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Technology

Stealth Aircraft Useless? 405

Posted by CmdrTaco from the billion-dollar-bombers-depreciating dept.
HughsOnFirst writes "Roke Manor Research, ( part of Siemens ) has announced that by using one of its sensor technologies in conjunction with mobile phone basestation networks, stealthy aircraft will be rendered useless. They point out that 'Many countries are spending large amounts of their defence budgets designing stealthy aircraft.'"
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Stealth Aircraft Useless? More

Stealth Aircraft Useless?

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  • Re:bird... (Score:2)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Knowing that the "bird" is doing Mach 2 will indeed identify the object as a military aircraft.

    However, with the radar return the size of a bird, the aircraft would have to be extremely close to be painted on the radar screen (read: you're dead or it's passed before you can react), and the missile/gun you attempt to fire at it would need very sophisticated guidance to hit a radar target that small.

    I spent 17 years attempting to do the above while stationed aboard several different guided missile cruisers/frigates (the last time during the Gulf War).

    Sigs are for wussies.

  • Maybe I'm nuts, but was this article complete fluff or what? They seem to be saying that the cell phone transmitters can be used to work like radar, execpt that they have recievers scattered across the landscape instead of back at the source. I don't see the advantage here.

    Besides, if it is merely a matter that the current stealth technology doesn't do a very good job of absorbing or directionally reflecting cell phone radiation, then you can bet the next generation (and the upgrades on the current generation) will. I think this story is just sensationalism. Besides, wasn't Doppler radar supposed to render stealth useless too? I don't remember hearing much about that other than a short blurb on the evening news back in '95. Somehow I doubt this is the end for stealth technology.

    Down that path lies madness. On the other hand, the road to hell is paved with melting snowballs.

  • I wonder if this has been demonstrated yet? (Score:5)

    by phil reed ( 626 ) on Monday June 11, 2001 @08:27AM (#160339) Homepage
    Interesting, but it sounds like it has not yet been demonstrated. Stealth aircraft work by reducing the radar return back to the originating radar station (by scattering it in other directions). This is the equivalent of having a single radar station with a huge network of receiving stations, trying to receive the scattered radar pulses. It might work.


    ...phil
  • Hmm... Well, the claims differ depending on whether you're counting total losses, or just USAF losses.

    The Mirage was definately not USAF, and the Harrier may have been British...
  • It's not, well NASA has one or two, but the SR-71 was used by the USAF for recon until the late 1990s, I think it was 96 or 97.

  • Re:Well, so much for the F-22... (Score:3)

    by Wyatt Earp ( 1029 ) on Monday June 11, 2001 @10:40AM (#160346)
    Why Mylar?

    From what I remember from reading Crusade, the Mylar and now it's coiled ceramic and metal strips, are blown up over the sub station generation site, and then the pieces settle over the wires and cause a short when they touch the ground. And it doesn't blow up residental areas.

    As fr timing, it's pretty easy to time your planes when you know that the cruise missiles are going to hit at 8.15 pm, have the planes there at 8.16 pm.

    Chaff worked better when there wasn't Doppler Radar, now it's alot harder to hide behind chaff than use it for taking out sub stations, actually the Navy got the idea in the 70s after some chaff from an exercise knocked out the power in a Southern California powerstation.

    Why do this instead of using an Anti-Radiation missile? Because you can launch a cruise missile from 1,000 km away, but a HARM or ALARM anti-radiation missile only has a range of 30-60 km. In the first wave, you're SEAD planes will get SAMs fired at them before they get in range to fire *ARMs at the targets.

    You'll get much higher civilian casualties from bombing a power sub station or cruise missiling it, than you will from using Mylar.

  • Re:Altitude (Score:3)

    by Wyatt Earp ( 1029 ) on Monday June 11, 2001 @10:43AM (#160347)
    B-17s usually flew at 25,000 feet.
    B-29s at 25-32,000 feet.

    They didn't practice pin-point bombing, the would plaster the country-side with bombs in hopes of hitting something.

    The raid on Plosisti in Romania was done at low altitude, as were some of the later firebombing raids on Japan.

  • Re:Well, so much for the F-22... (Score:5)

    by Wyatt Earp ( 1029 ) on Monday June 11, 2001 @09:35AM (#160348)
    The F-22A isn't just about stealth.

