Military technology has a short life-span; anyone who has an advantage immediately becomes a target for spies and scientists trying to figure out what makes it tick. And archeology shows us that military technology breakthroughs spread extremely rapidly, because they are a matter of literal life and death.
Unfortunately, as the technological cutting edge nudges more and more into software, advanced physics and material science, the costs of high tech spiral upward. That means you can spend a trillion dollars on a program that might result in a cutting edge aircraft for 15 years – and if the aircraft is 10 years late, the time it’s cutting edge may be close to zero. Even if we were to suppose that the F-35 is the bee’s knees (it’s not: it can barely use its weapons systems) it may not be in 5 years. Then, the entire expensive process would have to be re-started, except that it probably won’t be a manned aircraft – it’ll be an air superiority stealth drone and the air force’s days of macho pilots playing Highway To The Danger Zone will be over for good. Semi- and increasingly autonomous drones will eventually be able to gank human pilots and air to air combat will become a matter of clicking “Go” and seeing who won. In other words, Joe Haldeman’s Forever War may feel like a documentary. All the “data fusion” stuff is going to inevitably become semi-autonomous, anyhow; people can’t react as fast as computers when the situation gets fluid.
Now, here’s an interesting move: China says that they can detect the F-22. [ni]
The AI drone from the movie Stealth
Can they, or can’t they? A forward air commander would be absolutely nuts to launch an attack assuming that the F-22’s stealth was impenetrable because they could be flying into a trap. Or, it could be disinformation. How does one resolve this problem? Let’s suppose we fly an F-22 where it has no business being, to see if ground control radar lights it up; well, what if the plane is detected but the battery operators are clever enough not to track it? Worse, or more likely, the tracking capability will be part of a “data fusion” architecture so it might be possible to detect the F-22 far enough away that it can be hit while it’s fueling.
Wu Jianqi, a senior scientist at the state-owned China Electronics Technology Group Corporation, told Chinese media that his team has solved this dilemma. “Wu solved the issue by designing the world’s first practical meter wave sparse array synthetic impulse and aperture radar,” according to Global Times. “Wu said that his radar has multiple transmitting and receiving antennas tens of meters high, scattered in a range of tens to hundreds of meters. They can continuously cover the sky as the radar receives echoes from all directions.
That is interesting – stealth aircraft typically are mostly “stealthy” from the front, and some of them are quite un-stealthy from some angles, or if they have weapons bays open. It appears that the Chinese system is listening for faint echoes off of less-stealthy angles, and doing “data fusion” on them. That’s plausible, and each aircraft – even the stealthy ones – would tend to have a specific “signature” because you’re collating as many angles of signal as you can get.
Of course, it could just be marketing; some Chinese defense company wants to sell a bunch of expensive radar systems to the government, or to other governments. The Russians are working on similar systems as (naturally) is the US.
The obvious next step in the stealth game is to do away with all the life support systems and interface layer necessary to support a cockpit full of meat. The next generation of fighter aces aren’t going to be dashing studs like Von Richtofen, they’ll be caffeinated gamer-nerds who have twitch reflexes from hell and none of the slowdowns that a sense of self-preservation brings into the picture.
It won’t matter; they’ll still cost a trillion dollars.
Meanwhile, there is some interesting and vague news about an Israeli F-35 apparently being hit and damaged by a Syrian missile during an incursion into Syrian airspace. [ni] As you can imagine, that has really set the cat among the chickens – initially Israel tried to claim that the aircraft was damaged by hitting a bird. Of course what everyone is wondering is “what about the F-35’s stealth?” But it sounds (to me) like what happened is exactly what I predicted: someone took a rear-shot on the departing aircraft with something infrared-homing. The Israelis were in Syrian airspace attacking an S-200 antiaircraft SAM battery. [mt] Other than that, the story is changing a lot.
This is supposedly an Israeli F-16 over Syria being pursued by two antiaircraft missiles; you can see that it’s pulling hard G’s against the missiles’ line of travel (correct doctrine) and appears to have dumped clouds of chaff. [The standard doctrine for dodging missiles is to wait until you can see what angle they are coming at, then cut abruptly at right angles to the missile’s track, taking advantage of the fact that missiles cannot turn as hard as aircraft. The standard antiaircraft doctrine is also represented in this photo: you time the launch of the missiles so that hopefully if the target turns against the track of the first one, they are slowed down and set up to get hit by the second. That might actually work against an F-35, which does not turn anywhere near as hard as an F-16!] The reason Israel is supposedly striking the Syrian S-200s is because one of them shot down an Israeli F-16 while it was in Syrian air space bombing some target. [wik] The “tit for tat” behavior over Syria is really problematic because at this point everyone has something to claim revenge for.
