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."
Bad summary (what else is new) (Score:5, Insightful)
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."
This says nothing about fragile equipment, this is about a jammer putting out a signal stronger than what is coming from the satellites above. The signal from the satellites is well known, and thus figuring out how to jam it is just a matter of signal strength and what type of jamming they want to do. Do they want to just bury the signal in noise, or are they trying to send false data to lure US and ROK units into NK air and sea space?
Calling it an "emergency" seems sensational (Score:5, Insightful)
Fragile? (Score:2, Insightful)
The U.S. Army is the most powerful fighting force in the history of the world. An M1A2 tank is not fragile. The U.S.S. Enterprise in not fragile. The U.S. Marine Corps is anything but fragile.
Every time U.S. forces have come up against Soviet-doctrine troops and equipment in a regular battle (as opposed to a counterinsurgency campaign) after the Korean War ( a draw), the U.S. has soundly kicked their asses. The more technologically advanced the equipment, the less likely it has been to break down. "Smart" weapons of the 1970s were finicky and prone to failure; today's smart weapons are remarkably robust in comparison.
When U.S. forces went up up against the largest and best-equipped Arab army in the first Gulf War, they wiped them out. Read up on The Battle of 73 Easting, where U.S. 2nd Armored Cavalry Regiment went up against the Iraqi Republican Guards (and their "robust" Soviet equipment) and absolutely destroyed them.
Lake of GPS would be a serious disadvantage...right up until the AGM-88 HARM took out the jamming stations. Which would probably be less than a hour after the strike packets were launched. If the U.S. can't rely on GPS, there are fallbacks (terrain mapping and getting coordinates from JSTARS come to mind).
With GPS, the U.S. military is the most formidable fighting force in the world. Without GPSstill the most formidable fighting force in the world.
Re:any signal can be found and killed (Score:5, Insightful)
That eventuality is presumed within the question of "whether the US military would be able to perform operations in North Korea". The question being asked is whether or not, should the need arise, the US military would be able to function in or near North Korea given the situation described above. The "need arising" means war. So, yes, presumably in peactime North Korea is able to disrupt the navigation systems of US recon planes in the area, and removing that capability would be an act of war.
Should hostilities start, presumably those capabilities would be disabled (or at least such disabling would be attempted) and whether or not that would be an act of war would be a moot question-- else why is there a need for the US to "conduct operations" in North Korea?
Has to be more to it. (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm inclined to believe there's more to it than what's in the story. Military aircraft do not rely solely on GPS for guidance. Perhaps drones and missiles do, but piloted military aircraft have redundant systems for guidance, including a sextant. Why do you think all aircraft other than a few fighters have a pilot and copilot? The copilot can act as navigator, and most tactical aircraft also have a navigator in addition to the two pilots.
Of course, this being just a drill, they may have said "screw it" and just landed. Any real reconnaissance mission would have be continued using redundant systems.
Or, they may have wanted to give that dike looking Kim Jong-il a big head and make him think he made a state of the art US military aircraft run for the boarder.
Any way you look at it, unless he zapped the plane with an EMF pulse strong enough to knock out the avionics systems, there is no way he could have done anything electronically to make them have to perform an emergency landing.
Ditto for the military naval vessels. The civilian naval vessels, yeah, it's possible they don't have anything other than GPS.
Re:any signal can be found and killed (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:No it doesn't (Score:5, Insightful)
Indeed. I would go so far as to say that this was actually a success.
The U.S. military now have better knowledge of the North Korea's capability and tactics. They now know that in the even of war, before the drop any GPS guided munitions, they now have the exact location of a target to take out.
This is no different to the old Soviet days, when US planes would test Soviet defenses, provoking a reaction to gain intelligence.
I'm going to have to call bullshit (Score:5, Insightful)
First because of all the claims "I've got a friend who..." has to be the least reliable form of evidence ever. Sorry, but the amount of made up shit out there is legendary, and gets worse in each retelling. It isn't just a story, it is hearsay of a story.
