of directing weapons to shoot down the stealth aircraft. So instead of knowing that the stealth aircraft is there after getting bombed, the cell-enabled anti stealth country has a few minutes warning.
I suppose that such a thing could make a difference when considering the fact that other aircraft could be used to intercept the stealth aircraft, but that is also difficult without accurate information.
I guess what I should say is that intercepting a stealth aircraft is not going to be an easy proposition any time soon. The "in the neighborhood" solution that this technology provides is not going to be good enough to make a significant difference. Even if you do manage to get fighter interceptors up "in the neighborhood" of the stealth aircraft, finding an aircraft within a few miles with the naked eye is a difficult process at best. Especially at night.
Yes, they aren't exactly invulnerable to, say, HARM missles...
Hahahahha! No, no one told me, and that is very funny!
This isn't even going to remotely affect any county's military for a couple of decades at best. Aside from the fact that most countries where military action is taking place at all, have sketchy cell phone networks at best, there is hardly a military that has the command and control facilities available to use the kind of information that would be collected by cell phone towers efficiently. Other than those militaries who already rely upon stealth aircraft.
And this still isn't going to make that huge of a difference, because I seriously doubt that the technology could be used with the pinpoint accuracy needed to direct weapons fire.
Except those darn birds don't fly so freaking fast!
Seriously, though, stealth aircraft are designed to be stealthy against 1 type of radar station - a station where send and recieve occur at the same location. It is well known that separate send/recieve locations can reveal stealth aircraft, but there is a logistical problem when you shoot the send wave straight up.
Plus, the stealth on the craft will still work against missiles and other plane radar.
HI Mom!
Linux - Because Mommy taught me to Share.
Twenty feet up the mast of a sailboat, I easily detected a flock of four pelicans flying together very low, maybe 2-3 feet off the water, in a sort of "V" formation (one lead bird). I was able to "see" the flock about 1.5 - 2 miles away as a dim blip moving pretty fast, and its characteristics attracted my attention so much that I went abovedecks to see what kind of boat it was.
Of course, I was tweaking the radar at the time, and it was a pretty clear, calm, early-to-pre-dawn morning as I recall, so it was probably ideal conditions to detect such things. Still, a pelican flying that low (they use "ground effect" over water to minimize energy spent flying) is a relatively stealthy thing I'd think, compared to anything that contains metal or is big. A pelican is pretty big for a bird, but very small compared to any airplane. They were flying lower than any military aircraft would, too, and I only found out what they were because they were flying toward me. As they got closer, I was even able to resolve the individual birds, though they were close together and it wasn't too clear on the screen IIRC.
This was ordinary, mid-price Raytheon (Apelco) radar sold to any US boater without restrictions, and I'm no radar-expert, I was just messing with the knobs & buttons to see what I could see, and presumably both civilian and military technology have advanced a lot in the past decade+ since. This incident tells me that claims of aircraft stealthiness might be exagerated, especially if big-egos and big-budgets are on the line...
JMR
Speaking only for myself, and from relatively long-ago memory.
Try e-gold - (contact me). I'm NOT e-
...not that I care. If you are that pathetic, you can bookmark my userpage so you can be sure and downgrade as many of my posts as possible. I'll live. It was a JOKE you fricking idiot.
Either mod or post. I'm fairly certain that you are the one who uses his mod points to lower ratings on disliked posts then posts anonymously to explain why.
It looks like the troll kiddies have found themselves another way to abuse the discussions. SIGH.
"swift, strong, hard rods" George Carlin has proposed that all foreign policies can be summarized by what he calls the Bigger Dick theory. It goes something like this: "What?!?! They have bigger dicks?!?! BOMB THEM! And have you ever noticed that all of the bombs and the rockets and the bullets are shaped like dicks. It's an attempt to project the penis into other people's affairs. It's called FUCKING WITH PEOPLE!." He goes on to make several more points that are equally hilarious. I wonder what Mr. Carlin would make the parent's 'penetration by swift strong rods"?
So if this is true, why drop crowbars from outerspace? Why not just drop them from high in the atmosphere if that point where one could achieve maximum descent is at a point above the earth's surface but is still within the atmosphere.
One example of a radar-absorptive coating is a layer of conductive paint a quarter wavelength above the metal surface of the aircraft. This is very simple to do, doesn't require any particular care, and doesn't require any exotic materials. If, however, the radar is at twice the frequency that the coating is designed to absorb, that particular coating enhances the return rather than attenuates it.
Please note that even an absolutely stealthy aircraft can't necessarily escape detection. There are techniques for using backscatter from the atmosphere (developed primarily for wind shear advisories around airports) that can detect an aircraft's passage from the air that is disturbed around it. Even flying slow (which defeats a doppler-based system for low-observability aircraft) won't defeat that because it doesn't look at the aircraft, but at the air and an airplane is going to move a lot more air than a bird and is going to move it a lot faster than the bird would.