    The F-22A is also about high altitude and high speed.

    While the F-22 has a lower radar and infrared cross-section than most production aircraft, it hasn't sacrificed performance to gain that cross section like the F-117A did.

    A recent piece by Jane's on the future of combat fighter tactics talks about advantages the F-22A has.
    http://www.janes.com/aerospace/military/news/idr /i dr010529_1_n.shtml

    "Earlier this year, F-22 chief test pilot Paul Metz confirmed that the F-22's speed and altitude capability acts as a booster stage for the common-or-garden AMRAAM. At M1.5 and at greater altitude than the target (the F-22 has a very fast climb rate and a service ceiling well above 50,000ft), AMRAAM's range is 50% greater than is the case in a subsonic, same-altitude launch."

    Since the USAF and US Navy are working on a number of Uninhabited Combat Air Vehicle projects, that if succesful, will be used to replace the F-117A in the SEAD (Supression of Enemy Air Defences) role, that was demonstrated in Jan of 1991 during the Gulf War. Even with an ad hoc "stealth detector" it will be very hard to track and shoot down hordes of uninhabited LO aircraft and missiles intent on knocking out your air defence infrastructure.

    In the Gulf War, the first wave of Tomahawk Land Attack Missiles carried strips of Mylar instead of explosives. These missiles blew up over substations and shorted them out, depriving the local radar a few moments of power till backups could be started, letting the F-117s and F-15Es through the air defences, I'm sure if someone comes up with another defence, planners will have a way to take them out to, a defence system is as only good as it's power source.

  • Altitude (Score:5)

    by Wyatt Earp ( 1029 ) on Monday June 11, 2001 @09:58AM (#160349)
    B-2A Spirits and F-22A Raptors do fly high, the B-2A has very high lift and low drag and it gets to 40,000 or 50,000 feet easily. I talked about the F-22A up above in a post.

    The F-117A doesn't fly at nap of the earth, simply because it doesn't have radar to allow it to avoid the groud in front of it, and because it's high drag and low thrust.

    The old F-111 Aardvarks did fly at very high speed at low altitude, but that was a swing-wing with huge engines and afterburners.

    For things like laser guided bombs, normal bombs, air to surface missiles, you need some altitude to get some distance for your tosses and launches.

    I'd argue about the "altitude has not been a viable defense since 1960 when Francis Gary Powers had his U-2 shot out from underneath him." Since the SR-71 was designed after that and it's high altitude, as is the replacement for the U-2, the TR-1, and the F-15 has very, very good high altitude abilities, as do the Russian Su-27, MiG-31 and to a lesser extent the F-18 and MiG-29.

    If you are in a plane at altitude, it's much harder for the missile to get you if you have manouvered because the missile usually has used it's fuel during the boost stage and is now coasting. You also have more time to react, fire counter-measures and to move, while at low altitude, if a...ohh...SA-12 or Rapier gets you, you might hear a tone and look up, then the missile explodes.

    If AA guns are useless against high flying aircraft, how did B-17s, B-29s and Lancasters get knocked down by German and Japanese flak during the second world war?
  • At one British airshow, a Stealth Bomber was successfully targetted and tracked by a British missile system.

    When an F-117 is not on a military mission, it's going to have its Mode C transponder on, the same as my Piper Archer. If it didn't, it couldn't participate in civillian air traffic control, since civillian radars can't even see something as unstealthy as a Cessna 172 unless conditions are right. Not participating in civillian ATC is frowned on because of the risk of running into a 747 full of nuns, which could be bad for business. So this boast was probably prime PR luserishness.

    When conditions are right, however, ATC can see "wakes", which are atmospheric disturbances behind moving objects. I've had ATC point out flocks of geese that they were tracking by wakes. I bet that if they saw a 600 knot wake, they'd probably guess it was a stealth aircraft, but they'd never be able to target it.

    During Desert Storm, the Iraqi radar did see wakes from the F-117s and send up aircraft with hastily attached search lights to try and find them. The problem is that a wake (and probably a track from this cell phone thing) just tells you that an aircraft is up there, but it doesn't allow you to target it. You'll know it's up there soon enough when your stuff starts exploding, so why bother?


