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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."
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.