In addition to the Mode C transponders mentioned by other posters for safe civilian airspace transit, if you look at almost any picture of stealth aircraft in a non-combat setting, you can see several double-diamond shaped protuberances at various locations around the airframe.
These are essentially corner cube reflectors, designed to give nice bright returns on radar frequencies.
One important aspect of these devices is to make it difficult for an adversary to bring RCS (radar cross section) profiling equipment into an airshow or other venue and take detailed measurements of just how big that "little bird" is.
We should never forget that research and development is always useful in the long term. Yeah, the military and government fund a lot of it, but that doesn't mean that its still not useful.
The military gave grants to the development of the IC 40 years ago, The 747 aircraft was a design for a military transport. The microwave is an application of radar technology. The list goes on and on. Even stealth technology has lead to better software and better simulations of radar and radar resonation cavities. Its also lead to funky new designs for aircraft. (Like that faceted one.)
Then, what is that jet that runs supersonically WITHOUT afterburners? Will we maybe be seeing designs inspired by it coming out into commercial production in another 10-20 years?
Actually, what led to the invention of the jet, perhaps decades before it would have othewise come into widespread use. Military aerospace research!
Any organization that funnels billions of dollars a year into research is doing humanity a long-term good, whether its medical research, biotechology, vacination, aerospace, computing, radar etc.
Research is research. The more thats done, the better humanity will find itself.
Many countries are spending large amounts of their defence budgets designing stealthy aircraft
It would be much more impressive if Roke Manor Research could figure out a way to make war obsolete so we can concentrate instead on exploring the universe. Wouldn't it be something if countries did not have to spend any money at all on defence? Is there not a way for the world to organize itself so as to live in peace? I think there should be.
Oh OK. Sorry. I was daydreaming there for a second.
Perhaps you can use this to detect scatter and locate an aircraft, but this inferred position information is not the kind of thing you will be able to use on a seeking missile for example. Maybe you can use it to target some more sophisticated system to down the plane.
Neither stops the bozo with the FAE bomb (or biotoxin, or satchel nuke) in front of your govt building, or on a boat coming into NY harbor
I can just see the conversation right now....
::crash sounds::
PILOTS :
"The minute we move in there they are going spot us on their radar."
"Nu-nuh,"
"Uh-huh,"
"Nu-nuh, not if we Jam it."
"Ah- ha."
MOBILE BASE STATION JAMMED!!!!!
ENEMY:
"There's only one man who would dare give me the raspberry! LONESTAR!!!
Non-Deterministic Finite Automata
looks like a pretty clear-cut case of access-control circumvention. broadcasts or accounts of this aricraft's location may not be disseminated without the express written consent of the DoD.
When will those hackers ever learn?
Can your IM do this?
Also, Stealth aircraft tend to fly pretty high. This means that the signals are attenuated through distance, and the phone grid would have to cover a wide area to catch oblique reflections. Cellular towers put out aggregate powers if a few hundred watts at most, with the beam intentionally directed below the horizon. TV stations put out hundreds of thousands of watts... but they weren't mentioned! Military radars, OTOH, put out thousands to hundreds of thousands of watts (megawatts of peak power) with highly directional antennas pointed at the target, and with the advent of stealth, bistatic military radars are under development or in place. In fact, the F-117 lost over Serbia may have fallen prey to a bi-static trap - help by knowing its exact path and time to target.
It looks like a P.R. flack wanted some free publicity for his companies cellular products.
The only good weather is bad weather.
I seem to recall that the biggest problem with the patriot was a fortran floating point error. The system worked fine as long as you rebooted it every few hours to clear the error.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Even if you detected the airplane...
Even if a single pixel was devoted for that tiny return received by the dish covering hundreds of square miles...
Even if you could track that return between radar zones...
You'd still have a hard time telling it apart from all the other birds happily flapping around.
No. Some people have never looked at the actual numbers, or they would know that the firebombings of Dresden and Tokyo were definitely more destructive than the damage done to Hiroshima and Nagasaki. More casualties, more area destroyed, more total explosive yield, etc. Here's one sample link.
It's the calculus of war: lots of "small" weapons delivered continuously will outgun a single big kaboom. Bringing this back on topic, it's similar to the way a bunch of ordinary cell phone towers can help shoot down a billion dollar bomber.
This seems to be a similar approach to one discussed in a previous SlashDot thread, http://slashdot.org/articles/99/11/28/1723230.shtm l:
Detecting Stealth Planes
Posted by Hemos on Sunday November 28, @05:23PM
from the now-we've-got-you dept.
Zurk writes " Newsweek said China's new Passive Coherent Location (PCL) system tracked the signals of civilian radio and television broadcasts and picked up aircraft by analysing the minute turbulence their flight caused in the commercial wavelengths. cool huh ? " They hope to use it to detect the F-117A and potentially the F-22. Very cool use of technology to fix a problem.
