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North Korea Forced US Reconnaissance Plane To Land
First time accepted submitter ToBeDecided writes "A U.S. military reconnaissance plane was reportedly forced to perform an emergency landing during a major military exercise near the North Korean border in March. As revealed by the South Korean defense ministry, a strong signal transmitted from the north disrupted GPS in the area surrounding the position of the RC-7B aircraft. Without information about their position, the pilots were forced to abort their mission and return to South Korea. This raises the question whether the U.S. military would be able to perform operations in North Korea given how fragile their equipment seems to be."
This raises the question whether the U.S. military would be able to perform operations in North Korea given how fragile their equipment seems to be."
This says nothing about fragile equipment, this is about a jammer putting out a signal stronger than what is coming from the satellites above. The signal from the satellites is well known, and thus figuring out how to jam it is just a matter of signal strength and what type of jamming they want to do. Do they want to just bury the signal in noise, or are they trying to send false data to lure US and ROK units into NK air and sea space?
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It's believable that the GPS system got disrupted, but it's hard to believe that this somehow forced them to land. If they were doing recon, then GPS is pretty critical so that they can exactly pinpoint what they're surveying. However, even the lowliest pilots can navigate without GPS (this is required to pass any level of flight school, let alone military-level). I can understand the mission being scrapped due to this type of disruption, but I can't believe that they were in any sort of danger.
"This raises the question whether the U.S. military would be able to perform operations in North Korea given how fragile their equipment seems to be."
What an amazingly stupid statement. All kinds of things to consider:
1) Rules are different for peace time and war time. You are more careful in an exercise than in combat. Planes have other navigation systems, like inertial navigation, however they aren't as precise. During a drill, you take the careful approach, abort, and back out. In combat, probably not.
2) The reason precise positioning is so important in this case is because they need to make sure to not cross the border. This matters less in wartime. There are things that call for precise positioning but not ever flight needs it all the time.
3) They managed to get one plane to land. Oh wow, that would be useful if the US had 2 planes but they don't, they have thousands. Does the system work so well against that many?
4) Anything generating a signal is a target. Lock on the signal and blast it. There are even missiles for that sort of thing called AGM-88 HARMs. Their design is to nail radar facilities but it wouldn't take much change to make them nail GPS jammers, and the US may already have models for that.
5) How well is this going to work if you don't know the planes are even there, like say the B-2Bs, which they can't detect to target, and yet which can carry tons (literally) of precision munitions?
While I'm sure the US isn't pleased about this and it doesn't help, it isn't as though this would suddenly stop US craft from functioning. All it can do is stop precise navigation in whatever area it is effective in. It also can only do so as long as it can transmit. Anything hostile that broadcasts a signal had better be able to move fast and defend itself. If not, it will go 'asplode in a big hurry.
That eventuality is presumed within the question of "whether the US military would be able to perform operations in North Korea". The question being asked is whether or not, should the need arise, the US military would be able to function in or near North Korea given the situation described above. The "need arising" means war. So, yes, presumably in peactime North Korea is able to disrupt the navigation systems of US recon planes in the area, and removing that capability would be an act of war.
Should hostilities start, presumably those capabilities would be disabled (or at least such disabling would be attempted) and whether or not that would be an act of war would be a moot question-- else why is there a need for the US to "conduct operations" in North Korea?
I'm inclined to believe there's more to it than what's in the story. Military aircraft do not rely solely on GPS for guidance. Perhaps drones and missiles do, but piloted military aircraft have redundant systems for guidance, including a sextant. Why do you think all aircraft other than a few fighters have a pilot and copilot? The copilot can act as navigator, and most tactical aircraft also have a navigator in addition to the two pilots.
Of course, this being just a drill, they may have said "screw it" and just landed. Any real reconnaissance mission would have be continued using redundant systems.
Or, they may have wanted to give that dike looking Kim Jong-il a big head and make him think he made a state of the art US military aircraft run for the boarder.
