Woody;
If I might point out you keep making "assumptions" based on some non-technical news stories and what seems to be a mis-understanding of HOW weapons work and HOW they are designed to interface with manned operations.
From you initial post:
Woody said:
Since great success has been achieved in jamming and spoofing radars and communications, why have western (and now Russian it seams) armed forces put so much store in UAVs and remotely GPS guided weapons? These system are promoted endlessly as the way forward for weapons technology with barely a mention of how they would avoid jamming and even less on how UAVs would avoid subversion.
Your base "assumption" here seems to be that nothing can be done to prevent and overcome this type of jamming and spoofing which is, while not easy, at least "manageable" for military operations.
Let me point to your most recent post:
Woody said:
Grey Havoc said:
Thanks Grey Havoc. I think your contribution deserves quoting in full. Perhaps reports like this will allow us to see beyond the P.R.
Cheers, Woody
Please note that the article stated that the US and SK military were QUITE aware of where the jamming was coming from and it was QUITE obviously similiarly a capability to "take-care-of" this issue had this exercise been the "real" thing.
Note also that the MANNED plane did exactly what an UNMANNED plane would have done in the same circumstances, so you HAVE actually lent support to the previous responses on this thread. I'd also point out that while "a" single military reconnaissance plane had to make an "emergency" landing, meanwhile dozens if not hundreds of other aircraft both civil and military (as well as military drones) continued to operate though with some degraded capability during that time. Again you have pointed out support of previous posters on this thread.
Continuing from your orginal post:
Pilot-less guided weapons have been with us for decades in the form of bombs, torpedoes and missiles but their designs have used inertial reference, narrow beam or wire guidance or direct line of sight sensors that are difficult to defeat. UAVs and remotely GPS guided weapons have none of these features.
Here you "assume" that only one type of "guidance" is allowed on a weapon. ALL weapons have an abilty to "default" to a simpler guidance system even wire/beam, or laser guided weapons. INS has been mentioned but, lets get it right up front that the ONLY "jam-proof" guidance system is fully "dumb" weapons that have NO internal guidance capability. Within their (
admittedly limited) effective range they will always be the most effective and lethal weapons available. It is usefullness beyond this limited scope that spurred the development of guided weapons. Counter-measures have been racing to try and keep up with sensor effectivness and will continue to do so but they are NOT capable of fooling every sensor, every time.
UAVs and GPS weapons have back up guidance systems installed and multiple redundancy methods of "counter-checking" incoming instructions and data built in. You "assume" they don't but have nothing other than your opinion to back this up, yet it is an assumption you continue to maintain in the face of facts presented that show this to be false.
Continuing again:
There is anecdotal evidence that even Iraq was able to jam GPS bombs in Desert Storm with a French made system and the internet is filled with information on the problems of intentional and unintentional GPS jamming, yet more and more military system have become dependent on it.
Quoting "anecdotal" evidence of "supposed" capability is not only a weak argument it happens to be far out of context. Non-anecdotal (personal) experiance during Desert Storm shows (as would any effort in researching such "claims") that the "jamming" had no real effect on the effectiveness of the guided munitions used in Desert Storm. Iraqi "jamming" was actually the LEAST likely reason for guided munitons "failures" during Desert Storm. (Even more so since the "standard" practice of the Iraqi military for using the majority of "jamming" equipment they had was simply to turn in on and leave it on until they were hit by an Anti-Radiation Guided weapon)
In fact even with a higher and more sophisticated jamming environment (and a military actually trained, experianced, and more importantly capable of using the equipment effectivly) as encountered in Serbia during the campaign there there was little actual effect on weapons accuracy and guidance. Almost NONE effective enough to avoid effective strikes with guided weapons. (Increasing a 2000lb bombs CEP from 1-5 feet to 5-25 feet does no good. Even a miss of 100ft still has a good chance of "killing" a units combat capabilty. Worse of course is that managing to get ONE bomb to miss by that far in no way means that any of the OTHER bombs coming down at the same time will be so effected. And it only takes "one" good hit.)
Again, "jamming" has been taken into account and a far MORE possible reason for "missing" with a guided weapon is a malfunction within the guidance unit. Which bring us to the second half of your statement...
Reconnaissance UAVs and UCAV will be dependent on radio communications of some sort once over the horizon so why is it not feasible for a sophisticated adversary (with their own satellites?) to subvert them and perhaps send them back to attack their owners?
While not "impossible" it is highly unlikley simply because these systems are DESIGNED to not be interfered with. Even more so with multiple back up systems and sophisticated programing UAVs and UCAVs would NOT be dependent on single source instruction sets.