    --
  • You could encode a base station signature in a modulation of the radar frequency. Straight AM could easily and reliably encode at least thousands of signatures. Also, the modulation technique could be designed to not significantly reduce the average radiated power. Moreover, it might be good to frequency-hop to make it harder for the enemy to target and kill the base stations. Also, that would make it difficult for the enemy to use the system against you. The "listener" would need to know which stations were using which frequency and when in order to track anything.

    Of course, what do I know?
  • At one British airshow, a Stealth Bomber was successfully targetted and tracked by a British missile system.

    True, the Americans are unlikely to invade England any time soon (they already have, if the TV is anything to go by!) but that does indicate that Stealth technology - at least, as of the Stealth bomber - has been within the ability of single RADAR systems to track, successfully, for at least the past 3 years.

    Now, using "cheap" distributed technologies may prove to be "budget" solutions for some nations, but that simply widens the scope, rather than creating it.

    The -real- danger is that such technologies exist at all. If the British can invent Stealth-tracking devices, then so can any other nation, provided they can get the parts. And those can probably be ordered from Maplin. However, I don't see any Middle East countries admitting to what they can (and cannot) do, any time soon. These -unknowns- are the real threat. You can't allow for something that you cannot know.

  • Yes, but you can convert it to heat, which (IR) is both a) much harder to detect at distance than RF (especially during the daytime, and especially if you are between the sun and an observer, and b) a secondary threat when you're carrying around a giant pair of jet engines.

    --
  • I haven't been able to read the original article because - well it got slashdotted already ;-)

    I wanted to mentiong that Motorola invented a radar system a few years back that could routinely track aircraft of all types by accumulating the reflections from existing FM radio stations...completely passive! From the brief intro in the article, this is really just an expansion of that basic idea, but using cell-towers.

    There is also another technology called bi-static radar - basically having two listeners that is suspected of being capable of seeing stealth - you reflect the radar beam away from the emitter, but if their are two or more receivers - the likelyhood of detection goes WAY up.

    The last technology that has been bandied about as being capable of seeing stealy is Ultra Wide Band radar. These are also interesting because they might come under the heading of low-probability of intercept as well! The trick here is to find a frequency spectrum where the stealth technology doesn't work. You just try em all.
  • Stealth is for minimizing the effectiveness for someone else's detection measures. So if smart figure out a reasonably effective way to find stealth planes and use that information in real time to track them and shoot them down then the burden shifts to stealth planes to devise effective countermeasures like the concept of 'chaff'. After all if you can't reliably aim at a plane it's almost as good as not being able to see it - unless you use massive weapons.
  • Aviation Leak reported sometime in the last several years that Lockheed and someone else both had projects using reflections from commercial radio stations to detect stealth aircraft. They were in a cheap demo phase and worked.

    --

  • Military DMCA? (Score:5)

    by sacherjj ( 7595 ) on Monday June 11, 2001 @08:33AM (#160368) Homepage
    All the Military needs to do is pass legislation that makes it illegal to detect stealthy aircraft. SAD (Stealthy Anti-Detection) Act. If it works for the MPAA, why not for defense?

    Oh, wait. Armies don't fight with lawyers, they have bullets. That might not work...
  • The American Civil War featured the first instance of germ/biological warfare, as a ship full of fever victims' blankets was sailed into a harbor in the hopes of touching off an outbreak of the disease.

    Can't remember which harbor or who did it to whom, though...

    Jon Acheson

  • Oh, please... This makes no sense. Another reply to your post explains a much more believable reason for the F-117 shoot-down. Besides, the embassy-bombing conspiracy theory is just ludicrous. That bombing was a huge PR loss for the US, and a huge win for China (except for the unfortunate folks in the building at the time). You're saying that the US publicly humiliated itself, violated diplomatic immunity, and committed an act of war against the world's only hostile nuclear power-- all to obtain an empty vengeance for an event which took place years ago and cost no American lives? Keep in mind that nobody (including the Chinese) can ever know that it was anything but an accident, which is why I call the vengeance empty.

    Of course the embassy bombing was an accident!