Then there's the fact that military radars don't work at 2.4GHz. If the S band was in heavy use for that, there would be problems with interference with other 2.4GHz devices. Military radar is mostly X band (8-12GHz). If you think that these things can't be designed to sniff for different ranges, you are kidding yourself.
Then there's signal strength. A microwave's magnetron is 1000 watts or so, and is not designed for directional transmission. Military radar is an order of magnitude above that or more. It is also steered directionally towards what you want (either mechanically or by phased arrays) to keep power dispersion down. A microwave would not show up at all the same as a military radar.
Finally there's the fact that, well, it clearly didn't do much even if it happened. Yugoslavia lost, rather badly, to nothing but an air war. They left Kosovo. It wasn't as though the NATO planes were befuddled and they had to send in ground troops. It was the first war where airpower alone did the trick.
Back on topic, that kind of thing would do jack and shit for the North Koreans with regards to GPS jamming. Not only does the signal need to be much more powerful, but it is the wrong band. GPS works in the L band. Building high power, L band decoys might work... But then those are probably effective jammers so no real difference.
Easy to tell they could still navigate (Score:4, Insightful)
They landed normally. It wasn't like the thing dropped out of the sky, they broke off and landed back at their base. They had to navigate to do that.
As I said in my other post, I'm sure it was for safety reasons and not crossing the border reasons that they called it off. Why take risks you don't have to in training?
Pragmatism? (Score:4, Insightful)
I do wonder if the reason they aborted was simply because it was the easier thing to do. If North Korea are being dicks, it's far easier and less risky to just let them get on with it - so long as they're not doing anything more than just being a PITA.
I'm sure the crew of an RC-7B is actually more than capable of navigating without GPS, if they needed to. Pilots managed it for decades before GPS was invented. Sailors managed it for millennia.
Re:any signal can be found and killed (Score:4, Insightful)
Because a minor navigational error during an exercise could cause an international incident. If we were at war, that would be irrelevant.
Re:any signal can be found and killed (Score:5, Insightful)
We've always been at war with North Korea.
Re:Easy to tell they could still navigate (Score:4, Insightful)
the headline makes it seem like north korean jets surrounded the recon plane and gestured it to land "or else", because that's what a forced landing is.
the headline sounds like fucking north korean loyalists wrote it.
in other news north korea "forced" the entire air fleet involved in the operation to eventually return to base!
Several levels of armaments (Score:3, Insightful)
Inertial guidance is nothing new, it was developed in the 1930s, German V1 and V2 missiles used it.
Two problems: it's less accurate and much more expensive than GPS. If you want military superiority you need both, Inertial guidance is for situations where GPS is jammed.
There are several other types of guidance systems, the US military has them all. One wonders about the wisdom of so much research on weapon systems, but it's a fact that it provides useful side-effects on civilian systems.
Correcting you to be polite (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:any signal can be found and killed (Score:3, Insightful)
Not to me. (Score:2, Insightful)
Suppose this is true as stated. When not in a state of war, if you are not certain about your position, you avoid if possible violating the other side's airspace - especially in a trigger-happy zone such as the Korean DMZ. So, I think that they probably did the right thing.
Now, suppose there had been a state of war. In that case, they wouldn't have been concerned about which side of the DMZ they were on, and having GPS jammed doesn't mean you can perform your missions (one of the first of which would presumably be to take out the GPS jammer radiating away down on the surface).
Re:Bad summary (what else is new) (Score:3, Insightful)
Do they want to just bury the signal in noise, or are they trying to send false data to lure US and ROK units into NK air and sea space?
Explain why it has to be binary. If I were running the op in N.K., I'd have a modest yet respectable and noticeable jammer doing mission #1, and a whopping boom-car monster of a jammer doing mission #2. So, they steer out of range of mission #1, trust their instruments, and therefore fly into the side of a mountain because of mission #2. Insert N.K. version of simpsons "ha ha" voice. Don't get all moralistic as if we wouldn't do the same to a nation that had air superiority over us...
