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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.'"
No, the Romans had it (hence their successful invasion of Britain).
Surely they could solve this using a verbal code.
From now on, frog is me, sandwich means you and lemon means rocket. So, come on, sandwich, build me a lemon â(TM)cause froggy wants to come home.
Unfortunately they were too busy making tea to be smug about this latest development.
"There is a way that seems right to a man, but its end is the way of death." Proverbs 16:25 (NKJV)
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
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.
Don't forget French and Poles. Credit where is due.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryptanalysis_of_the_Enigma
Actually most of the stuff that makes up PKI (Public Key Infrastructure) was invented at Bletchly Park (UK) during the war. Obviously Encryption has a very long history but the encryption used in the F22 is probably loosely based on a Secure PBX designed by Alan Turing.
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.
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.
Africa is still full of old school wars. We just don't see them talked about on news because it's not really in interests of anyone to have voting sheep know that real wars are still fought, and as a result start thinking that wars aren't about sexy hardware and war heroes and supporting your troops (several from safety of at least one ocean away). Not having modern weaponry, good support base far away from conflict and hatred for your neighbour that can only be born from cohabiting for millenia makes for a wonderful pot dish of war.
"So by the time America came in - ‘cause you were watching a U.S. cavalry film, ‘cause the U.S. cavalry always comes in right just towards the end of the film - ( sings charge melody ) "Ok, let's go America!" ( charge melody ) "I love the smell of Europe in the morning! So, how're you doing?", we were going, "Fucking ‘ell, where've you been?" "Ah, having breakfast. So, what's going on, hey?'" - Eddie Izzard (Dress to Kill)
Surely they could solve this using a verbal code.
I guess "secure" means more than "secret" in the context of TFA. As it is mentioned that regular radio can be triangulated, hence I am assuming that "secure radio" should be protected from that. Which might mean serious frequency hopping and probably bouncing signal from big birds flying above etc...
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.
You clearly failed to triangulate the humour as it flew over.
Probably extreme high frequency narrow beam to satellite.
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.
"Go to war together", not "go to war with each other".
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
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...
Go to war together... meaning fighting on the same side. Such as a squadron of F-22's and Typhoons working together during an op / firefight / etc.
The wars in Africa are old school, in the sense that it's a bunch of people fighting a bunch of people with somewhat decent weapons, on the ground. For the most part, they don't have fighter jets, they don't have close air support, they don't have forward air controllers, they don't have long range artillery, just a bunch of people with Kalashnikovs shooting each other. These are the types of wars that really haven't been fought by the developed world since about World War I.
Against who? Anyone who can field anything that could even shoot in the general direction of a single F-22 also have nukes.
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.
Europe, according to the grandparent post.
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
Indeed :)
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.
For the same reason that the world MMA champion doesn't go around picking fights with enraged crocodiles: being the best of your species doesn't mean you're invincible. In this case, you want to avoid surface to air missiles.
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
Another example of monumental stupidity! I mean, really, a monument should be dedicated to this one ....
Against the stone-throwing terrorists, obviously. You've never heard of the "shock and awe" method of warfare? That's why $200,000,000 planes are needed to attack people with $20 AK-47s.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
He was probably referring to public key cryptography, which was indeed invented in Britain first. Due to the official secrets act, it was not revealed until after some clever people in the US figured it out, too. Interesting anecdote: The Brit who came up with it figured out all the mathematics involved in his head without writing anything down, as he did it at home, where his job forbade him from writing anything work-related down.
Far more importantly, these are wars fought where people involved actually live. There is a massive disconnect in the Western countries about the entire concept of war, largely driven by mass media.
You see, even modern wars fought by West, like Iraq and Afghanistan are fought on the ground. The main difference is that one party only has army living out the realities of the war, while its civilian population is far away and doesn't have to experience any of the harsh reality of wars. Wars like Iraq and Afghanistan, only the enemy civilians are exposed to the war.
