North Korea Forced US Reconnaissance Plane To Land 417
First time accepted submitter ToBeDecided writes "A U.S. military reconnaissance plane was reportedly forced to perform an emergency landing during a major military exercise near the North Korean border in March. As revealed by the South Korean defense ministry, a strong signal transmitted from the north disrupted GPS in the area surrounding the position of the RC-7B aircraft. Without information about their position, the pilots were forced to abort their mission and return to South Korea. This raises the question whether the U.S. military would be able to perform operations in North Korea given how fragile their equipment seems to be."
No it doesn't (Score:5, Informative)
"This raises the question whether the U.S. military would be able to perform operations in North Korea given how fragile their equipment seems to be."
What an amazingly stupid statement. All kinds of things to consider:
1) Rules are different for peace time and war time. You are more careful in an exercise than in combat. Planes have other navigation systems, like inertial navigation, however they aren't as precise. During a drill, you take the careful approach, abort, and back out. In combat, probably not.
2) The reason precise positioning is so important in this case is because they need to make sure to not cross the border. This matters less in wartime. There are things that call for precise positioning but not ever flight needs it all the time.
3) They managed to get one plane to land. Oh wow, that would be useful if the US had 2 planes but they don't, they have thousands. Does the system work so well against that many?
4) Anything generating a signal is a target. Lock on the signal and blast it. There are even missiles for that sort of thing called AGM-88 HARMs. Their design is to nail radar facilities but it wouldn't take much change to make them nail GPS jammers, and the US may already have models for that.
5) How well is this going to work if you don't know the planes are even there, like say the B-2Bs, which they can't detect to target, and yet which can carry tons (literally) of precision munitions?
While I'm sure the US isn't pleased about this and it doesn't help, it isn't as though this would suddenly stop US craft from functioning. All it can do is stop precise navigation in whatever area it is effective in. It also can only do so as long as it can transmit. Anything hostile that broadcasts a signal had better be able to move fast and defend itself. If not, it will go 'asplode in a big hurry.
Exactly (Score:4, Informative)
That was the procedure in Iraq. Listen for anything broadcasting on GPS frequencies and hit with laser targeted bombs. Once they were quiet move back to GPS.
Not currently an option for North Korea at the moment, so turning around and flying off is probably a good call.
Re:The question isn't the fragility of systems. (Score:4, Informative)
This raises the question of 'How did they do this in World War II, before we had GPS?'
Very badly. Aerial navigation in WWII barely worked. Bombers routinely had trouble finding their targets. The V-1 and V-2 could at best hit a city-sized target; using them to attack an airfield was hopeless. (Had they been accurate enough to hit airfields, the Battle of Britain might have turned out differently.) There were various radio beam schemes, most of which were jammable.
Much bombing was done by sending in the best navigators as "pathfinders". They dropped incendiaries, and the other bombers dropped bombs on the resulting fire. Both sides occasionally set up big bonfires to divert bombers looking for such fires.
Re:I'm going to have to call bullshit (Score:5, Informative)
GP's anecdote seems to be a folk exaggeration of the story of Zoltan Dani [wikipedia.org], the "I've shot down an F-117" Serbian guy. Quoting Wikipedia:
Lt. Col. Dani made it a strict field rule that the SA-3's UNV type fire control radar could only be turned on for a maximum of 2 x 20 seconds in combat, after which the battery's equipment must be immediately broken down and trucked to a pre-prepared alternative launch site, whether or not any missile has been fired. This rule proved essential, because other Serbian AAA units, emitting high-frequency radiation for any longer periods or forgetting to relocate, were hit by AGM-88 HARM missile counter-strikes from NATO aircraft, suffering radar equipment and personnel losses.
Radar sets obtained from confiscated Iraqi MiG-21 planes were planted around the SAM sites to serve as active emitter decoys, which diverted some anti-radiation missiles from the actual targets (dozens of Iraqi MiG-21/23 warplanes, sent to Yugoslavia for industrial overhaul, were seized in 1991, after Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait.) Retired SAM radar sets were used as optical decoys, left at well-known military bases to lure NATO planes waste munition on worthless targets. Owing to these measures, Dani's unit evaded 23 incoming HARM missiles, all of which impacted off-site with insignificant or zero damages.
This was probably overlaid on top of other factual stories of Serbs using decoys for their military equipment to curtail damage. Also from WP:
Most of the targets hit in Kosovo were decoys, such as tanks made out of plastic sheets with telegraph poles for gun barrels, or old World War II–era tanks which were not functional ... At the end of war, NATO officially claimed they destroyed 93 Yugoslav tanks. Yugoslavia admitted a total of 13 destroyed tanks. The latter figure was verified by European inspectors when Yugoslavia rejoined the Dayton accords, by noting the difference between the number of tanks then and at the last inspection in 1995.
Similar figures are there for other equipment. So Yugoslavia did not suffer significant military damage or casualties - most of NATO bombings disrupted civilian infrastructure (which NATO has conveniently redesignated as "dual-purpose", leading to events such as Grdelica train bombing), and most victims of them were civilians. But the way Serbia avoided decimation of its military was, effectively, by dodging the open fight.
Re:That's it. (Score:2, Informative)
But I'm so ronery!
Re:The question isn't the fragility of systems. (Score:3, Informative)
The Pathfinder bombers were purely on the Allied side, in Europe no less. What about the other sides to the conflict, in other theaters? Typical Ameri-eurocentric view of WWII, misinformed and blindly following the narrative instead of the facts.
Re:Calling it an "emergency" seems sensational (Score:4, Informative)
The more interesting story here is that the US is doing exercises near North Korean airspace. Here is a militaristic country with nuclear weapons and with China on one side and South Korea on the other, as well as Japan close by. They have medium range ballistic missiles and nuclear weapons. Everyone wants them to stop antagonising their neighbours, launching missile tests over them, doing nuclear testing... And the US and Japan have perfectly good spy satellites.
Operation Team Spirit has been going on in Korea for DECADES.
There were a bunch of years in the late 80's and early 90's where NK would offer to come to talks if OTS was called off. So they'd opt out of OTS for a year and then NK would send us a "Fuck you capitalist pigs!" message.
Finally, back in 1992 they basically chose to ignore NK and carried on with OTS again.
When does OTS happen? About this time every year.
Re:Exactly (Score:2, Informative)
That's similar to the arab strategy of attacking from mosques hospitals and schools. Is it working for them? Not really. Maybe at the beginning it did, but now everybody is aware of that.
Re:The question isn't the fragility of systems. (Score:4, Informative)
The V-1 and V-2 could at best hit a city-sized target; using them to attack an airfield was hopeless. (Had they been accurate enough to hit airfields, the Battle of Britain might have turned out differently.)
Battle of Britain - 1940. V1/V2 - 1944/45. Most weapons are ineffective if they come along 4 years too late.
In 1940, the Germans had a weapon that was accurate enough to hit even tanks, much less airfields, the Stuka dive bomber. The trouble is, dive bombers are very vulnerable to fighter opposition unless you have air supremacy, which was what the Germans were trying to achieve in Britain. The Stukas suffered heavily from the RAF and were rapidly withdrawn from the Battle of Britain, which indeed hampered the German ability to take out those airfields.
After the V2 campaign started Germans installed a post-launch radio navigation system which improved the V2 accuracy to a few 100 meters or better. Thanks to the ULTRA / Enigma decrypts, the Brits knew that they were testing this against English targets, were worried about the improved accuracy, and instituted a deception campaign to convince the Germans that they were not actually hitting what they were aiming at. It worked, and they never really made good operational use of the more accurate aiming capabilities.