Yeah, this theory has been proven by the MPAA.
But seriously, a moving object by its very nature displaces material and changes the relationship of its neighbouring bodies. There will *always* be an effect. Thus, there will always be something to detect. You can't outrun physics.
toeslikefingers.com - because
Looks like this would require a country to blanket their territory in receivers and if they did detect something the chances of it being a bird or a cloud are probably higher than it being an enemy plane.
I can just see it now, military detects something using this system, lobs a couple of missiles at it:
"Lietinaunt What did we get?
"No plane commander but we nailed a bald eagle, should I make a report?"
"No Lietinaunt, the last thing we need here is the EPA or any of those other green %!@#$!";
"One World, one Web, one Program" - Microsoft promotional ad
The Anti-Blog
But since they've chosen to tell everyone about this -- I think its an oveture -- "Ohh all those poor countries building stealth aircrafts that can be detected by our unproven technology" ... "let *US* build your stealth aircrafts and we'll make sure this dosen't happen to your military projects!"
Free Techno/Jazz/DNB/MI Music by guys obsessed with monkeys!
http://www.janes.com/aerospace/military/news/idr/i dr010529_1_n.shtml
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
Unless we invade Finland or Sweden,(with 100% coverage), we're ok. I'm sure Abdul Iraqi on his camel is surfing the web on his Nokia.
what about a laden swallow?
When the average soldier in your enemy's infantry is armed with a Kalishnakov and a bag of rocks, stealth matters. When your enemy's armor division consists of a black-market Stinger in the back of an AMC Gremlin, stealth matters. The US has no quarrels -- no significant ones, anyway -- with countries who have the capability of producing comparable tech... the UK, Germany, Japan, et cetera. Our poorly equipped enemies allow us to make very good use of "antiquated" technology. When you're fighting a third-world country like Canada, you don't need a friggin' F22. Unless you're trying to impress Alanis, of course.
--
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I like to watch.
Spotting this should be easy. Just look for the 'large bird' traveling at mach2.
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While it sounds "cool", i'll have to agree with other posters who speculate that this is a pure and simple PR play to boost the stock and not something terribly useful.
But a nice idea for Tom Clancy to use in his next book :)
-DVK
"The right to figure things out for yourself is the only true freedom everyone shares. Go use it"-R.A.Heinlein
Demonstrations of this stuff have been around since stealth aircraft themselves. They use "backscatter" to track the energy (radio waves at pretty much any frequency) the aircraft reflects in all directions as it travels through an RF field (which the Roke guys are setting up with mobile phones, but just about any kind of transmitter will work).
This necessarily doesn't spell the end of stealth aircraft, though, because what also makes them stealthy is that they don't reflect much energy from single-point RF sources back to the source itself, which means they're very hard for a missle to track and hit if it is guided by an onboard radar system. And as the US's own Patriot system demonstrates, remotely-guided high-speed munitions aren't all that effective yet.
b.g.
b.g.
We learned of the general uselessness of "stealthy" technology in the Serbian conflict a few years ago. The Serbs, using relatively current real-time satelite recon (probably infra red) provided by the Chinese, shot down our best "stealthy" delta wing, (which the Chinese apparently charged them the actual remains of the plane, which was packed up and sent back to China). The US afterwards "mistakenly" bombed the Chinese Saravejo Recon office (located in their local diplomatic offices of course), etc, etc. The easy to reach conclusion here is that in future conflicts, stealthy aircraft are only useful against adversaries without access to good current satellite recon... unfortunately for us, apparently available very readily via the Chinese and a host of other government and private resources. If we understand this reality, a few other logical elucidations quickly fall into place... particularly about the tenacity that the US defense establishment keeps up with the PR charade surrounding the seemingly continuously failing "space sheild" missle defense tests... the true use of this system will not be to shoot down ICBMs (as is the public assertion, and source of frequently embarrassing test results), but is instead the shooting down (or mere disabling of) adversaries' intelligence satellites (such as the Chinese one used against us in the Serb conflict). This usage is way less technically demanding than the publically stated ICBM capability... and it's likely that we're either really close, or have already acheived success with realizing the truly intended space-to-space capability of this system. So... in the future, we can discreetly disable the adversary's recon sattelites (no need to even "shoot it down"), thus assuring the safety of our "stealthy" aircraft.
Actually, they used standard technology, but studied the radar "tapes" night after night. 2 things became clear.
First, the stealth is not 100% stealth. It was showing up on the radar, about the size of a small rock. The processors for the real-time displays were trained to not look for rocks. They changed the software of the radar systems to look for rocks going 500 knots.