Israel’s “bird strike” story [alm] seems to be a bit debunked, since the Syrians were able to collect pieces of damaged F-35 from the scene of the missile interception. The Israeli Defense Force is being cagy about whether the aircraft will be returned to service soon, if ever. At $100 million apiece, this is a big deal. Various accounts put the Israeli F-35 force at 7 6 and that the Israelis are ${thrilled|unhappy} with them.
What is odd and fascinating is that the battlefield environment in Syria sounds exceptionally weird. The Israelis appear to be notifying the Russians before they launch strikes against Syrian gear that the Russians are selling them; they don’t want to accidentally hit any Russians and cause an incident. I wonder how that plays itself out on the ground? Do the Russians near the S-200 battery all suddenly announce that it’s time to go on a smoke break, over on the other side of that hill, over there? Meanwhile the Syrians have to pretend that they don’t know that it means stealth strike aircraft are inbound?
I have lost track of the number of times I have seen someone post pictures of the aircraft or drone from the movie Stealth, claiming it’s a 6th-generation aircraft. Mmmmmmmaybe, but if I had to bet money I’d bet that the next generation of air superiority craft are going to look like air-launched cruise missiles controlled by pilots sitting in aircraft that are circling out of range of the battle area, but close enough that the lightspeed radio-lag does not come into play. Picture a B-1 bomber dropping a couple of high speed drones that are being flown by twitch gamers sitting in a 747 full of communications gear.
During the 1st gulf war, I was having lunch with an old friend who was a CIA intelligence officer. There was a lot of awkward stuff going unsaid during that lunch, but at one point he told me an interesting story. Apparently another friend of his had said, “I don’t understand why everyone cares about so much secrecy. There’s news on CNN that an F-16 has maybe been shot down, within 30 minutes of the event.” And he said, “the difference is: I know how it was shot down; the fact that it was shot down is not the important information.”
With respect to your friend who, being your friend, can’t be a complete idiot, his story sounds like the standard Spook BS.
Whatever little box of information they have that other people don’t have gets designated “the important information” and everything is is stamped “NOT MPORTANT” because otherwise, what exactly is the point of their job anyways?
The AI in Stealth was written in TeX. No wonder it went insane.
xohjoh2n@#2:
The AI in Stealth was written in TeX. No wonder it went insane.
I’m sure it felt it was well-justified.
Andrew Molitor@#1:
With respect to your friend who, being your friend, can’t be a complete idiot, his story sounds like the standard Spook BS.
That was the 90s. Like I said, we don’t talk anymore after what he got up to after 9/11. I broke all relationships with anyone in the FBI or intelligence community. Everyone in those shops knew about the torture program.
Whatever little box of information they have that other people don’t have gets designated “the important information” and everything is is stamped “NOT MPORTANT” because otherwise, what exactly is the point of their job anyways?
Well, I’m pretty cynical about those guys, too. But, in the example of “can they detect stealth planes or not?” that is really important information (if they have it) – now, the question is “do they share it?” and the answer is “probably not.” The US intelligence community is so fond of internecine warfare and secret-keeping that it’s not very effective. I, uh, wrote a not very good book about that, once.
I wonder if this is true what posible implciations for astronomy might be. Clearer picture of incoming meteorites / meteors and the ability to survey the their populationin alot more detail maybe? Perhaps some wider serendipitous radio astronomy gains? Wonder what its range and resolution is and might enable it to observe outside the purely artificial flying objects category? Possibly even applying to avain populations and zoological work too?
The thing about stealth is that it’s in part a subset of antenna design. You design elements of your aircraft based on the radar frequencies you expect the other guys are using. So they reflect back as little radar energy as possible on those frequencies. But if the other guys start using some other radar frequencies your stealth is reduced. From what I understand radar at relatively low frequencies has an easier time detecting current stealth aircraft. But those frequencies are more prone to ground clutter and other interference, which is why the higher frequencies are used in the first place. The hope is that modern DSP will help counter that interference.