The other reason not to fly is its WAY too tempting to the pilots to fly right at the boundary of "GPS works" in other words proving the jammer works against our machinery at a specific exact range. Why participate in an intel gathering activity against our own guys? We can try to work around that by intentionally flying into the jamming and pretending our GPS works, but they have perfectly good tracking radars that can see our behavior is somewhat different when being jammed (perhaps we only approach while VFR rules apply and we only do mostly level flight?) It becomes the codebreaker problem of them knowing that we know that they know that we know endlessly.
The other thing is the plane probably costs way more than a million times what the jammer costs, and the jammer might have a 1 in a million chance of making the plane crash into a cloud shrouded mountain or another plane, so if there is no specific mission to accomplish, just warmongering for the sake of warmongering, then there is no economic point in flying under those conditions. The way to "win" is to let the N.K. waste their electricity and labor.
Re:Exactly (Score:2, Insightful)
If you put that in hospitals et cetra then you will have no hospitals left.
The second you put military equipment there, then it is no longer "off limits".
May look bad for the attacking country, but it would be your hands on which that blood is spilled. If the enemy isn't bombing your hospitals and churches, then why give them a reason too. Unless you want your own civilians to die. That just makes you fucked up, to ensure the deaths of your own citizens, to make the other country look bad.
That makes YOU the war criminal.
Re:any signal can be found and killed (Score:5, Insightful)
Without information about their position, the pilots were forced to abort their mission and return to South Korea
My, what did pilots do before GPS?
Instead of being "forced to perform an emergency landing" it was probably more like they had the intel they needed and were done for the day.
Re:Exactly (Score:3, Insightful)
Don't be stupid.
There is nothing random about targeting military equipment, jammers or otherwise.
There is nothing random about placing military equipment in a school, hospital, or other traditionally civilian structure.
If you don't want something blown up, don't put military equipment in it. Tying your civilian infrastructure to your military infrastructure is just plane stupid.
Re:any signal can be found and killed (Score:4, Insightful)
Almost all of the time. The US has by far the world's most powerful military, and has for over a half century. For over a century before that the US military was among the top 5, though probably actually still the most powerful since about the 1860s, but confined to North America. During that time the US has invaded only its neighbors to the west (native nations) and south (Spanish Mexico, and then Mexican Mexico), and not for a century now, and very occasionally small distant countries with either no substantial military (Grenada), or similarly sized military (Iraq, Nazi Germany), or substantial counter-insurgency communities (Vietnam, Afghanistan).
Yes, the US is at war (overt or covert) almost all of the time. But there have always been far more opportunities for the US to make war with its huge military and bloodthirsty population than it has exploited. During most of its history other nations with big militaries have made more war.
So while most of US history has featured acts of war by the US, that's just a small percentage of the time the US could have committed acts of war. Most of the time something's stopping us, because we aren't doing nearly as much as we could.
Re:any signal can be found and killed (Score:4, Insightful)
I agree. ALL aircraft have on-board inertial navigation systems as well. And when all else fails, a map and a compass works just fine too. I smell BS.
Agreed, plus this seems like a pretty dumb thing to do if they were ever planning a war, to show us all their new toys since now we know what they're capable of and can figure out a strategy. It's like they're showing us their cards, wouldn't a powerful GPS jammer be something they'd want to keep hidden? Pull out the GPS jammer when the GPS-guided tomahawk missiles [wikipedia.org] are on their way, not when a reconnaissance plane is doing a annual drill. [wikipedia.org]
I think it went like this:
Pilot: Command we're experiencing problems with GPS, some sort of interference
Command: Can you identify the source?
Pilot: Seems to be originating from NK
Command: Is it effecting your ability to fly?
Pilot: Negative
Command: Continue operations as scheduled and chart locations of interference so we can pinpoint jammer locations.
Pilot: Roger
Command: (We were only doing a yearly drill but NK gave us the exact location of their GPS jammers! NK you are very stupid)
Re:any signal can be found and killed (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Exactly (Score:4, Insightful)
And then after your country is bombed into the stone age anyway you will be prosecuted for war crimes.
Not necessarily. Haven't the fighters in the Gaza Strip successfully shot rockets from schools and other such places, and caused Israel to get all kinds of worldwide criticism when they fired upon those locations? I haven't heard of anyone in Hamas being prosecuted for war crimes.