Second, the Air Force mission planners got lazy. They made the F117's fly the same routes over and over again, at almost the same time. So, not only did the radar operators know what to look for (rocks moving at 500 knots), they knew when and where to look.
Result? Shot down F117. They simple filled the sky with flak, old-school style.
The Russians, Chinese, and Iraquis all helped Milosovic do this, because they all had interest in seeing if it could be done. The F117's in downtown Bagdhad night after night scared the crap out of them.
Interesting side note: The reason we bombed the Chinese embassy is to destroy some F117 parts that they had bought from Milosovic.
The only way to measure doppler is to have the precise frequency of the pulse before it bounced off of the target. Since the "pulse" that you are receiving could have come from any one of a hundred cell-phones, all transmitting at slightly different frequencies, it seems unlikely that you could ever have this knowledge.
Now, since you have no doppler information, the only way to track speed is to keep track of the target and do the math (calculate the distance between two points and divide the distance by the amount of time it took to cover that distance).
Again, I could be wrong, but this method seems to be unlikely to succeed because the flight trajectory of the plane is not likely to be static (the plane is weaving). A pilot who is travelling in a straight line over hostile territory is probably not that smart.
So, I hope that I've explained why I think that it would be difficult/impossible to obtain speed information. This was all off the top of my head. Would you like more "facts"? Most people who have experience with this subject would probably tell you the same thing.
>that the only plane to be shot down by
... okay, lets say your being bombed, and you can't see who's attacking you, because they're obviously stealth. Even the ones that you *can* see, are going too fast for you to target. What do you do? You pepper the sky with your AA guns.
>Milosevic's army was a stealth aircraft. And
>they don't even have mobile phones...
The fact that a stealth bomber got hit means that one of those AA rounds was really really lucky, that's all. If AA guns could target, they'd hit more often.
SAM batteries is a different story - but also require targeting.
Engage brain before putting mouth (or keyboard) in gear. F-117's get assigned the most dangerous missions, because they are the most survivable. If you put enough lead in the air, you're going to hit something, even it it's only by luck - which is what happened in Kosovo. Sometimes in military operations (or anything else, for that matter), you can do everything right, but the other guy just gets lucky.
Why is it that the proponents of "one nation under God" are so eager to get rid of "liberty and justice for all"?
B-2's were not used operationally in the Gulf War - they were all at their bases performing their strategic Nuclear deterrance mission, which freed up a bunch of B-52's for Desert Storm. When it comes to delivering huge quantities of (dumb) iron bombs, not even the B-2 can compare to the venerable BUFF (big ugly fat *ucker). The B-2 isn't really optimized for delivering gravity bombs - even in a conventinal strike role the B-2 is equipped with standoff weapons like the Tomahawk cruise missle or the SLAM. In military parlance, B-2's are HVU's - high value units (like aircraft carriers and ballistic missle submaries) HVU's are typically your most potent weapons, but you use them in such a manner to minimize their exposure to counterattack. Think of chess - you wouldn't sacrifice your queen to take a pawn unless you had a VERY good reason for doing so (like setting your opponent up for a checkmate)
Why is it that the proponents of "one nation under God" are so eager to get rid of "liberty and justice for all"?
Monkey sense
It would seem to me that stealthy aircraft could still approach their targets from unpopulated areas where cell phone coverage is bare or non-existant. Too bad for the UK that you can approach by water on all sides, so for them their own invention is useless.
Have fun: Join D.N.A. (National Dyslexics Association)
Now, at close range, with a known location, a good RSO could probably pick out a stealth bomber with fair accuracy, but how often do we tell our enemies exactly where we are going to be and then fly right over their radar installations? That would kind of defeat the purpose....
Think outside the... Hey, where'd the friggin' box go?
what about a laden swallow?
African or European?
The US Military is exceedingly conservative. F-117' and other neat stuff that we know about now has been around and under development for a while. This is the Military-Industrial complexes public face. The old stuff.
I'm quite sure they've got loads of really wild Top Secret (and stuff that requires higher clearance) weapons that we won't know about for a similar length of time.
I'm not too worried.
A message from our sponsor
...isn't to be undetectable by radar... its to be undetectable, period.
If you figure out a way to detect the plane, the military will just develop a new way to be undetectable by your new methods. It doesn't mean we shouldn't make new stealth planes, it means we just need to do a little more research.
Stuff like this just makes for new technology. Don't knock it.
Good quote, too many chars. Seriously, the slashdot 120 char limit sucks!
Actually, stealth aircraft use RAM only as an additional measure. Most aircraft, in particular the F-117a use their faceted shape to scatter radar.
Why not just blow up the sub station? I would think those strips of Mylar would have to have been fairly bulky to prevent being melted before blowing the sub stations breaker, and the timing for letting the planes slip through would have to be fairly precise.