One use of low frequency radars is over the horizon radars, intended for very long range detection of objects. The Soviets deployed an OTH radar in the ’70s.. It became known as the Russian Woodpecker to hams and short wave radio listeners because of the noise it made in the shortwave range. The Duga 1 site is located inside the Chernobyl exclusion zone.
Before the F117 stealth fighter was publicly revealed there were several years of rumours. The model kit company Testors even released a model kit of the supposed F19 stealth fighter, which didn’t look much like the F117. It reportedly was the best selling American model kit of all time.(Monogram also put out an F19 kit of a different design, but it didn’t become as popular.)
There was a story about how a German radar manufacturer claims to have tracked the F-35s visiting the Berlin airshow last (?) year. It made the rounds again because recently their claims were apparently reconsidered as “plausible”. If I remember and undestood correctly, they did this passively, by observing how the EM chatter of a first world nation – broadcasts etc. in frequency ranges not used for radar or designed for in stealth – was affected by the F-35s moving through it. If true, then it’s another “good reason” to fight all your wars in already-destroyed countries. And another excuse to target civilian infrastructure like communcations: “They’re a threat to our precious stealth bombers as they violate your borders and lay waste to your cities!” Good excuses are a vital part of the arsenal of freedom.
Really? I would have assumed it to be the other way around, not least because of the meat control system limiting sustained g-forces. So, next guess, missiles are too fast whereas the fighters are “slow” and have nice, large control surfaces?
At that point, why have non-autonomous aircraft at all? Your control craft is just a big target. The way you put it it’s literally the aircraft carrier of the sky. As soon as it is spotted it can be taken out, maybe even from long ranges by one of those fancy uninterceptable hypersonic missiles that are in work. There goes your expensive electronic platform along with its thralls. And, of course, the emotionally detached twitch-gamers, who, years later, would otherwise have gone on to complain about PTSD and how awful their lives are, having blown up all those civilians on their computer screens.
My guess is that it’ll be completely autonomous drones or long range missiles all the way.
Pro drone:
1) No pilots to train, just software that’s copied over and over
2) While we get to read fanciful articles about the moral ramifications of machines deciding who to kill, every military everywhere will simply be doing it. (Should that be “are” instead of will?) Because.
3) All the other technological advances that support drone armadas, e.g. solar-powered drones that would be limited chiefly by how much ammo they can carry. As long as there are humans in the loop, 24/7 “service” becomes more difficult to maintain.
Drones with long staying-power could be launched any time from anywhere and parked until needed. Why, you could have them flying in circles around certain countries you don’t like, just outside their borders, and nobody could object. Unless they’re your borders, naturally, or your international waters, which isn’t an oxymoron at all.
Pro missile:
1) All sizes, shapes and ranges
2) Someone like the US military doesn’t care about reusability. Forget the money, forget the efficiency, forget the environment. Forget logistics, too, because, we never learn. Although that part gets a lot easier if you develop really long range rockets – unless the parts are shipped from China.
3) Again no pilot, just software
4) No need to worry about your asset coming home safely
5) Hard to intercept
I was tempted to add to missiles that they’re much easier to supply to “third parties” who pay well or happen to share your world view. But clearly that holds true for drones as well.
@komarov
It will be a mixture of drones and missiles. Or more precisely fast drones (aka missiles) and slow drones.
They need some ‘hang around terrifying the local farmers’ capacity, which from memory is referred to as loitering, and ‘WTF? Blam!’ first strike capacity, which they currently use missiles for. So it’ll be both. Someone will probably put one on the other, just to invoke the yo dog meme.
My naive guess would be that this sort of stealth is not binary. Anyone saying that they have defeated the plane’s stealth tech is probably talking up the radar system, but it probably does make it less effective.
Anyway, given the current nature of the US government (corrupt), i would just be investing in spies. Like Russia.
@ 5. me – apologies for all the typos. Afraid I was about two-thirds asleep writing that last night & am a lousy typer at the best of times. Hope y’all get the gist of it anyhow. Also know its a bit of a tangeant but hope that’s okay.
For those who may not already know; radar is already used in astronomy eg for imaging nearby asteroids :
https://echo.jpl.nasa.gov/
Thus better radar would certainly seem to have potential in this area.
I don’t think the fighters act by themselves; AWACS, radar-homing missiles, all that sort of stuff will be in the mix.
The USA military might be expensive as fuck and inefficient (though the money goes to the right people and the right states), but I’d hardly write it off. And it can afford it.