And yes, I know that official propaganda line is that they're not the enemy. It doesn't change the fact that they are treated like enemy civilians of occupied enemy nation, and the fact that they react like such civilians, by widely supporting local guerilla freedom fighters who are fighting asymmetric war against far more powerful invader that has no non-mercenary civilians of its own exposed to the war.
Personally I recommend BBC's Bomb Alley.
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.
Since when does encryption prevent radio signals from being triangulated? (Hint: it doesn't).
I use Friend/Foe + mod-point modifiers as a karma/reputation system.
There is no western interest in the areas mainly due to lack of oil in the ground. Or other sufficiently valuable resources.
No I say that wrong, as there are valuable resources in Africa. It is more that as long as those wars are fought, no-one is able to actually keep track of what western companies - who secure their installations using private-hire armies - remove from their lands. And that's a win for the western world, who as a result are not really interested in stopping those wars.
Well, also not entirely true, that is unless some islamists start to actually gain ground, like recently in Mali, after which western forces jump in to restore the balance of power and to prevent the conflict from ending.
I don't disagree with you there, at all.
That said, I personally disagree with the decoupling of civilians from enemy aggressors, as well as the focus on eliminating collateral damage. Sure, it makes you look nice in the papers, but if you're going to war with someone, it should be all-out war. Bring everybody in, decimate the aggressors, and be done with it. I'm tired of this line that we need to make sure that we're sensitive to the people that live there, when any one of them could strap a bomb on and kill twenty American soldiers.
Also, while I was and am a supporter of what the US did in Iraq, both from a 'remove Saddam' and 'build a relatively healthy, friendly nation,' I've become wholly unsupportive of our action in Afghanistan. We're just spinning our wheels in a country where we'll never be able to implement a healthy government, spending a metric crapload of money on people that will never support us, and overextending our active duty military (and reservists) such that we're now going to furlough them or lay them off, further reducing our expeditionary capabilities.
TFA mentions that F22s would have been used in Lybia, if not for these communication issues. So there you have your answer.
Just like the B2 was used against Saddam in Iraq. Weapons the enemy doesn't have an answer to - that at least makes kinda sure your plane will come back unharmed, and that the mission will be accomplished. That doesn't mean a lesser aircraft could also have done the job, it's just making extra sure the job is done.
You just triggered a thought. It is possible to build an emitter (transmitter + antenna) that simulates a completely different emitter, including a diffuse one. This is done by working backwards from the far field equations. This was originally done (AFAIK) to develop a sonic equivalent of a laser that worked underwater - the scientists worked backwards from the far field equation for a coherent sonic beam, and successfully came up with and built a sonic emitter that resulted in the desired coherent beam. Another recent related example of working the equations are the successful experiments in 'invisibility cloaks'. So by determining what the far field of a diffuse emission would be, it should be possible to build a radio transmitting system that was essentially invisible in the sense of determining where it came from, at least from a significant distance.
In fact, a similar methodology might be effective in countering the latest threat to stealth - reading the disturbances in the milieu of the many terrestrial radio sources such as cell towers and power lines. As early as the Kosovo war, experimenters successfully located stealth planes by measuring the distortions in the field that is generated by the cell tower network. This is somewhat like seeing the distortions of ocean waves caused by islands or other fixed objects. So, by continuously monitoring those fields, a stealth plane could compute the necessary interference to make its own distortions of the fields disappear.
It's easier to be a result of the past, but more fun to be a cause of the future! http://www.spacefinancegroup.com/
Whoosh! Or simply a bad joke. Was going for the +1 Funny
I will say there is something 'unchivalrous', unfair and perhaps war-crime-worthy in using weapons that do not expose one's own fighters to some level of risk. Such as people in Kansas City or wherever driving drones over another nation. I think this is something intuitively understood by most people, as demonstrated by the terroristic aspects of various 'robot war' movies such as Terminator et al - viewers intuitively feel something worse than plain fear when the enemy personnel are beyond reach or are controlled entirely by machines. This was also exemplified by Picasso's "Guernica" painting, depicting the horror inflicted on civilians by the new pre-WWII German bombers near the village of Guernica, Spain during that country's Civil War.