  • I meant hostile to the U.S., obviously.
  • It seems the whole idea of stealth reached its hey-day prior to cheap, ubiquitous computing power. Nowadays it seems that detecting stealth aircraft should be just a firmware upgrade away (in a manner of speaking). If the F/A-117 has a radar signature the size of a large bird, the only problem would seem to be to be able to track a large enough amount of birds just long enough to differentiate those that fly at 400+ mph from those that don't. Some SAMs should be able to be retrofitted for ground vectoring into the general vicinity of the plane, at which point its on-board radar should be able to finish the job. I'm sure the plane will appear bigger than just a bird to a missle 200m on its tail. And even if it doesn't, small enough computing power to do stealth tracking on-board is readily available, to say nothing of optical tracking.
  • And this still isn't going to make that huge of a difference, because I seriously doubt that the technology could be used with the pinpoint accuracy needed to direct weapons fire.

    I don't know about that... While I cannot read the article because of the /. effect, I would surmise that this technology would be QUITE accurate. The reason for this is triangulation. If you are trying to pinpoint your location with a map and compass, you take bearings on the surrounding land and draw lines on the map as to your location. The more reference points you take, and the more lines you draw the greater accuracy you have in pinpointing your location.

    This is triangulation. If you were to use a bevy of cell towers, each one pointing out a direction where the reflection was spotted, your accuracy would be high.
  • One by one, our new high tech miltary tricks are being nuetralized, either by selling the secrets to the Chinese for a few million and a blowjob (thanks Bill) or by cunning high tech ingenuity.

    Far be it from me to jump into a political minefield, but you do realize that the nuke secrets were actually stolen during the Reagan and Bush administrations, and the theft was discovered during the Clinton administration?

    You also should realize that there has always been a see-saw effect between military offense and military defense. The European fiefdoms needed castles to maintain their military control; in reaction to the immense defensive structure of a castle, militaries developed the siege engines such as the trebuchet and early demolitions (fire in the hole!). The primacy of the castle-based military was only for a couple of hundred years. Technology moves much faster today.

    To believe that nuclear secrets could be held forever, or that stealth aircraft would never be detected, is to ignore history.
    ----
    lake effect [lakefx.nu] weblog
  • Stealth technology is nothing compared to the George Washington project. New US currency has a small magnetic strip embedded in the paper, when thousands or hundreds of thousands of these bills are dropped over a battlefield they act as paper maché radar chaff. The system was actually designed during the 1950s but deemed not expensive enough for development. The US attack bombers of the 21st century will fly hidden behind a screen of paper currency. Go America!

  • Can you imagine how cool the phones will be when this technology is deployed?

    • To make a call, dial the number and press SEND.
    • To check your voicemail, press MENU-2-SEND, wait for the tone, then enter your PIN.
    • To acquire NOE flying targets with radar diffusing surfaces, press MENU-5-1-SEND, and wait for target lock tone.
    • To acquire medium-high altitude flying targets with radar diffusing surfaces, press MENU-5-2-SEND, and wait for target lock tone.
    • To alert the authorities that you've been targeted as an enemy SAM site, dial 9-1-1, press SEND, and kiss your ass goodbye.
  • As a Canadian whose ancestors conquered several American Indian tribes, it's nice to know that you don't need war any more. Those Indians, however, might disagree...

    -jon

  • Except that the civilians living in the Iraqi dictatorship are just as much victims of the government as the civilians who the Iraqi government attacked.

    I don't know if you realize it, but launching Scuds at Israel was incredibly popular in Iraq. If you're going to cheer while your country attacks civilians, taking a few bombs on your own head shouldn't lead to much complaining.

    And who exactly makes up the Iraqi army? That's right, the citizens of Iraq. Trying to make some sort of artifical separation between the people and their leaders is a game for armchair warriors. In the end, the Iraqis could overthrow Saddam. There are 22+ million of them; Saddam and his henchmen couldn't kill them all. They don't. Draw your own conclusions.

    We need to learn to tell the difference between the actions of a government and keep the blame off the people living under that government, especially in undemocratic countries.

    So you wouldn't have fire-bombed Dresden? Nuked Hiroshima and Nagasaki? I realize I'm edging close to Goodwin's Law territory, but what parts of Nazi Germany would you have considered off-limits to attack? Should we have stopped when most of Europe was free and the German troops were only within the borders of Germany? Were the Japanese civilians not responsible for making war goods for the Japanese military?

