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US Stealth Jet Has To Talk To Allied Planes Over Unsecured Radio
Lasrick writes "David Axe at Wired's Danger Room explains: 'For the first time, America's top-of-the-line F-22 fighters and Britain's own cutting-edge Typhoon jets have come together for intensive, long-term training in high-tech warfare. If only the planes could talk to each other on equal terms. The F-22 and the twin-engine, delta-wing Typhoon — Europe’s latest warplane — are stuck with partially incompatible secure communications systems. For all their sophisticated engines, radars and weapons, the American and British pilots are reduced to one-way communication, from the Brits to the Yanks. That is, unless they want to talk via old-fashioned radio, which can be intercepted and triangulated and could betray the planes’ locations. That would undermine the whole purpose of the F-22s radar-evading stealth design, and could pose a major problem if the Raptor and the Typhoon ever have to go to war together.'"
The Brits almost certainly invented the Cryptography involved in the 1st place!
Build a Man a Fire, and He'll Be Warm for a Day. Set a Man on Fire, and He'll Be Warm for the Rest of His Life.
I mean, they have hacked both US and Brit planes' software. So if we could persuade them to CC: the American and Brit planes, they could have direct encrypted communication, just a minor delay for round-tripping via Unit 6 1398 in the Beijing suburb.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
the American and British pilots are reduced to one-way communication, from the Brits to the Yanks.
That's okay; if the grammar and vocabularly of today's 20 and 30 year old Americans are any indication, our boys need to just shut the fuck up and listen. :p
Today "wars" can be described as
- invasions
- grab natural resources and go
- wipe your competition
Enough said.
If the F22 has to keep stealthy, it can't irradiate, period. Transmitting any sort of signal would allow a third party to triangulate its position. If the Typhoon is not concerned with hiding its position, it can transmit without worries. The only mitigation against discovery through listening in passively to the Raptor's transmission is to either devise a system to transmit on multiple frequencies in a way that cannot be distinguished with background noise, or hop frequencies in the hope that the eavesdropper won't be able to match the signal for more than a fraction of the time.
...."could pose a major problem if the Raptor and the Typhoon ever have to go to war together.'" Aww, such a sweet pair, and yet their communication is just not would it could have been when they are heading out to fuck humanity up the butthole.
"That would undermine the whole purpose of the F-22s radar-evading stealth design, and could pose a major problem if the Raptor and the Typhoon ever have to go to war together."
The pilots speak different languages anyways, so who cares? ello govna!
That would undermine the whole purpose of the F-22s radar-evading stealth design, and could pose a major problem if the Raptor and the Typhoon ever have to go to war together.
If the Raptor and Typhoon have to go to war, we'll have bigger problems.
As someone who once worked a project to implement Link 16 into a laptop on a HUMVEE, Link 16 is very easy to implement. If the Air Force wanted it, they'd have it. In all likelihood, the Air Force is unwilling to share the Raptor's targeting data, as they don't want the operational capabilities of the radar/IFF/command and decision systems to be revealed to anyone, including one of our closest allies. Such data can reveal the range of the radar, the resolution, and the characteristics of the radar when it comes to jamming and clutter. Obviously, all this data is classified as secret or above, and is almost certainly not for release to foreign individuals.
Remember, the F-22 is the only airborne weapons system that the US Government refuses to sell to other countries, because it's an apex predator. There's nothing out there that can rival it, and even the F-35, which is basically a follow-on of F-22 technology, is no match for it. Thus, we'll sell it to allied countries, but the F-22 stays US-only, in the case that if we're ever involved in an air war where we're back to old school air superiority, there are no air forces that can match ours.
That said, I remember reading an article a couple weeks ago, where a new pod is being installed in several US fighters that allow for interoperability with the F-22, over a form of encrypted radio. Basically, the pod allows the fighters to act as a sort of wireless access point, which interfaces with the F-22 and any other fighter with radios that don't talk the same language.
All this means to me is that the technology of the data network and the doctrine for using that network is evolving faster than the aircraft themselves.
The F-22's design is over 20 years old. Think about what data networks looked like 20 years ago compared to today. Considering that the F-22 is an air superiority fighter and the current war is against an enemy who has no air force, I can see how the F-22 might not be at the top of the priority list for a comms refit.
[Sir Garlon] is the marvellest knight that is now living, for he destroyeth many good knights, for he goeth invisible.