Any way you look at it, unless he zapped the plane with an EMF pulse strong enough to knock out the avionics systems, there is no way he could have done anything electronically to make them have to perform an emergency landing.
Ditto for the military naval vessels. The civilian naval vessels, yeah, it's possible they don't have anything other than GPS.
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That was the procedure in Iraq. Listen for anything broadcasting on GPS frequencies and hit with laser targeted bombs. Once they were quiet move back to GPS.
Not currently an option for North Korea at the moment, so turning around and flying off is probably a good call.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
South Korea (and its allies, like the US and Japan) and North Korea are technically still at war with each other and people do occasionally get killed. So a lot of "acts of war" happen rather frequently. A more nuanced view IMHO is that this would be an unnecessary and risky escalation of a minor hostility.
This raises the question of 'How did they do this in World War II, before we had GPS?'
Very badly. Aerial navigation in WWII barely worked. Bombers routinely had trouble finding their targets. The V-1 and V-2 could at best hit a city-sized target; using them to attack an airfield was hopeless. (Had they been accurate enough to hit airfields, the Battle of Britain might have turned out differently.) There were various radio beam schemes, most of which were jammable.
Much bombing was done by sending in the best navigators as "pathfinders". They dropped incendiaries, and the other bombers dropped bombs on the resulting fire. Both sides occasionally set up big bonfires to divert bombers looking for such fires.
This is all coming from one story from Agence France-Presse. More info is needed. The US DoD says they don't have a record of this happening.
It's possible that it might be a South Korean plane of a US type, not a USAF plane. If someone was just up on a routine training flight, they might choose to land due to a GPS failure. With no mission to complete, there's no reason not to. Wait for Aviation Leak to cover the story.
All major USAF aircraft have inertial navigation capability, and have for decades. Everyone assumes GPS will be jammed. Even "smart bombs" have a low end inertial navigation system, one that gets its initial fix from the much better INS in the aircraft and only has to guide for about a minute.
First because of all the claims "I've got a friend who..." has to be the least reliable form of evidence ever. Sorry, but the amount of made up shit out there is legendary, and gets worse in each retelling. It isn't just a story, it is hearsay of a story.
Then there's the fact that military radars don't work at 2.4GHz. If the S band was in heavy use for that, there would be problems with interference with other 2.4GHz devices. Military radar is mostly X band (8-12GHz). If you think that these things can't be designed to sniff for different ranges, you are kidding yourself.
Then there's signal strength. A microwave's magnetron is 1000 watts or so, and is not designed for directional transmission. Military radar is an order of magnitude above that or more. It is also steered directionally towards what you want (either mechanically or by phased arrays) to keep power dispersion down. A microwave would not show up at all the same as a military radar.
Finally there's the fact that, well, it clearly didn't do much even if it happened. Yugoslavia lost, rather badly, to nothing but an air war. They left Kosovo. It wasn't as though the NATO planes were befuddled and they had to send in ground troops. It was the first war where airpower alone did the trick.
Back on topic, that kind of thing would do jack and shit for the North Koreans with regards to GPS jamming. Not only does the signal need to be much more powerful, but it is the wrong band. GPS works in the L band. Building high power, L band decoys might work... But then those are probably effective jammers so no real difference.
They landed normally. It wasn't like the thing dropped out of the sky, they broke off and landed back at their base. They had to navigate to do that.
As I said in my other post, I'm sure it was for safety reasons and not crossing the border reasons that they called it off. Why take risks you don't have to in training?
Why should the plane demonstrate whether it has ability to navigate under a certain type of jamming? I lived close to the inner-german border at cold war times and i saw the funny patterns which were flown, obviously to test the enemy radar capabilities and confuse them.
I do wonder if the reason they aborted was simply because it was the easier thing to do. If North Korea are being dicks, it's far easier and less risky to just let them get on with it - so long as they're not doing anything more than just being a PITA.