On the other hand, Mylar reflects radar fairly well, they could have just used all that Mylar as chaff to blind the enemy radar which would allow the planes to slip through. They would also float around for longer than it would take to bring a backup power generator online.
But why go through all this when you could simply destroy the enemy radar station? Anti-Radiation missiles are fairly mature, civilian casualties are minimized, disruptions to necessary civil services are minimized, and they are probably cheaper than a tomahawk (and certainly more accurate).
Education is a better safeguard of liberty than a standing army.
Edward Everett (1794 - 1865)
Here's a newsflash:
War is bad. Who/What/Why are we spending money on any kind of war-craft?
Cant we just grow the fuck up and realize that everyone has the same needs and priorities? My desire for a love, happiness, security and welbeing are the same as some anonymous Brazillian, Aussie, Brit, Egyptian or Korean. Im hold no anamosity towards them, id bet they hold none against me, so who's mandate do the conitnued military-industrial complex continue down this path of waste? The only thing that is certain is that if you hold large enough amounts of arms that Generals will eventually find a reason to use them.
I know it is really an aside to the technilogical issues in this article, but it always amazes me that we even need this crap - who the hell wants it?
One by one, our new high tech military tricks are being neutralized, either by selling the secrets to the Chinese
I once saw a foreign film that seems to be playing out in parallel to the present US fixation on China.
The plot was something like:
For some reason the 'effectiveness' of the present propaganda-war against the present-American-Enemy was loosing its lustre. There were people, 'black suit' types who worked in conjunction with the nameless committees of the US intelligence underworld that were in charge of occupying the public with images and ideals to coalesce the American Psyche into a single 'Enemy Unit'.
So, as the story goes, these 'black-suit' types meet in a darkly lit room (think Big Room/Big Board from Strangelove), there around a table lit in shadows were the 'leaders'. Each small group sitting around the room were given an opportunity to "pitch" (like you see in mythos associated with advertising agencies (lively, animated presentations designed to get the potential clients involved/help them see the vision)). So, here are all these little 'black ops' groups pitching their ideas for the new 'uber-enemy' for America - one that would be evil (enough), strange (enough) etc etc as to illicit the ire and loathing of the malleable American public. Some groups pitched small islands, one group pitched Canada (my favourite), and one group hit on Peru. In their 'pitch' they said things like 'Peruvians: there strange, there dark skinned - they live in South America, South America - - who knows anything about SouthAmerica? People don't know anything about Peruvians - everyone knows an Italian or a Canadian, its hard to believe that a Canadian is Anti-American, but the Peruvians - the Peruvians can be anything we make them! Now, the Peruvians dont have alot of money, this is good, we can make them appear desperate and hungry to overtake us - the Peruvians would steal your American Apple pie cooling on the window!" The 'pitchers' then showed a picture of a Peruvian in native dress (what I know of it) stealing a pie, ala a circa WWII war-bond poster, with 'Evil Peruvians!' branded on the bottom.
So, as it goes, the Peru advocates win the 'account' and go about spinning a web of anti-Peruvian propaganda via children's cereal, toy-gun packaging (with pictures of brave American soldiers killing those nefarious and cunning Peruvians on the packaging), and popular media. (think "wag the dog" types of fabrication)
Now that Ive exhausted you with this (bad) re-telling of this obscure film, what does this have to do with this article? With the quote above???
Right now, if you turn on CNN or talk to people in the street - you will see a (growing) fear of the Chinese. This sad movie tells it pretty close to the way i believe it goes (maybe minus the Strangelove scene-rip-off).
In this case, China == Peru. And the Americans have fallen for it time and time again... Russia, Cuba, Vietnamese (gooks* of all kinds), Iraq, China... America seems to define themselves more by who they hate - and who they publicly admonish than they do anything else.
For anyone who thinks this is not the case - take a step back - and replay in your mind all the images you have of the people I sighted above... what images do you have of these people? And where did they come from? What/Who's purpose is served when you feel this way? McCarthy-Anti-Communist campaigns still go on - just much more sophisticated and subtle.
Being Canadian, who's government has had very little need to whip up these straw-enemies, it is very strange watching US citizens getting constantly 'pitched' new enemies all the time... China is just the recent one.
*American 'term' not mine...
penetrated by these swift, strong hard rods.
Ha! I nearly fell off my chair - how very good of you, penetrated/strong/hard/rod sheesh, how much more phalic could that statement be! Who wouldnt want to have a swift strong rod with which you could assault anyone you'd like by penetration?
Correct me if I'm wrong, but by the time the "aircraft are flying over the area", it's a little late. They could also put microphones at the cell sites and detect the bombs exploding.
They stab it with their steely knives,
But they just can't kill the beast.
What if you use a command center to detect the aircraft, then illuminatie it with a laser (either in the visible range or some other range) and have the missles home in on the laser reflection. I'm sure you can fine a frequency that a stalth fighter reflects resonably well at.