    I know that the Gulf War wasn't WW II, but the point of war is to win. When you are facing an opponent who will do anything, trying to play by "civilized" rules will get you killed. Ask the British, who stood around in their pretty red coats while the American rebels shot them from cover. They kept complaining the colonists weren't fighting fair. They also lost.

    In war, everyone is a target. War "crimes" are the winners trying the losers for losing the war, nothing more. Once upon a time, you just beheaded the losing leader and took his concubines. Now you put him on trial in the Netherlands. The only difference is the lawyers are involved...

    -jon

  • Re:why.. (Score:2)

    by TWR ( 16835 )
    The Isrealis were too busy committing genocide against the Palestinians to respond...

    I'm always amazed at how anti-Israeli ranters can't spell Israel correctly...

    If Israel wanted to "commit genocide" against the Palestinians, they'd be long gone by now. Say Israel wanted to kill, oh, 1 million Palestinians. How long would it take? An hour of heavy bombing of Gaza? Gaza is one of the most densely populated areas in the world. There's a large sea on one side of it, and large fences on the other three. There'd be nowhere for anyone to run, and if you believe what the Palestinians say, they have no weapons which could mount a credible counter-attack. I believe the technical term would be "shooting fish in a barrel."

    Heck, in Rwanda, Hutus managed to kill 500,000 to 1 million Tutsis in a month, using nothing more than machettes. After 37 years of Israeli control, there are more Palestinians than there were in 1967. I guess the Israelis must not have this genocide stuff figured out yet.

    -jon

  • And besides, I wasn't thinking so much of Yugoslavia and Iraq (hell, Iraq was mostly hit with precision weaponry anyway) as of Vietnam (carpet bombing, anyone?) or Cambodia (ever wondered why you don't see any civilians from American aircraft?).

    Well, the US did destroy an amazing amount of Iraqi civilian infrastructure in the Gulf War, precision weapons or no. Water purification facilities are still kaput. That probably has a lot more to do with the rise in Iraqi infant mortality than depleted uranium.

    Vietnam was another case of the US' enemy not exactly fighting according to the Geneva Convention. Whether or not you thought the US should have been in Vietnam, the Viet Cong were using civilians as cover, sending women with babies wired with bombs at US troops, etc. The enemy was fighting dirty. The US fought dirty in its own way (carpet bombing, several massacres of Vietnamese villages), but not as dirty as it could have (nuclear bombs, for example, or a massive invasion of the North, forcing them to battle on two fronts). The end result: the US lost. You can be quite sure that the US military is aware of this lesson.

    Cambodia is a much murkier area. From what I know, we supposedly attempted to bomb Viet Cong bases in Cambodia. We also killed a hell of a lot of civilians who had nothing to do with it. But if the Cambodians didn't allow the Viet Cong to establish bases in the first place...you can go on and on with this. I don't know a lot about the war in Cambodia; anyone who can provide me with some accurate info will be greatly appreciated.

    -jon

  • The days of razing cities and incorporating their populations as slaves is over.

    Maybe in Europe, but that's still happening in the Sudan, Congo, and Sierra Leone. And some of the events in the Bosnia war were pretty close to the old "rape, pillage, and burn" method of war.

    It's dangerous to pretend that the world is a civilized place. Peace and prosperity is not the normal condition for humans. Abject poverty and perpetual war are much more common. Right now, those of us in the western, first-world countries are very lucky and most don't appreciate how good we have it. Maybe the people of the world are slowly getting tired of stupidly killing each other. But take a look through most of the third world and you'd be hard-pressed to come to that conclusion.

    -jon

  • Re:why.. (Score:2)

    by TWR ( 16835 )
    thankfully, people do watch and care about the palestinians.

    That's debatable. There's a lot of evidence that support for the Palestinians is more lip service than actual support. The other Arab nations talk a lot about monetary aid for the Palestinians, but they rarely actually send any. Jordan threw out a bunch of PLO supporters after the Black September uprising in the early 70's. Between 1948 and 1967, Egypt and Jordan didn't allow the creation of Palestinian state; they kept the West Bank and Gaza as their own. Other Arab nations didn't absorb Palestinian refugees the way Pakistan absorbed millions of Muslims who fled India when the subcontinent was partitioned. Doesn't quite sound like care to me.