I think there is a fundamental difference between overwhelming force, and force that is entirely robotic and controlled remotely by people who are at no risk of harm.
I would not be surprised if, in another hundred or two hundred years, use of such overwhelming tactics has become defined in international law as a war crime.
OTOH, I would also not be surprised if we've gone the other way and agreed that it's OK to use nerve gas to kill anyone we don't like. Either way, it'll be long after I'm outahere.
It's easier to be a result of the past, but more fun to be a cause of the future! http://www.spacefinancegroup.com/
the world MMA champion doesn't go around picking fights with enraged crocodiles
Although I have to say, I'd pay good money to watch a match like that.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
Actually the main reason was because our multinationals controlled these just fine until recently, and wars were often used by said multinationals to improve their extraction terms with locals.
And nowadays we cannot really go to open war with China that uses its state companies to do the same thing.
I'm tired of this line that we need to make sure that we're sensitive to the people that live there, when any one of them could strap a bomb on and kill twenty American soldiers.
It's always a bad idea to lose support in the local population, even if it tires you.
Fighting a war without local support means that most of your army has to stay behind in occupied territory busily fighting local insurgents, and as you rightly said, they can just strap a bomb on and kill twenty American soldiers.
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.
That said, I personally disagree with the decoupling of civilians from enemy aggressors, as well as the focus on eliminating collateral damage. Sure, it makes you look nice in the papers, but if you're going to war with someone, it should be all-out war.
Also, while I was and am a supporter of what the US did in Iraq, both from a 'remove Saddam' and 'build a relatively healthy, friendly nation,'
Well then you have a problem because while it may be argued that the ends justify the means, that argument falls apart when the means contradict and thus prevent the ends.
All-out-war is over because the political goals of war have changed. You simply cannot fight a war of "liberation" without respecting the civilians. And this was self-evident in the years of complete and utter failure in Iraq. Sure, we didn't engage in "all out war" against a poorly understood collage of insurgent forces because that's a completely ineffective way to fight an insurgency unless you're willing to go the Roman or Mao Tse Tung route and use genocide. Which would have resulted in us "winning" for a definition of "winning" completely different than what we started with. The warfare equivalent of flipping the chessboard. Good job. You "won". Slow clap.
So instead we tied our soldiers' hands with rules of engagement while simultaneously maintaining a flippant attitude toward colateral damage -- enough to "look nice in the papers" back home, but definitely not the ones in Iraq. This was because the people in charge, like you, really would have rather engaged in all-out war but knew they couldn't because of politics at home.
The result was unsurprisingly ineffective as the ranks of insurgents swelled with angry former-civilians (many of whom were former-army, but don't get me started on that).
A lot of people credit The Surge with turning Iraq around, but while a component it was actually the least important part of what changed. Petraeus' real genius was in not only using force even more judiciously than before -- the opposite of what you would do -- but also in fully engaging the civilian population. He didn't treat them as though they were basically the enemy that he couldn't shoot because it looked bad on CNN. He treated them as if they were already allies that required help. He took "winning hearts and minds" seriously, and it worked. When the area of Iraq Petraeus was in charge of stabilized like none of the rest of Iraq had, they put him in charge of the lot so his demonstrably effective (and not coincidently completely unlike your) strategy could benefit everywhere. And it did. Only in the environment created by this new strategy could the additional troops put in have been effective.
You know what the REALLY sad part is? The part that really causes comments like yours make the bile swell up in my throat?
It's that when we began in Afghanistan, the people did support us. Unlike the Iraqi people who felt betrayed by us after Desert Storm, the Afghan people still thought of us as the folks who helped them kick out the Russians. With no love lost for the Taliban, they were actually on our side. At first.
Thanks to years of idiotic management, that flippant attitude towards collateral damage you embody, and years of neglect due to being focused on Iraq, we lost both literal and figurative ground in Afghanistan. We squandered our advantage. Pissed it away. Turned the people against us.