Woosh
When the US gov't gifted Chrysler with the M1 "designed for the European theater" contract to a facilitate THAT bailout, it used a 105 mm main gun, while the "NATO Standard" was 120 mm, which the Abrams later adopted. Really silly to have to carry a completely different set of ammunition: "We've got 10,000 rounds of main battle tank main gun ammo, Sir, but none of it fits the tanks that happen to be near our ammo carrier, so should we just throw the rounds at the Russians?".
I just hope the Saudi crews perform as well in the Leopard II as the Iraqis did in the T72, in case we ever have to suppress yet another US-backed potentate gone rogue.
That's easy. You just get a box at home, set up ssh to port forward everything, and just route all your traffic through that box.
What was the question again?
A good question is how much radar data from passive only F22 is to a typhoon that has its active radar powered up. F22 essentially cannot fire up its radar and stay stealthy for obvious reasons, so its passive radar only. The major part of data link is sharing targeting data. F22 is designed to feed off allied aircraft's search and fire control radar data for both target acquisition and weapon guidance.
Not having proper communications link is a bitch, that's certain. But F22 is just not designed to be fighting alongside aircraft it needs to talk to in the first place. It's the silent hunter that doesn't really see anything on its own, and just listens to what allied aircraft tells it via datalink or what it can scrounge up from passive sensor data, and then performs interception based on that data. It apparently can also occasionally fire up its own fire control radar in short pulses to minimize risk of detection, but it's simply not intended to be an actively radiating aircraft.
The stupidity here is that it has no standard NATO datalink for cases where it has to perform other roles. It's one of the reasons why F22 hasn't seen any combat to date. There are no pure air superiority missions in the modern world for US airforce, and F22 is pretty incapable of doing anything properly else because of the way it was designed. Lack of common data link is just one of the design choices that hurts that aircraft really badly when it comes to doing anything else.
Why not drop little sub transmitters with parachutes to translate the signals from secure to non-secure channel.
The "writ large" subtext of the headline is that "somebody or somebodies in defense procurement is an idiot."
Not so fast there.
1. there are coordination costs and possibly size/weight penalties associated with installation of additional equipment.
2. the act of installing additional equipment and sharing the necessary protocols is itself a security weak spot.
3. it is hard to imagine where the two aircraft would be operating together and need direct ship to ship communications...
4. especially as they always have the ability to communicte indirectly via AWACS, etc.
5. and if they were in the air together, it is highly unlikely that whatever they'd transmit would be anything except other than a short time period thing that would be useless and impossible for an enemy to make use of (such as coordination information during an air-to-air engagement)
so let's be clear, smitty - what you are basically arguing is for FURTHER gilding the defense lilly and spending what will ultimately amount fo at least one human life's worth of effort to engineer this potential security hole for some highly unlikely engagement.
sorry, but no.
This sounds as though the encryption is capable of evading triangulation. Don't know how they want to do that...
If the F22 is a top of the line fighter, why would it need stealth?
You'd think it was obvious, but there's more than one soldier been caught with a smartphone running a location app.
the American and British pilots are reduced to one-way communication, from the Brits to the Yanks.
That's okay; if the grammar and vocabularly of today's 20 and 30 year old Americans are any indication, our boys need to just shut the fuck up and listen. :p
It's become clear to me from what I see on various internet forums, including Slashdot, that almost nobody under the age of 30 in any English speaking nation has an education worth having. So I wouldn't hold my breath that the Brits would be any better than Americans.
RAF and USAF pilots just need to use cockney rhyming slang. enemies will die laughing and the war ends quickly.
The Link-16 US (NATO) airborne crypto-comms system was rather late to the fighter jet scene. Both the soviets, with their encrypted analogue symbol based ground-controlled interception infrastructure and the swedes with their amazingly advanced digital "Stril" systems preceded it. (What their Gripen has with the TIDLS comms system nowadays versus Link-16 is like a trekkie holodeck compared to TV at the Berlin Summer Olympics.)
The problem is, stealth aircraft can only talk to each other via directional beams (radio with a narrow cone of emission and well-supressed sidelobes or laser, if there is line of sight). Laser is dependent on the weather and there is no such thing as a perfectly supressed sidelobe. The communist czechs had their Tesla factory, which manufactured tape decks and a passive radar called Tamara, which specialized in collecting minuscule seeping radio emissons. After the soviet block fell, Uncle Sam purchased the Tesla company and promptly sent it to the grinders wholseale. Yet, the tech behind Tamara is know to the russians and the chinese and they have derivate systems.