(Obs, there are opportunity costs; what would the odd trillion dollars otherwise buy?)
komarov@#7:
Really? I would have assumed it to be the other way around, not least because of the meat control system limiting sustained g-forces. So, next guess, missiles are too fast whereas the fighters are “slow” and have nice, large control surfaces?
I believe I have that right, though doctrines change and I’m going based on Vietnam War-era antiaircraft missile dodging techniques.
The situation is basically this: in combat, aircraft are seldom supersonic or even close. A jet fighter’s maneuver tactics are not about it’s top speed as much as that it can rapidly vary its speed – it can burst and squirt around the battle environment. Post-Vietnam aircraft like the F-15 and F-16 are further designed to maneuver vertically as well as horizontally; Vietnam War-era Phantom II aircraft were relatively un-nimble and were good at flying in a straight line. So, here’s how it stacks up: you have a missile coming in at your plane and it’s going about Mach 5. At that speed, its turning radius is huge, whereas yours is comparatively tight. So, you have choices: 1) outrun the missile is a non-starter that gets you killed 2) turn toward the missile is a bad idea because the missile only needs to deflect its course a fairly small amount to come straight at you 3) fly perpendicular to the missile, forcing it to deflect as much as it can, which is hopefully not enough because you can turn harder than it.
If you want to see some interesting stuff, take a look on youtube for videos of Iron Dome intercepts over Israel. The ID missiles go up, pass the missile they are trying to intercept, then do a hard turn, align on the target, and explode – hopefully shotgunning it with chunks of metal. You can see how wide a turn a missile makes when it’s at speed! I believe the ID missiles fly a boost stage where they speed up, then coast and are slowing down as they attempt to intercept.
Modern antiair missiles are way more complicated than the Vietnam-era stuff. A pilot I talked to once told me that it was pretty easy to find the missile coming at you – you looked for a gigantic white telephone pole and flew at right angles to its course. The modern stuff has boost stage that gets it up to about mach 5 and then it coasts and maneuvers. They are still really big things flying at you and all your aircraft really has is maneuverability.
StevoR@#9:
Thus better radar would certainly seem to have potential in this area.
It can’t hurt; I suspect that the big bang for the buck for asteroid detection is going to be software-based. You can do all kinds of analysis (occlusion of other light sources, etc) based on imagery, which is basically the same idea, except it has a much better range.
Most of mankind’s expected response to a planet-killer involve detecting it far out and deflecting it slightly. If we were rational, we’d be throwing the proverbial kitchen sink at that problem. Instead, we’re making antiaircraft radar and stealth jets.
By the way: the “over the horizon” antenna grid near Chernobyl is something I saw, but I don’t appear to have any photos of it. It’s huge – absolutely gigantic – but from the distance where I saw it, it just looks like a big rusty grid. The trick with photographing something like that is to figure out how to compose the image to convey its size. In the case of the radar grid, I just gave up. It was pretty foggy when I was there (plenty of rain) and I didn’t think pictures of a huge ghostly grid would look like anything.
I believe the comparable US system was called RHYOLITE and it depended on catching echoes of ground to orbit communications bouncing over the horizon. It was a very clever piece of work.
TBH, I’m not sure that planet-killing asteroids even make the top 5 list of risks that we really should be throwing the kitchen sink at, but aren’t.
Dunc@#14:
TBH, I’m not sure that planet-killing asteroids even make the top 5 list of risks that we really should be throwing the kitchen sink at, but aren’t.
True.
I am by no means convinced that they’re going to pull pilots from aircraft. There’s a large component of macho bullshit in the military, and whether our shit is effective of not doesn’t matter because our actual military doctrine is “don’t shoot at us, like, at all, or we will hurl materiel at your until you’re dead” so they could be flying around in hot pink Sopwith Camels for all it matters.
Doesn’t a drone with any sort of tether end up being vulnerable to being found and targeted? I assume they’re using some form of broadcast medium to communicate with the things. And as others have pointed out, if your base station is a flying target nearby, it’s also a very big one.
The primary reasons drones work currently is because they’re terrorist weapons. If they were used against any country with significant resources they’d be disabled or captured in a hurry. Iran has already done this repeatedly. I assume the only reason we don’t hear about it is because we either stopped sending drones their way or they figured the point was made and got bored of telling us how ineffective the things are.