And then some dweeb comes along and says the people "will never support us". As if it was always this way. As if it's their fault, instead of ours. Gee, maybe we should just stop worrying about killing them. That would probably fix it.
So fucking sad.
The enemies of Democracy are
Are you kidding me? Are we to believe that encrypted radio transmissions can't be triangulated? Give me a break.
Yes, I'd be up for a No-Holds-Barred Man's Hubris Wrestling Championship. Especially the tag team rounds. Can a polar bear and a brown bear set aside their infamous salmon grudge to take down The Undertaker?!
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
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
I think the point I'm more trying to make is that the two world wars, while HUGELY costly in terms of human life, on all sides, including civilians, was completely immersive. They were also fought under circumstances far different than recent wars, with an attacking army (the Allieds) repulsing an invading army (Axis Powers), while the attackers had the support of the people being oppressed, especially in France, Poland, etc. Most of the world is so polarized, nowadays, and indoctrinated to hate anything that's different than their lifestyle, that it's unlikely any indigenous civilians would be supportive of an invading force, even if it were ostensibly to defend the civilians against an oppressive dictator, a la, Saddam Hussein, Ghaddafi Duck, Mubarak, et al.
I don't disagree with you there, at all.
That said, I personally disagree with the decoupling of civilians from enemy aggressors, as well as the focus on eliminating collateral damage. Sure, it makes you look nice in the papers, but if you're going to war with someone, it should be all-out war. Bring everybody in, decimate the aggressors, and be done with it. I'm tired of this line that we need to make sure that we're sensitive to the people that live there, when any one of them could strap a bomb on and kill twenty American soldiers.
Also, while I was and am a supporter of what the US did in Iraq, both from a 'remove Saddam' and 'build a relatively healthy, friendly nation,' I've become wholly unsupportive of our action in Afghanistan. We're just spinning our wheels in a country where we'll never be able to implement a healthy government, spending a metric crapload of money on people that will never support us, and overextending our active duty military (and reservists) such that we're now going to furlough them or lay them off, further reducing our expeditionary capabilities.
I think there are a few issues at play here, and you have hit on one of the fundamental contradictions of American military and foreign policy. The American people see themselves as the Good Guys. And the Good Guys don't decimate entire populations. They don't kill women and children and old men. So you can't just do all-out war on civilian populations because it runs counter to modern morality and the nation's self-image. But as you point out, that leaves your forces open to insurgency and guerrilla warfare. Can an invader out-last a homegrown insurgency? Personally I doubt it, but I haven't studied the history too closely.
In addition to that, there are the stated and actual goals. If your goal is to depose a dictator and bring modern civil life to the country, you can't just kill everyone. In fact, just the opposite, you need to make friends with them. Hearts and minds and all that. Similarly, if you want to invade to take control of government and commercial power to further your commercial and geo-strategic interests, you can't just decimate the country. You need the infrastructure and bureaucracy. But again, if the people end up not liking you your soldiers will be open to insurgency and guerrilla warfare.
This is the dynamic the US finds itself in in both Iraq and Afghanistan. The stated and unstated goals, and modern morality and self-image make restraint paramount. But having to use restraint makes using the military to achieve those goals difficult. The military is a tool of death and destruction and it's tricky to kill and destroy your way to peace and prosperity.
"What the American public doesn't know is what makes them the American public." -Ray Zalinsky (Tommy Boy)
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.
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...
The technique used is almost certainly a form of spread-spectrum transmission, making its interception by an ordinary receiver unable to listen in or conventional triangulation useless.
Um, spread spectrum can still be detected and the location of its source triangulated. It does complicate things somewhat when it's hopping from frequency to frequency, but it hardly makes it impossible.
Ultimately, if a stealth plane wants to remain truly stealthy, it also needs to observe radio silence. There are things they can do to make their transmissions less obvious (including using spread spectrum), but ultimately none of these technique are completely effective.