Dresden and Hamburg represented tactics of mass destruction, not weapons. Mrs. O'Leary's cow was not a weapon of mass destruction either, and yet it burned out Chicago.
Part of the issue is that an atomic bomb, for instance, cannot really be used any other way. Any of the bombs dropped on Dresden could have been dropped on a single, clearly-defined target (a particular building, say), but they were instead dropped en masse. The enormous destruction was a result of how they were used, not of their specific nature.
In the same way, black-powder arms and muzzle-loading cannon killed 40,000 at Gettysburg, but such are not weapons of mass destruction.
This next song is very sad. Please clap along. -- Robin Zander
Eek, didn't know that! I'm not sure if I would consider that an early example of biological warfare or the first use of cluster munitions...
This next song is very sad. Please clap along. -- Robin Zander
Sarcasm aside, remember that an SR-71 is not only considerably larger, but also works with air very differently. Airflow is not a necessary evil to an airplane, but rather the stuff of life itself -- wings and jet engine intakes engines are expressly designed to catch air. We're talking here about something much less like a bird and much more like a spear.
Remember too that the SR-71, impressive as she is, was not optimised for speed per se. She needs to go long distances and be able to take off on her own as well. The X-15, for instance, technology of nearly the same generation but free of those constraints, achieved double SR-71 speeds. Obviously every orbital launch hits 25,000 mph without melting the structure. And of course, mentioning the X-15 reminds me that the SR-71 made her first flights around 1965 -- a lot has happened in the last 35 years.
Lastly, the SR-71 is designed to be reusable. The flying crowbar only has to make the flight once.
I'm not saying that this is something that could be built today, merely that it could be built in a fairly short time. There's nothing fundamentally new here -- ICBM's have dropped semi-ballistic warheads for quite some time, cruise missles have demonstrated excellent autonomous control, and anti-tank canon rounds are already kinetic-energy spears. It wouldn't be trivial, but it wouldn't be revolutionary either.
This next song is very sad. Please clap along. -- Robin Zander
Many small weapons do not constitute one large weapon, unless you want to claim that weapons of mass destruction were employed in (for instance) the American Civil War.
This next song is very sad. Please clap along. -- Robin Zander
The neat thing about radar is that a stealth aircraft also has the ability and opportunity to broadcast signals as well as absorb and redirect signals.
So this bistatic radar, these cellular networks, are working off of reflected signals off multi band and distributed receivers, without taking into account that a squad of stealthy aircraft can broadcast, in a manner, misinformation about location and direction and velocity.
Geek dating!
GPL Deconstructed
Nevertheless, stealth technology remains useful for several reasons. For starters, it is impractical to deploy this system (as far as I can tell) on aircraft, meaning that interceptors are going to be vectored right into the engagement by ground controllers. Ground controlled intercepts are generally considered to be tactically inferior to intercepts in which the controllers vector fighters into the vicinity and allow the fighters autonomous control in the final phases of the intercept (and has more or less been proven as such over the Persian Gulf and the Middle East). Shooting the planes down will still require an enemy pilot to find and track the stealth fighter, which remains difficult.
Additionally, the ordinanace involved encounters the same problem. Provided the stealth aircraft is not transmitting, a missile has to home in on a very small radar or IR signature, which may cause additional issues.
Finally, stealth was never meant to be the end-all technology. Like most military advances, it requires a tactical and strategic shift on the part of the enemy force that may make them less effective against conventional aircraft or may cause them to make an error that can be exploited. Implementing this requires command and control additions, organizational shifts, reanalysis of defensive planning, etc. At the very least, the enemy has expended substantial time, money and effort implementing a response. The onus now becomes to develop a response to the response. In this case, widespread implementation of this technology might well see the design of a cellular-frequency homing missile. Now Wild Weasels hit SAM sites, radar sites, and cellular towers (causing an additional problem when in wartime a substantial chunk of a countries cellular network goes down the first night of the war).
Witness too that, at least in the case of the USAF, the military is moving away from pure stealth. The F-22 was acknowledged to be the less stealthy of the two entries in the ATF competition, but won out due to its somewhat higher performance and usefulness as an air superiority weapon. Its stealth characteristics are useful, but it is not a stealth aircraft in the way that an F-117 or B-2 is a stealth aircraft.
Does this technology alter the landscape with regard to air defense somewhat? Absolutely. But I would judge Siemens' title "Stealth Aircraft to be Rendered Useless" to be roughly as accurate as an article appearing around 1940 or so touting radar as the invention that would "Render Bombers Useless." Stealth aircraft were only "undetectable" if one listened to the media. They will remain powerful weapons, if only because of the strategic and tactical problems they cause.
-db
One by one, our new high tech miltary tricks are being nuetralized, either by selling the secrets to the Chinese for a few million and a blowjob (thanks Bill) or by cunning high tech ingenuity.