Of course you don't understand how UAV systems are set up so you pointed to the Iraqi Insurgent "hacking" of a Recon-UAVs video feed. But then ignored people pointing out that it was an unsecured video feed in the first place DESIGNED so that people with rather low-tech and in-field set ups could access the data stream. (After all part of the reason it was on-board the UAV was to provide LOCAL feed to be used by "freindlies" in the field) You of course ignored or never seemed to understand that this system was NOT a route to "hacking" the flight controls or the "main" video-and-data links and that the Insurgents would be unable to actually get into those systems with any "off-the-shelf" commercial equipment.
Continuing again:
To save a bit of time please make your answers considered but not just techno-gibberish. I know US military GPS is more powerful than civilian and uses it's own frequencies but so do their enemies. Also obviously UAV communication would be encrypted but encryption can be broken and if not it can still jammed.
If you'd wanted to "save-time" I'm pretty sure you wouldn't have just "blurted" out the above with no support as you did. I rather suspect you WANT to "waste-time" arguing your point because you believe your "right" and everyone else is wrong, but that's neither here-nor-there as you ASKED
Communications technology, jamming, anti-jamming, encryption, code-breaking, false-communications, etc... etc...
It's been "on-going" since "people" have been comminicating and fighting each other, break-throughs happen and it is a military MAXIUM that NO communcations system or encryption lasts forever. So you simply do NOT count on it being "secure" forever and you build in systems and methods to authenticate your communications and you CHANGE them regularly. (Twice as much and twice as fast if there is actually shooting going on)
Your "assumption" again here is that nothing changes and that when the military says it's using "GPS" it is similar to and vulnerable as a civilian system. (You go on to CONFIRM this being your assumption when you point to the FAA article on GPS jamming and interference.)
Probably the MOST telling "assumption" in your argument is that somehow an "enemy" could simply "take-over" a UAV or UCAV and turn it back against us. Using a powerful jammer, an enemy satellite, hacking into the computer system all of which is DIFFICULT to do with encrypted CIVILIAN systems, and magnitudes harder for a MILITARY system, yet you pass off these efforts as though they would be easy....
Your responses seem to fall into 3 areas.
1) a jammer would be vulnerable.
2) a GPS signal has to come from orbit.
3) no system relies solely on GPS.
All good points but...
Firstly, with answer 1), could the same not be said of any battlefield jammer, be it for radar or communication? Also the world's military don't seem to have a problem with powerful early warning and control radars in the theater so why would GPS jammers be any worse? And unlike these other transmitters the ground based GPS jammer jams most of the weapons fired at it.
Battlefield "jammers" have a "life" measured in minutes at best, which is why they are used sparingly, intermitently or when you have overwhelming air superiority. They radiate "noise" at high power in a localized area normally and they "die" very, very quickly unless they are highly mobile AND very, very good. (Wild Weasels are a good example) Ground based units are probably the worst survivable units becasue they are incapable of being tactically "mobile" enough to use movement to counter anti-radiation weapons. They survive by being used ONLY intermitiantly AND being very, very good. (See my above example of how the Iraqi military was NONE of the above)
Now you NEXT "confuse" Early Warning and Control systems with "jammers" which are two VERY different systems. The worlds militaries have powerfeul EW&C systems that are normally place BEHIND the battle lines at a distance to allow them to be protected by multiple layers of defenses in order to NEVER allow a single Anti-Radiation Homing Weapon to be allowed within striking range of the system! SHOULD such a
sacrilege happen, one of two things result: If the EW&C system is mobile it goes silent and EVADES in order to lose the weapons lock, scattering counter-measures to try an block any secondary guidance systems on the weapon. Or if the EW&C system is non-mobile it goes silent and then deploys counter-measures to try and destroy, spoof, or break the lock on of the weapon. If the evasion/spoof/CM works the station comes back on-line once the threat goes away. If not; In the case of the mobile system you normally have to switch to a back up platform as they most often carry only a single system and you just LOST that one. (It's why you buy mulitples) Usually though a mobile system is a much more difficult target to hit. If it is the "non-mobile" kind you erect a back-up, or secondary antenna system since your main "vulnerable" parts are the antennas doing the radiating. Usually your main processing, control, and power systems are located in distant and seperated locations so you don't HAVE a single target to get hit.