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 wars in Africa are old school, in the sense that it's a bunch of people fighting a bunch of people with somewhat decent weapons, on the ground. For the most part, they don't have fighter jets, they don't have close air support, they don't have forward air controllers, they don't have long range artillery, just a bunch of people with Kalashnikovs shooting each other. These are the types of wars that really haven't been fought by the developed world since about World War I.
Progress is the root of all evil.
Progressives even more so.
Urgh. Why did they have to go and screw it up like that with excess computerization?
What the hell ever happened to good ol' KY-58? It worked, could take a beating, was a NATO standard, and was drop-easy to maintain. It couldn't have taken too much to update its crypto strength... :/
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
Yes, they use spread spectrum for a variety of reasons. The frequency hopping is also "secret" and is related the key (word of the day).
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
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
Spread spectrum and frequency hopping are two different things. You seem to be mixing them up or considering them the same thing.
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
public key cryptography (invented in the 1970s, mostly down to the RSA authors) was not among this work.
--Freddie Widgeon
It was actually invented over a hundred years earlier than that, and GCHQ developed an RSA equivalent with Diffie-Hellman key exchange several years before RSA was created or before Diffie and Hellman published their work. Occasionally the UK does manage to keep something secret :)
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
So this is what happens when trolls collide
More Twoson than Cupertino
Well even the Romulans had to decloak their warbirds from time to time. Seems the F22 Raptor is no exception.
The part that really causes comments like yours make the bile swell up in my throat?
It's that when we began in Afghanistan, the people did support us. Unlike the Iraqi people who felt betrayed by us after Desert Storm, the Afghan people still thought of us as the folks who helped them kick out the Russians. With no love lost for the Taliban, they were actually on our side. At first.
Thanks to years of idiotic management, that flippant attitude towards collateral damage you embody, and years of neglect due to being focused on Iraq, we lost both literal and figurative ground in Afghanistan. We squandered our advantage. Pissed it away. Turned the people against us.
Afghanistan is a completely different country from Iraq. Iraq has a history of being some kind of nation for the past 1000 years or so. Iraq had a strong national government in recent history (a bad government, but a strong one anyway). Afghanistan's borders are more of a collection of the borders of other countries. Afghanistan has never had a strong national government. There are few nationalistic tendencies. Politics are extremely local and based on small-time government and small-time lack of government. When Kabul tries to make policies, they might as well be England trying to administer the US in the 1700s. The distance is too far and nobody respects a power so far away and unrelated to the local politics.
Petraeus tried his Iraq strategy in Afghanistan and it was a complete failure.
Even those who arrange and design shrubberies are under considerable economic stress at this period in history.
The last war where the United States was significantly foriegn invade was The War of 1812, unless you count the Union's invation of the Confederate States as a foriegn invation where Sherman's March to the Sea decimated the confederacies will and ability to resist. The next invation was an invasion of Numerous Aleutian Islands by Japanese forces during WWII. The whole point is we have learned to never fight a war on our own soil; the stupidest thing a Country could do is to invade the United States, Russia or Israel.
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TFA mentions that F22s would have been used in Lybia, if not for these communication issues. So there you have your answer.
Just like the B2 was used against Saddam in Iraq. Weapons the enemy doesn't have an answer to - that at least makes kinda sure your plane will come back unharmed, and that the mission will be accomplished. That doesn't mean a lesser aircraft could also have done the job, it's just making extra sure the job is done.
And that is part of the problem. We have engineered more and more expensive weapons so that the other guys die and our guys never take a scratch. But the weapons are so expensive a loss is basically unacceptable. And because a loss is unacceptable, the weapons become even more expensive. It is an endless cycle. Eventually there is a point when you are paying so much to play the game that the benefit is smaller than the cost. When that happens, most people realize that you would have better off not playing at all.
Even those who arrange and design shrubberies are under considerable economic stress at this period in history.
Don't worry, when all is said and done, it ain't over untill there are boots on the ground.
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KY-58s? we still use them! marine hueys and cobras still got em! the new Zulus and Yankees might have finally updated them, but i havent seen yet.