We almost have a monopoly on space, we need to partner with the Russians to militarize space. Jerry Pournelle wrote about the High Frontier, and proposed flying crowbars. Basically, a 10 pound crowbar with tiny guidance fins and homing sensors. You drop it from orbit, it strikes at about Mach 15 (after drag), and nothing can withstand it. If we have the shuttle drop a satellite of flying crowbars or two off every trip, in several years we would be able to blanket the Earth with them, and rain Mach 15 hellfire down on anyone who attempts to disrupt the peace or endanger the American way.
There's no real defense against this, even Saddam in his Sadam-bunker would eventually be penetrated by these swift, strong hard rods.
Best of all, this is not nuclear, so it doesn't break any international treaties!
IANARO (I am not a radar operator), but I think the whole point is that radar can't detect something that small.
This, of course will have no impact on military spending relating to stealth aircraft. This is why military contract work is so profitable. First they hire you to develop a technology, then they hire you to make it inefective, then they hire you to develop a new more effective technology... A nice little perpetual spending machine. Imagine those little balls handing on strings from a bar on your desk cost the tax payers $1 million every time they complete an arc.
Don't get me wrong, I'm all for a strong national defense, I'm just saying that It's a good business to be in.
--CTH
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--Got Lists? | Top 95 Star Wars Line
- A piece from Free Republic
- A paper from Military Information Technology Online
I found both sonewhat interesting but vary light on details...Enjoy!
--CTH
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--Got Lists? | Top 95 Star Wars Line
I like how in the Air Forces' new ad campain they talk about a plane that is the size of a bird on a radar.
I'm going to go out on a limb here, but lets say i'm a radar guy, and I know the U.S. *may* be heading my direction. Now, lets say I see a bird going !MACH 2!. That would make perfect sense wouldn't it?
I'm willing to guess these planes weren't too stealthy anyway.
Siemens' new technology has circumvented the stealth fighter's access protection.
Let's get drunk and delete production data!
because flying in civ airshows and other public demonstrations requires them to be detectable. Besides, knowing where he is kind of helps a missile system, if you don't see it you ain't going to target it.
This is as much fallacy as the claimed Austrailian "we can detect B2s by their atmospheric disturbances"...
too bad the ones that bombed Serbia (they used B2s) were not detected by any European country they flew over or even the NATO stations not informed about their flight. (they flew non-stop, dropped bombs, and flew out without the local commanders being told to expect them - guess who never saw them?)
Never underestimate the military, the use air shows to both show off and to make somethings appear as they are not. (which is where these stories of "stealth" planes being tracked come from)
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
If you can't beat them, embrace and extend them.
If I recall correctly, in addition to avoiding possible civilian casualties, the mylar in nearby trees, on roofs, desert dunes, etc. had to be cleaned up, or it would blow onto the lines and short them out again. Appearantly it takes a lot longer to clean up the stuff floating around the neighborhood than it does to replace the infrastructure.
So what good is this type of defense when the attacking country destroys the cell phone network's towers? Now, they kill two birds with one stone by disabling the area's communication network and allowing the stealth aircraft to safely continue operation.
It would be humorous, though, to see a stealth aircraft pilot watching the little bars on his Nokia to see when he's safe.
Cell towers are tiny things that are generally located in populated areas. The bombing pattern you suggest would make swiss cheese out of an undefended civilian center. Any government that would authorize that sort of attack is a monster, and your military should be doing everything possible to make sure that sort of attacker does not emerge victorious, no matter how many lives it costs. With such respect for life, do you really want to meet them in person?
In any case, portable cell towers are quite common-- I see them at concerts from time to time. I would imagine that after the enemy has wasted an enormous amount of time and smart ordinance blasting your fixed cell network to bits, you could simply turn a couple of hundred mobile transmitters on and start over again.
I have not been able to download the article, but I do remember a few things from my years as a radar tech + EE school: First, cell phones use frequencies no higher than about 2GHz; most radar sets work at 10 to 30 GHz, so the same material would probably not work. However, my guess is that this technology uses a conventional radar transmitter, but use a network of receivers which report in by cell phones. Second, "stealth" planes are only stealthy in certain directions. RF absorbing material that was really effective across the full range of radar frequencies would have to be several feet thick, so the airplane couldn't fly. Instead, mostly they rely on the shape of the airplane to reflect the radar beam like a tilted mirror, away from the transmitting antenna. They use some thin radar-absorbing material, but this is only really effective where the signal is weak to start with, like with the waves scattered off the corners and the engine intakes.
Then again, maybe they just use cell phones on open-mike to catch the sound of that jet engine and badly-streamlined plane flying over. Or it could be even lower tech: In WWII, the British had a fairly effective network of thousands of people who would observe planes flying overhead and phone it in.
