US Stealth Jet Has To Talk To Allied Planes Over Unsecured Radio 270
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.'"
Relative speed of technology (Score:4, Insightful)
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 [wikipedia.org]. 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.
Re:Nobody goes to war anymore. (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re:I don't think the cypher is the problem. (Score:5, Insightful)
In a true air-to-air conflict, there will be radar signals bouncing all over the place, originating from everything from AWACS to SAM sites. There's plenty of emission, just from the defensive ground stations. A really good passive seeker is all you need for target acquisition, especially when your aircraft is equipped with fire-and-forget missiles that have their own active seeker, and require no intervention from the pilot of the firing aircraft.
Re:Nobody goes to war anymore. (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re:Nobody goes to war anymore. (Score:4, Insightful)
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.