    What it does sound like is that the Palestinians are being used by the other Arab nations. By keeping the Palestinians in a squalid condition, Israel becomes the target of hate by the Arab "street". By directing the commoner's hate at Israel, they pay no attention to how crappy their lives are, and they support whatever horror their government will inflict on them, as long as it is in the name of defeating the "Zionists." Orwell described the technique quite well in "1984." He even picked a Jewish target for the Five Minute Hate sessions; he knew how these things work.

    it would destroy ties with benefactor usa

    Part of the whole "Israel is committing genocide" paranoid fantasy is that Jews (and through them, Israel) control the US government. If the Israelis were going to kill all the Palestinians, why wouldn't the Zionist Occupied Government of the US let them?

    not to mention millions of palestinians rushing into israel to escape the bombing

    There are heck of a lot more hiding spaces in Rwanda than there are in Gaza. Didn't help there. The sad lesson about genocide is that those who are committed to it often succeed quite well.

    -jon

  • Re:why.. (Score:2)

    by TWR ( 16835 )
    trying to associate people (and the vast majority of the world's governments) who rightfully deplore Isreal's criminal actions against their own population as Idaho ZOG loonies is pure claptrap.

    Another one who can't spell "Israel." Sheesh.

    The "vast majority" of world governments aren't what I'm talking about. I'm talking about the Muslim countries. If you don't believe that they are using antisemitism to rile up their masses and deflect attention from their own bankrupt policies, you aren't paying attention.

    Two easy examples: Indonesia's former finance minister claimed that the economic problems of Indonesia were due to "Jewish bankers" in the US; i.e., Jews control the world economy. Egypt's newspapers constantly talk about the Jewish control over the US government, especially during Colin Powel's trip to the region. Spend some time reading the newspapers from Arab and/or Muslim countries if you want to see more examples of what I mean.

    And by the by, the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza aren't Israeli citizens. Most of them hold Jordanian passports; some hold Egyptian. The Arabs who are Israeli citizens are the only Arabs in the region who can vote for their governmental officials, who have freedom to worship (or not) as they choose, and who live under a (more or less) free market economy. Yes, there is discrimination against Arabs in Israel, but the Israeli Supreme Court (which includes an Arab as a justice) has made repeated rulings to end the biases.

    As for Israel's "criminal actions," I maintain that Israel is no worse than every other country on the planet, and in many cases a heck of a lot better. Israel didn't level a town and kill 25,000 people, like Syria did in the early 80's. Syria is still occupying Lebanon, despite UN Resolutions telling it to get out (550, I believe). Funny, Hezbollah isn't shooting rockets at Syria over that. Must not be any Jews in Syria.

    What's even funnier is the way that Hezbollah and Hamas will take money from Iraq, which spends a lot of time trying to kill Shi'ites. I guess the Shi'ite Hezbollah and Hamas find it OK for Iraq to gas Shi'ites, as long as Iraq will help them kill Jews.

    I'm not even going to get into European colonization of Africa, Asia, America, and Australia. But I'm sure that if you can find a Native American or an Australian Aboriginie, they'll tell you all about it.

    -jon

  • Re:Bad, bad idea to deploy this technology (Score:4)

    by TWR ( 16835 ) on Monday June 11, 2001 @10:50AM (#160391)
    The reason why the Geneva Convention is pretty much ignored by the US is that it fights countries (Yugoslavia, Iraq) who ignore its spirit. Both put sensitive military installations in civilian neighborhoods, HOPING for the collateral damage so the US et al would look bad for killing women and children. What do you do when a country holds its own citizens hostage?

    And in the case of Iraq, it launched missiles at civilian targets in Israel, a country not even involved in the hostilities. The fact that Israel didn't remove Baghdad from the map is remarkable. I'd say that any country which targets civilians for no good reason deserves to have its own civilians attacked.

    -jon

  • I suppose that puts an emphasise of using computer viruses in warefare. If you wanted to ensure that you planes stayed stealthly then you would simply have to create virus that rendered cell-phone base stations inoperable. This way there would be no signal upsetting your planes.
  • OK, wiseguy. I'm going to put a multi-frequency RF receiver inside my house. Now, I want you to detect it....

    Done yet?

    How 'bout now?