Lastly you "assume" again an effectivness for "jamming" that is simply not seen on the modern battlefield. Please note that the majority of "jammers" are simply NOT capable of effecting the type of weapon used against them because they guide the weapons in on themselves! A GPS "jammer" would not adversly effect an anti-radiation weapon and in fact it would HELP the weapon find and kill it! As for being effective enough to "stop" a GPS guided weapon aimed at it, I'd point out that jammers need a LOT of power and they are not something "small-and-cheap" being a large mass of electronic gear. If they cause the "bomb" to miss by 100ft (assuming a totally ballistic "glide" from 1000ft, which is NOT a given as they jammer ONLY gets better the close the weapons gets and is LESS effective the further away the weapon starts) 2000lbs of High Explosive is still more than likely to combat "kill" by blast and fragmentation the jammer. And lest we forget you can only use a jammer effectivly at or near the spot where the GPS weapon is headed for since the limited range of the jammer means once the weapons passes out of effective range it reaquires guidance. (If it lost it at all in the fist place)
Secondly, answer 2) discounts the possibility that the enemy may also have satellites. I believe a lot of modern systems are only appropriate against unsophisticated enemies and this will be a huge problem should a real threat emerge (re-emerge?). Also I don't believe this to be true (that GPS must come from orbit). The USAF has done a lot of work increasing the accuracy of its ALCMs by using ground based differential GPS beacons.
I'm glad you state that it is your "belief" rather than trying to support it as fact. Point of fact you're quite wrong about most of the suppositions you make here. 1) GPS DOES come from orbit there is not such thing as a "ground-based" GPS system, nor "differential GPS beacons" as you seem to imply. (Note here, but the ALCM does NOT use GPS at all it relies on a totally different system for guidance and in fact is used to TARGET and DESTROY GPS/Communications/Radar-jamming and EW&C sites)
The various "Jamming" of GPS that you point to is based on huge signal noise sources and a great deal of power and do not "confuse" the system as you seem to think (ie:false readings) but simply overwhelm the GPS signal itself. Such jammers are easily located and destroyed IF you're actually shooting already. Unfortunatly it is not so cut and dried when there isn't an actual "shooting-war" going on. (Your example of North Korea) Point of fact most "GPS" guidance systems can NOT recieve GPS signals in any direction EXCEPT from "above" them so the ONLY way to "interfer" with a GPS signal is either to push out enough noise and power to overwhelm the signal (which paints a huge target on yourself and gets one killed rapidly) or to have a weaker, more directed "source" with the SAME frequency and input protocals as the original signal source somewhere "in-between" the GPS satillite and the reciever.
To which you provide the answer of the "enemy" putting up satellite(s) to do just that...
Which shows you don't understand how GPS works, or the difficulty of doing such a thing. GPS satellites are in Low Earth Orbit and there are hundreds of them. Now, while I don't have the exact numbers a simple check tells me that CIVILAN GPS systems, for example a hand held or car unit uses at least THREE GPS satellite signals in coordination to find it's location. A MILITARY system would use many more than that. Now in order to "spoof" a UAV or UCAV, (let alone a GPS guided bomb) you would have to intercept and over-ride each and EVERY one of those signals (satellites) with one of your own. So you now have to launch a complete GPS satellite network simply to try and interfere with "my" GPS network, but worse yet I don't need to have anything BUT a signal and a known orbit if I have ANY type of INS system and/or I "know" where I started, and where I'm going to guide me to the general area of the target!
And you have to have enough satellites in orbit for me to have multiple signals (all with the proper protocol, wave-length, and pulse train, etc) over my entire flight time. And they HAVE to come in at the proper "angle" to the reciever so you can't simply put a big satellite into GEO because it won't "move" the proper way a LEO satellite will!
In other words while it's not "impossible" by any means it is very, very unlikely to work the way you assume it does or would.
And answer 3) wile I appreciate that it's good to have multiple sensors, if GPS can't be relied upon all the time requiring another system then what's the point. The machine doesn't know when it's getting good data unless it has another fool-proof system to check against, in which case use that! No navigational device works without a degree of inertial reference, not even a compass. But what other system does JDAM have apart from GPS?
The "point" is that the military doesn't RELY on a "single" system for the majority of it's work BECAUSE we fully understand that such reliance is a huge vulnerabilty. JDAM has a simple, well tested and very reliable INS system in addition to its GPS. The GPS simply makes the weapons MORE accurate with its inclusion but it is not the SOLE guidance system the weapon has. (In fact ALL of it can be "disabled" and the weapon dropped as a simple "dumb" bomb if needed. Why? Because beneath all the "kits" stapped onto it that's what it IS based on. Expensive yes, but much better than having to solely depend on a system that "could" be jammed)
For the most part GPS is only used to "compare" to inertial guidance in any system it is used in. Civilian GPS systems are even "supposed" to NOT be relied upon as the "only" navigational aid, but in practice people generally get complacent. (Hence you have people driving into rivers, trees and houses following the directions of their "Tom-Tom" rather than paying attention to where they are going. The military LEARNS from these lessons
)
Generally I'm seeing that your basing your whole argument on the various assumptions you've made regarding how you THINK systems work rather than how they actually work or how they are or would be used.
In the main you seem to think that UAV/UCAV and/or guided weapons are simply pointed in a general direction and let go to find their own way and that's simply NOT the way things work.
Randy