First, I'm going to assume that this works. While I have grave doubts about the effectiveness of this system (the company's stock is down, and they're trying to hype investors) a piggyback on civilian technology to widely distribute sensing equipment is probably the best way to detect stealth intruders. If the system is developed, and installed in...say...Iraq, (who doesn't have that many cel phones, but that's not the point) then they may be able to detect flights of B2s or F117s carrying bombs. So what? The tactical situation doesn't change unless there is some capacity to shoot down attackers. Most SAM technologies are pretty basic, and would need massive upgrades to integrate each projectile's radar with the entire cell phone network of a country. The more radio data is in transit, the easier it is to block, falsify, or jam. The place this could be useful is in defending extremely valuable targets. For instance, you could get an early warning of inbound bomber flights, and possibly, just possibly, scramble intercept fighters to defend Washington. Overall, I don't think this would change the tactical picture much at all. The Bombers are harder to hit when they're stealthy, the fighters need to be stealthy to attack each other, and there is a slight possibility that densely populated areas will be able to recognize the locations of stealth aircraft above them. The system is too unwieldy, vulnerable, and expensive for something that will effect the tactics of battle so little.
My Karma is so good, I'm the Dalai Lama...or something.
Stealth Aircraft has show it can be seen by normal radar all the way back in the Iraqi Gulf War. The problem is shooting them down. Yes it's very hard to detect them but not impossible by normal radar. In the case of Stealth aircraft stealth does not mean it is invisible it only means that it is hard to detect. Ever wonder why they don't send the 2 billion dollars B-2 bomber into enemy airspace? Because the air force are afraid of it getting shoot down.
The Australians have used the JORN radar base at Alice Springs to track U.S. stealth aircraft since 1993
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"Weapons should be hardy rather than decorative" - Musashi
"Weapons should be hardy rather than decorative" - Miyamoto Musashi
I think that goes for OS's too
Stealth technology is quite cool, still.
It was the cold war, and technology like this was more to say that we're more danerous (mostly for the sake of the general public), and to remind the "enemy" that they were inferior.
If I had my way, I'd have built vast runways, with heavily fortified hangars, and announced that I had planes that were silent, as well as invisable to radar, ir, and the naked eye.
With the money I would have saved, I could hire more interns.
Even if it looks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, you can't be sure until you see the RealDuck
Saddam knew our planes were coming in the Gulf War, hell for PR reasons, he was counting on it. He didn't know exactly where or when, but he had his men on alert at all times. But even after we dropped a few bombs, alerting him to exactly what we were hitting, he was still unable to knock a single stealth plane down, because the TARGETTING radars were ineffective.
After saying that, I find it difficult to imagine that this system would be able to provide enough resolution of the exact position of a single plane to provide targetting information. Think about the geographic dispersal of the towers, echo effects of the signals, the speed of the craft, the non-military grade of the equipment (specifically, temperature variation effects), and the accuracy needed for targetting information.
All this system will do is let a leader know that he has been hit.
I'm afraid you're terribly wrong here. Mobile phones are all over the place in emerging economies. In countries where you had to wait 5 years to get a land-line, if at all, you can now pick up a cell phone cheap pretty much anywhere. Wireless technology is really cheap and is really fast to deploy.
-- Another senseless waste of fine bytes.
As you might imagine, a bird will scatter radio waves differently than a cloud or B-2 bomber. Using multiple sensors tied together with a processing engine, they can intrepret the signals and distinguish between the organic and non-organic bombers.
It has alway been possible to track Stelth aircraf. Stealth effectively reduces the cross-section of a fighter to say the size of a bee. Now you might expect that a radair return from a bee is rather small (about -100dB) and would get lost in the noise. If you just filter for return amplitude you would be correct. On the other hand if you filter for speed you can pick out a bee traveling mach 2 with little effort. In fact, you know that it is a stealth aircraft. 20 years ago building a 22 to 28 bit ADC to grab the the data real time was a problem, now you can can just call Creative Labs and get a gross of them FedExed. The truth of the matter is that the Navy has always been able to track Stealth aurcraft, even with their original SLC8 RADAR. Counter-measures are a whole nother issue, Throwing out a ton of RF noise is not a good idea if the whole point of your aircraft is to be silent. On the other hand, if you are dealing with a bunch of ill-trained draftees Stealth does seem tooffer some advantages (Vs. gulf war) -S
I read a while back about a system the Chinese were deploying that uses commercial radio stations as the 'background' transmitters and military installations as the receivers. The military keeps track of the 'normal' radio traffic patterns and tracks aircraft based on changes in those patterns. It supposedly scares the pants of the US military cuz there are no military radar transmitters to hit, only civilian transmitters. This stealth detections sounds similar, but why do mobile phone transmissions bounce off stealth aircraft, anyone know?