I'm sure the crew of an RC-7B is actually more than capable of navigating without GPS, if they needed to. Pilots managed it for decades before GPS was invented. Sailors managed it for millennia.
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This raises the question whether the U.S. military would be able to perform operations in North Korea given how fragile their equipment seems to be."
Let's assume that the incident really did happen. The US has already denied it, but less assume it happened. Jamming is all about blasting a very loud signal that drowns out other signals. During a military operation GPS jamming the US is a pretty ineffective technique for a number of reasons.
First, there are a number of methods of navigating and targeting without GPS. GPS is easy and accurate, but if all of the GPS satellites fell out of the sky, they US military would still happily navigate its planes around and drop bombs. The US military is designed to go toe to toe with Russia and China. Go ahead and assume that the idea that their GPS satellites might be denied to them has crossed their minds. The US doesn't build stealth bombers to kill sheep herders. The US military might be good and killing sheep herders, but it is designed to fight a modern military.
Second, if you are dumb enough to turn on a GPS jammer powerful enough to knock out a plane's GPS navigation during a time of conflict, you pretty much deserve the missile that is going to fly up your arse a few minutes later. Jamming is done by blasting a very powerful signal out into the air. A very powerful signal is trivial to track. You might as well paint your GPS jamming equipment bright red and leave it out in an open field with arrows pointing to it. The first thing the US does in any sort of air war is to level anything that transmits. Normally, this is for taking out radar stations to blind air defenses, but it also applies to any attempts to jam. You really don't want to try and get into an ECM battle with the US. If you are screaming at the top of your long loud enough to jam GPS, you are being more than noisy enough for a missile to follow the signal back to the source.
Third, the airplane was not 'forced down'. If the story is true, what happened was they aborted their mission. That seems like a pretty legitimate thing to do if the mission isn't critical. I am sure they could have carried on if they wanted to, but they decided to play it safe. They were flying close to hostile territory doing a mission that will be fine if it waits a day or two longer. Hell, they might not even known they were being jammed until after the fact and were just concerned that their GPS equipment was malfunctioning. Delaying a signal flight for a couple of hours is hardly a stirring victory. If those plans had been sent to do something hostile, GPS jamming wouldn't have worked. The jammers would have been quickly destroyed or the plans could have navigated and hit their targets without GPS, or more likely, both would have happened. The jammer would have been destroyed and the plans on a mission would have merrily carried on without waiting.
This whole article is sensationalist crap.
I doubt it was near the border, more likely the U.S. plane completely disregarded the border and the U.S. government is lying about the whole thing.
When I made my military service in the Swedish air force in the early 1990's, several NATO spy planes passed over Swedish air space every week. Since there was no point in letting U.S.A. know that the Swedish defence system was able to see them, Sweden only complained about a very small number of the really slow or clumsy ones and then got some lame excuse that they had navigated wrong. Since U.S./NATO had many moles within the Swedish Armed Forces, they likely knew that Sweden knew anyway, they also likely knew that we could have taken down at least 1/3 of them while they were still inside Swedish air space, even if the passovers usually took less then a second. The planes was way to fast, well camoflaged and agile to be civilian aircraft’s, there were never any doubt that they were military or that most of them came from NATO (unless NATO allowed foreign spy planes to land on their military bases and air craft carriers). [ Biting my lip to not expose anything that could still be a Swedish military secret ]
There were occasional Russian spy planes passing over Sweden too, but at the time I made my military service, the Warsaw pact and the Soviet Union had just ceased to exist and the Russian government was more focused on what happened inside their country then spying on foreign nations. At least at that time, Russian spy technology was also still more advanced then the NATO one, so they could likely get the same information as the NATO spy planes without flying into foreign territory.