What remains for the stealth aircraft is to communicate via encrypted directed radio beams with well-supressed sidelobes and hope that transmitting according to LPI (Low Probability of Intercept) algorythms will prevent the enemy not just from eavesdropping, but also from realizing that any transmission is going on. That beliefe better be true, as there are huge computing and advanced RF electronic requirements, as well as costs behind LPI, which principle is also used in radar emissions, especially with the new beam-steared AESA active radars.
Currently more and more air forces are trying to solve plane-to-plane comms via satellites, so the transmitting parties RF emmission beam points upwards and is more difficult to notice for the enemy. The drawback is the time skip if the sats are geo-stationary. if the sats fly low, they can become single point of failure as the enemy downs them with missiles. Anyhow, the cost of airborne satcom is very high, but e.g. the zionist entity pays for it using american pockets, so it is not a problem for them...
"the American and British pilots are reduced to one-way communication, from the Brits to the Yanks."
Well, at least then we can claim ignorance. "Bomb that hospital over there", "wipe out that rocket launcher that's really a new reporters", etc. can be greeted with "Sorry, can't hear you. By the way, would you like to sign the Geneva Convention yet?"
Reminds me of Blackadder in the trenches trying to avoid the order to go "over the top":
"I said, there's a terrible line at my end. You are to advance on the enemy at once."
"Well, as far as I can tell, the message was, "he's got a terrible lion up his end, so there's an advantage to an enema at once."
Another example of monumental stupidity! I mean, really, a monument should be dedicated to this one ....
You can't talk much without oxygen anyway.
Maybe they can get all the pilots Verizon iPhones? Just don't let then use the Map app.
Just give me $350 Billion dollars --- said greedy defense contractor.
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
It's actually a feature. It saves the Britons from having to put up with what the Americans do to their language.
Time to bring in the WW2 Navajo code talkers... Nothing like using a language that no one else can understand! :-)
HEY! Imma Ninja!
Maybe paint it bright Orange and put a few dozen loud airhorns on it!
Maybe paint across the wings "Hey! Imma a Stealth fighter!" in black bordered red letters as well...
HEY Imma Ninja!
You have to use vector potential communications if you want to be able to transmit from a stealth fighters / bombers without the use of a conventional radio signal.
There are more variables in electromagnetism than you learned about in Maxwell's equations. They were edited out by Heaviside because they don't normally have any measurable effect in real world experiments. They only show up in things like a SQUID (Superconducting QUantum Interference Device) used to detect faint magnetic fields. (The SQUID actually detects the A field, which the B field is the curl of).
Because the knowledge of these additional values (there were 20 original equations, all in quaternion notation) has pretty much been lost, we're missing out on a lot of cool tech. It's my hope that we pick these things back up as this becomes more widely known.
You can transmit a signal that no normal radio will pick up. It needs an actively powered plasma antenna to be received.
My favorite High Cost Military Equipment With Low Cost Achilles heel story is about the Stryker armored vehicle. The Pentagon spends ~$200,000 to put the M151 remote machine gun mount on the Stryker APC to avoid a crewman being exposed to enemy fire while operating the .50 cal machine gun. But if that solider runs out of the standard load of 200 rounds of ammo they have climb outside vehicle and expose themselves to enemy fire to reload the weapon.
Are you kidding me? Are we to believe that encrypted radio transmissions can't be triangulated? Give me a break.
The point of the whole secure-comms thing as I understand it is to have one 22 staying well out of range of the hostiles with its targeting radar active (which totally screams HI GUYS HERE I AM LOOK AT ME YAAAAAAAAAAH!), feeding the info unidirectionally to a few more Raptors that are much closer and have all their radio and radar emitters quiet; they receive the data, feed it to their tracking and targeting systems, and fire all without (theoretically) compromising their stealthiness - the bad guys see one fighter 150 miles away and think "ha ha dumbass is lighting us up from out there!" and next thing they know six AMRAAMS appear out of thin air 20 miles away.
Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored. - Aldous Huxley
The US Military uses the SINGCARS (Single-Channel Ground and Airborne Radio System)/ASIP (Advanced System Improvement Program), a.k.a. the RT-1523 series radio. The radio takes in COMSEC (Communication Security) keys from the AN/CYZ-10 Data Transfer Device or SKL (Simple Key Loader).
This is the bottom line up front: We don't share our keys with other countries because it will violate OPSEC (Operational Security). The US does not want any other nation to have it's secure key. There are specific keys generated for the use between NATO allied countries...
This article is a waste of time to read because you can replace 'high tech plane' with any other US equipment and X country and you have the same story.
people still use the word yanks? been a while since i've heard that word. just saying
I work with military radios. Every military has different radios from different mfgers (Harris, Thales, Kongsberg, etc) and even across militaries with the same model of radio, the firmware/waveforms are potentially different because they're not necessarily intended to work together... A radio upgrade takes years and has to be staged and so is scheduled a decade in advance... To say nothing of keys, and so on...
from the song Yankee Doodle Dandy. Mark Twain wrote A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court. i couldn't find the post i just made so i make another one. maybe firefox is acting bad
Perhaps the designers of the aircrafts envisioned a time in the future when the aircrafts might be fighting against each other... In which case you certainly would not want the pilots to be able to talk to each other without Command finding out.
"Piter, too, is dead."
The genocidal depravities that control the armed forces of the UK and USA only war against helpless victims with primitive military technologies, and then only after even the slightest ability to resist has been bombed to dust, alongside hundreds of thousands of civilians in the vicinity of those defensive systems.
On the other hand, against the Russians or even the Chinese, the lack of encryption on radio chatter would be the least of the problems faced by the sickening war-criminals of Britain or America.
The military-industrial complex of the West is free to make vastly over-priced, poorly designed garbage because those that find themselves as targets have only the equivalent of sticks and stones to defend themselves. Take Tony Blair's current murderous wars of North Africa. A handful of Uniformed European goons can easily clear out a town or city (while neatly sowing the seeds for a much wider and bloodier 'civil war' - the real intent).
If a target nation has DARED to invest in a decent air-defense system from Russia (the best in the world), and uses it to shoot down US or NATO planes, its cities will immediately suffer massive missile attacks. In the case of Iran, these missiles will be nuclear. It is no co-incidence that the worst war-crimes of WW2 were NOT the death camps, but the deliberate destruction of entire cities, including their civilian populations, by the British and Americans. Even Genghis Khan and his sons refused to be as murderous as the Allies during WW2.
Of course, the owners of Slashdot salivate at the prospect of nuclear war in Iran at the behest of Israel, and promote as many war propaganda articles as possible. For them, the racist psychopathic speed-freaks that operate these flying Crimes against Humanity are the greatest heroes. Interesting that at the beginning of the 20th Century, the prospect of death from the air was universally condemned as obscene.
Even back then, there were times when radio silence was required. Funny as it sounds, pilots occasionally used hand signals (assuming they were in visual range, of course)
https://app.box.com/WitthoftResume Code: https://github.com/cellocgw
Sorry if this is a dumb question, but if the any two countries are working together, then there must be SOME secure communication link between them, right? Why can't the pilot of one aircraft relay his message home via his home country's secure link, then use the secure link between the two countries to pass it from one country to the other, and then the other country sends the message via their secure link to the other pilot? Sure it's some latency there, but is there some obvious reason I am not seeing why this would not be feasible?
Encrypted comms still requires a transmission and therefore can be triangulated. It only prevents others from knowing content.
'Do not go where the path may lead, go instead where there is no path and leave a trail'. Emerson
Well even the Romulans had to decloak their warbirds from time to time. Seems the F22 Raptor is no exception.
Once upon a time, we had switchboards where people physically connected two party lines. Just do the same connect something on our back end to something on their back end. Problem Solved.
The article is really funny and looks like a talk from World War II technology ... the comments are even funnier ... the problem is that the US gov and worse the US extremist racist society ... look upon other countries as primitives .. stone age people. Nowadays countries outside the NATO have more sophisticated means to triangulate NATO warplanes other than listening to old fashion communications between two warplanes.
About people bragging what the US did in IRAQ, well Saddam wasn't toppled by the US and the US couldn't invade IRAQ if the IRAQI people didn't help the US to topple Saddam ... but then ask those who fought in IRAQ why did they have to leave it afterwards ?! is it really because the mission had ended ?! .... giggles ^__^