Unless the goal is to be powerless against any nation that can pose a real threat, I don’t see how the current paradigm could change very much without some way to use tightly beamed communications effectively at long range within an atmosphere. But I’m not a communications guru by any stretch of the imagination so maybe I’m missing something here? I also don’t want to trivialize how difficult it might be to find one communication hiding among a huge number of them in a modern country. But once you know you have to do that, finding a way to do it seems inevitable. The drone communication is stuck with hiding in plain sight and/or using security through obscurity, at least as far as IDing the communications channel goes.
Re: Andrew Molitor (#16):
And that’s working great in the world of insurgencies, isn’t it? Whether it’s a pink Sopwith (yes, please!) or a vanta black F-35, if it’s in the wrong place at the wrong time some random insurgents can pop up and down that manly prestige project with whatever hand-held AA missile some other nation state has sold or gifted to them. If someone goes down with it, so much the better.
After a quick high-five they vanish and all all that’s left to retaliate against is whatever hospital, school or residential quarter is still left standing in the area.
It doesn’t take much to do a lot of damage these days, and it’s near-impossible to defend everything. IS lit Paris on fire with some automatic weapons and bombs. Yemeni rebels crippled Saudi Arabia’s oil production with a few drones. Paris is the French capital and it was, if I’m not mistaken, already crawling with armed cops at the time. The refinery had its on defence system, which apparently accomplished nothing.
So how would one retaliate to deter future attacks? Launch some air raids against IS? Well, the French did, and IS is still around and may just come back – although people have been saying that for a while now. Maybe bomb Yemen to rubble and … oh, wait, someone got ahead of themselves there. Even pre-emptive revenge doesn’t seem to work.
Anyone willing to take a pot shot at US owned (or at least built) assets probably doesn’t give a toss about what the US (or owner) might do in response. One, they evade, two, pawn sacrifices are part of the game, three, whatever the retaliation might be has probably been happening all along anyway.
The macho bullshit you mention is definitely there but fading. There are remote controlled drones and they’re now the preferred solution to whatever problem needs bombing. It’s become normal and the manned airstrikes must therefore seem more and more unusal. I seriously doubt many pilots will complain about being denied the opportunity to become someone else’s propaganda victory, however unlikely that may be.
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Re: #14/15
We’re basically gambling on spin-offs. Just look at what
ICBMsthe space race gave us. Just imagine what might happen if The Communists (TM) announced their goal to be the first to mine asteroids at economically useful scales. In the meantime we simply have to hope that the current moon landing attempt and other large scale projects, half-hearted though some of them may be, somehow pull the iron(s) out of the fire.But while not useful as such, militaries being distracted by some unattainable stealth fighter is not the worst thing. They could be developing better nukes and superfast missiles to deploy them, for example. Oh, right, they have infinite money and are doing all those things at once. Drat!
Maybe someone should point out what a fantastic weapon an asteroid would make. Uninterceptable, unattributable, if you’re careful, and completely devestating. It’s been done in SF and went about as well as you’d expect. But it would also yield a lot of useful knowledge about the subject. We’d simply have to learn to live with the next generation of MAD looming over us. Well, TAD, as in total…
Personally, I’m betting that we either fix – or manage – climate change, only to get smashed by a rock, or we deflect the next flying mass extinction, only to go, “oh, right” when we turn our attention back to the surface and die. Not because that’s where the science points or anything; it’s what Applied Cynicism would indicate. On second thought, getting hit by a rock while in the grip of devestating climate change would be adding insult to injury. Let’s go with that.
P.S. Marcus, I followed your suggestion regarding iron dome intercepts. Some missiles seem to follow really strange trajectories, as if the target is maybe weaving and the missile following along. Also noticeable is the tendency o fire a lot of missiles, though I can’t tell whether that’s because of a lot of incoming targets or a better-safe-approach. Cynic that I am I immediately thought of the people selling those iron dome missiles. Peace between Israel and Palestine would surely dent their bottom line. Better line a few pockets – if that’s even necessary.
I’m certainly not saying that the US military doctrine is a good or effective doctrine. It’s the one we’re using, though.
Honestly, the “shoot at us and we’ll blow up your hospitals and schools” is a historically very effective doctrine, but we haven’t the political will to get serious about it, so it doesn’t work very well for us. Which, you know, I am pretty much in favor of. I wish we also didn’t have the political will to half-ass it either, but apparently we do.