P.S. Most of the NATO spy planes likely didn't spy on Sweden, but on Russia and other former Warsaw Pact countries, most of the spy planes passing over Sweden flew into such territories or turned just before they reached their borders, Sweden just happened to be in between. NATO/U.S. had easy and cheap direct access to that kind of Swedish military secrets through all their moles within the Swedish armed forces, no need to send expensive air planes.
Because a minor navigational error during an exercise could cause an international incident. If we were at war, that would be irrelevant.
We've always been at war with North Korea.
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The Battle of Britain was in the summer of 1940. The first V-1s were launched shortly after D-Day in June 1944. The first V-2s were fired operationally several months later.
The Pathfinder bombers were purely on the Allied side, in Europe no less. What about the other sides to the conflict, in other theaters? Typical Ameri-eurocentric view of WWII, misinformed and blindly following the narrative instead of the facts.
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The V-1 and V-2 could at best hit a city-sized target; using them to attack an airfield was hopeless. (Had they been accurate enough to hit airfields, the Battle of Britain might have turned out differently.)
Battle of Britain - 1940. V1/V2 - 1944/45. Most weapons are ineffective if they come along 4 years too late.
In 1940, the Germans had a weapon that was accurate enough to hit even tanks, much less airfields, the Stuka dive bomber. The trouble is, dive bombers are very vulnerable to fighter opposition unless you have air supremacy, which was what the Germans were trying to achieve in Britain. The Stukas suffered heavily from the RAF and were rapidly withdrawn from the Battle of Britain, which indeed hampered the German ability to take out those airfields.
After the V2 campaign started Germans installed a post-launch radio navigation system which improved the V2 accuracy to a few 100 meters or better. Thanks to the ULTRA / Enigma decrypts, the Brits knew that they were testing this against English targets, were worried about the improved accuracy, and instituted a deception campaign to convince the Germans that they were not actually hitting what they were aiming at. It worked, and they never really made good operational use of the more accurate aiming capabilities.
Without information about their position, the pilots were forced to abort their mission and return to South Korea
My, what did pilots do before GPS?
Instead of being "forced to perform an emergency landing" it was probably more like they had the intel they needed and were done for the day.
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Almost all of the time. The US has by far the world's most powerful military, and has for over a half century. For over a century before that the US military was among the top 5, though probably actually still the most powerful since about the 1860s, but confined to North America. During that time the US has invaded only its neighbors to the west (native nations) and south (Spanish Mexico, and then Mexican Mexico), and not for a century now, and very occasionally small distant countries with either no substantial military (Grenada), or similarly sized military (Iraq, Nazi Germany), or substantial counter-insurgency communities (Vietnam, Afghanistan).
Yes, the US is at war (overt or covert) almost all of the time. But there have always been far more opportunities for the US to make war with its huge military and bloodthirsty population than it has exploited. During most of its history other nations with big militaries have made more war.
So while most of US history has featured acts of war by the US, that's just a small percentage of the time the US could have committed acts of war. Most of the time something's stopping us, because we aren't doing nearly as much as we could.
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I agree. ALL aircraft have on-board inertial navigation systems as well. And when all else fails, a map and a compass works just fine too. I smell BS.
Agreed, plus this seems like a pretty dumb thing to do if they were ever planning a war, to show us all their new toys since now we know what they're capable of and can figure out a strategy. It's like they're showing us their cards, wouldn't a powerful GPS jammer be something they'd want to keep hidden? Pull out the GPS jammer when the GPS-guided tomahawk missiles are on their way, not when a reconnaissance plane is doing a annual drill.
I think it went like this:
Pilot: Command we're experiencing problems with GPS, some sort of interference
Command: Can you identify the source?
Pilot: Seems to be originating from NK
Command: Is it effecting your ability to fly?
Pilot: Negative
Command: Continue operations as scheduled and chart locations of interference so we can pinpoint jammer locations.
Pilot: Roger
Command: (We were only doing a yearly drill but NK gave us the exact location of their GPS jammers! NK you are very stupid)
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