  • Right, and it better not have a 50-foot sign outside saying "Acquire target here."
  • I read about something similar about a year ago, being developed by China. The basic idea seems to be to use existing civilian radio sources that span multiple frequencies - TV, radio, and now cell phones. The receiving stations are completely passive (this is important); all they do is detect the strength of radio signals at all these frequencies, compare that information to the known quantity of an empty sky, and calculate where in the sky pieces of metal are altering the radio signal.

    Here's why it's a bad idea:

    It turns CIVILIAN installations into MILITARY installations. Right now, it's considered really bad form to blow up TV or radio stations, or to destroy a civilian communication network. (Doesn't mean it won't be done, of course). However, if an opposing force is using TV stations to blow up your jets, then those TV stations become legitimate target.

    But why, you ask, would the military not target the receiving station? Because they're PASSIVE. They are not emitting enough of a signal to be differentiated from the background noise of 100,000s of TVs, radios, and cell phones. The receivers can't be targetted, but the transmitters can.

    So in essence, deploying a system like this gives your opponent carte blanche to destroy your civilian wireless communications network. This is a bad, BAD idea.

  • Re:From What I Understand... (Score:3)

    by leperjuice ( 18261 ) on Monday June 11, 2001 @09:15AM (#160397)
    In this case, widespread implementation of this technology might well see the design of a cellular-frequency homing missile.

    A smaller version will be made available for use in restaurants.

    Cluster-bomb variants will be designed for use over LA.

  • ... just to remind people why stealth was originally developed. The Soviet tactics was to advance their tanks underneath a SAM umbrella (c.f. 6 day war, etc). The stealth concept was to reduce radar cross-section and turn the overlapping fields of acquisition radars into more point-sources. This was to enable the US AirLand attack concept where you strike simultaneously at targets in the rear. e.g. if you expect a major tank tank in n days, you hit their reinforcements at n-1 day, their air support at n-0.5 day, etc ... The stealth aircraft are not wonder woman invisible planes, designed to penetrate high urban density regions (use cruise missiles for those). Mobile C3I posts yes ..., deep surprise raids OK, maybe some photo-reconaisance. Trying to enter a firezone ... most definitionly NO as they're subsonic and would be toast for any interceptor squadron with look-down/up radar. Any idiot wanting to use their stealth fighters as CNN cannon fodder (flying down streets to wow armchair generals) should be court martialed (3rd world countries with no tech (cough*sudan*cough) excepted). Now that the emphasis is moving towards infowar, expect to see stealth applied to small semi-intelligent observation planes. Afterall, if you can see a target you can usually nuke/gass/bomb it.

    Realistically ... who in the world wants to pick a fight with the US? Are you expecting the chinese to row across the pacific (bypassing Hawaii with a non-existant blue-water carrier fleet)just to prevent the hordes wanting a green card? Or do you expect the Arabs to suddenly become outright stupid in killing off their biggest customers. If the Qubecans dediced to take over Canada and make war on the Hollywood english, it might be a shock but anyone else has got to first build a navy and space network. What is much more likely (as shown with Australian refugees) is for a major disaster to happen (drough in Mexico, volcano in caribean, etc) and the borders get swamped by panicked survivors (the US social system is not exactly reknown for being robust). Buying a bunch of mobile phones to ward off stealth plane ad-spams to go home is likely to be the least of their worries.

    In summary, the stealth concept was to solve a specific problem of penetrating SAM envelops. Creating a defnce against a non-existant threat sounds like a marketing tactic than hard-nosed military thinking. and the US should be more worried about other matters (cough*Kyoto*cough) such as global reputation before junking a valuable asset on the basis of a defense manufacturer with evident self-interests in propagating an arms race.

    LL

  • Re:This'll happen...in 20 years... (Score:3)

    by Sux2BU ( 20893 ) on Monday June 11, 2001 @08:41AM (#160402)
    Given that this technology is not restricted to "unfriendly" countries, this could be a major incentive to deploy cell networks. Also, Iraq is not the only country that America (being the major user of stealth planes) is likely to go to war against. China (either directly or through Taiwan) is a possibility. Cellphones are hitting Chinese cities like wildfire. As such, this technology could become an effective tool for them.


    Technology-wise, China is not a joke. Likewise, Iraq isn't left in the stone-ages either. Don't assume that because a country has little to no consumer technology, that their military must be "primitive" as well. Keep in mind that the UN is still monitoring Iraq to make sure that they do not develop nuclear or biological weapons, which they have the brain-power to do so.

