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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.'"
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."
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?
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...
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.
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!"
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.
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
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.
"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"?
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.
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.
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.
Spotting this should be easy. Just look for the 'large bird' traveling at mach2.
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>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
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?
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
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!
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
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.
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