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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.
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.
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...
You clearly failed to triangulate the humour as it flew over.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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/
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.
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
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 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)
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 :)
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 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."