The guy who said the election was rigged won the presidency with the second-most votes.
oh ignorant AC, how you underestimate the computing power of modern electronics.
The guy who said the election was rigged won the presidency with the second-most votes.
That's not really hard to "learn" when you're oceans away from everyone who could even remotely oppose you.
The fact that USB sticks, laptops, hard disks and CD-Rs were not yet invented helped here I guess.
I mean it is pretty hard to lose a filing cabinett in the tube or in a taxi.
"Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart he dreams himself your master."
"It is a telegram, it is ordering an advance, but it's addressed to a 'Catpain Blackudder'."
FGD 135
And this attitude is why people decide to target American civilians.
And yes, I know that official propaganda line is that they're not the enemy. It doesn't change the fact that they are treated like enemy civilians of occupied enemy nation
It's worth noting here that the actual modern laws of war, the Geneva Conventions don't make a distinction of "enemy civilian". The only class is "protected civilian" which is anyone not in a military who is not contributing to a conflict and happens to be in an area which you occupy or control. You then have an obligation under the Conventions to protect those civilians (hence, the label). They could be allies or enemies in terms of political support or allegiances, the law doesn't make that distinction.
The words "supersonic" and "stealth" are mutually exclusive.
You can have a plane that can do both, but not at the same time.
It's never too late to have a happy childhood.
I'd think that a big limitation here would be the ability to predict the incoming signals before they arise. For just an unmodulated carrier that is easy, but for signals that are heavily modulated that would not be the case.
When radio waves hit your stealth aircraft they WILL reflect off in various directions. It isn't until they hit the aircraft that you're able to detect and measure them, and any signal you generate to confuse the location of your aircraft must be transmitted after the real reflections have already been created (radio waves travel at the speed of light, and your signal processing gear can operate no more quickly than that).
For a naive receiver that is only looking at carrier signals and which doesn't pick up on double-reflections it might work. However, I'd think this could be defeated with a design that took this attack into account, or especially if the signal sources were non-civilian in nature (think spread spectrum transmitters whose signals might be hard to even detect in the first place, except for a receiver which knows exactly where to expect them and when).
This is of course if you care about Geneva Conventions in the first place. Guantanamo Bay, creative classifications and other legalese shenanigans showed that these conventions no longer realistically apply to modern warfare beyond PR level.
They used to say that about arrows.
Then why are they done? Because the Geneva Conventions still matter. It's worth noting that several of these don't actually contradict the Geneva Conventions because the enemies in question (the "unlawful combatants") aren't adhering to the Geneva Conventions and hence, lose a lot of the protections that would normally be granted by the Conventions.
Propaganda. You still need to be convincing to your own civilian population that you are in fact a force for good. Currently too many people alive still remember WW2 or have passed their experiences to their children and as a result too large portion of the civilian population will not swallow a wholesale ethnic cleansing.
So the obvious thing to do is to take baby steps. Remind yourself of world in the 1990s and look at the world today. Imagine selling some of the things of today's world to population back then. Imagine how you'd likely get tried for treason if you pushed for them too seriously.
Public opinion is fairly slow to change on such issues, but they do change over time.
Propaganda.
No. Merely a correct observation. Read the Geneva Conventions sometime and see what protections they offer to military forces who don't play by the rules.
Spread spectrum and frequency hopping are two different things
Well, sort of. There's multiple types of spread spectrum, and some involve frequency hopping.
You can be pedantic about what exactly spread spectrum and frequency hopping mean if you want, but the military (and other users) often use them together, especially when they want something that's difficult to jam and intercept (and they often throw encryption on top of that, of course.)
It's different if the dictatorship consist of native people. Then it has at least partly local support. And if the dictatorship was there for some decades, then you have a large part of the population whose whole life is based on the existance of that dictatorship, even though they may be opposed to the actual actions of said dictatorship. People tend to be wary if someone else wants to turn their life, even if he claims it would be better. And if he then makes some mistakes, he can easily turn the whole population against himself, good intentions be damned.