  • One point. It was Jack Northrop who designed and built the post-WW2 flying wings, and it was his company that got the nod for the B-2. Lockheed's aircraft was much less expensive, and rather a lot smaller, carrying about the same warload as the F-111. (rather than the B-2, whose load is on the same order as the B-1 and B-52) The Air Force decided to put their eggs in fewer, larger baskets, and bought the large Northrop bomber. Lockheed was seriously annoyed.
  • Huh? I'd say that any government that puts military targets in concentrated civilian areas is monstrous. Or, more to the point, using the civilian population as a shield to hide weapons behind is a pretty low tactic. The only way to make sure that governments don't do this is to systematically destroy such installations, preferably with smart weapons to moderate (though not eliminate) civilian casualties.

    War is monstrous. It's also inevitable. The only question is how to decrease its cost...sometimes, being monstrous is the only way to do it. (ref. Hiroshima and Nagasaki)
  • I do see your point, but I still disagree. The problem with fighting non-Geneva Convention signatories is that they don't play by the rules of "civilized" warfare. Specifically, prisoners of war are routinely mistreated, hospitals and the like are used to camouflage legitimate military targets, and we (the "Good Guys") care more about our enemy's civilian populace than the enemies do.

    I submit that this is an untenable situation. For the same reason that we cannot allow terrorists to get what they want, we cannot tolerate a foreign power that strikes from behind cover of their civilian populace. I argue that this sort of power is MOST likely to start aggressive wars (like, say, the Gulf War) and they're by your argument the least "attackable". What do you propose? What tactics can be employed that will accomplish the mission, but not offend our sensibilities? I'm really interested in any thoughts you may have.

  • Four-second summary (Score:5)

    by twoflower ( 24166 ) on Monday June 11, 2001 @08:27AM (#160409)
    We have cool technology, but our stock price is down. Maybe this will help us.

    That's about it.

    Twoflower


    --
  • The stablity of the wing is in it's implementation, not it's inherent concepts.

    That's true.

    If the wing was inherently unstable, the design would of never been considered, since designers focus on making the plane as stable as possible, without having computers make many, many corrections per second.

    That's not necessarily true. If you're trying to design a commercial aircraft, that's going to carry civilians, then yes, you want a very stable plane. But, there are certain advantages to having an inherently unstable aircraft. One being agility. I hate making blanket statements, but in this case, I think it's true... All modern fighter planes (F-xx) are inherently unstable. It improves their maneuverability, but you have to use a fly-by-wire system.

  • A couple of corrections. You were right that the Air Force had a couple of flying wings in the 1940's. They were built by Northrop and competed against the B-36 for the Air Force long range bomber contract.

    Also correct is that flying wings are stable, at least mostly. They do have a slight yawing problem because of the last of vertical tail. The air force deemed that this adversely affected bombing accuracy an unacceptable amount. The B2 could be flown without computers (or rather its shape could, the actual B2's fly by wire system wouldn't work without its computers) However this shape would also have the yawing issue. It is not enough to cause problems flying, but seriously affects unguided bomb accuracy. The computers on the B2 make hundreds of control inputs a second with it wingtip ailerons to counter yaw forces.

    And finally Northrop not Lockheed designed and build the B2. Lockheed did build the F-117.
  • A single object travelling ~800 knots would stand out, however a stealth bomber wouldn't appear as a single object, rather a series of seemingly unrelated, extremely small objects - ie. noise.

    What about the doppler effect? A moving object will slightly alter the frequency of the reflected radar wave.
  • In and of its self the flying wing can be made into a stable flying platform. There have been implementations of it going back as far as the late 1920's. In the 1940's and the 1950's NASA and the Air Force had a number of stable flying wings, without resorting to the use of Fly By Wire, which didn't exist. Only its the B2, that is unstable. The stablity of the wing is in it's implementation, not it's inherent concepts. If the wing was inherently unstable, the design would of never been considered, since designers focus on making the plane as stable as possible, without having computers make many, many corrections per second. The wing was chosen, because Lockhead's designers have been facinated with the wing for a long time and finally found a problem that fit the correct solution.
  • It's not the underlying tech that the two countries you specified are lacking, it's the communication and control networks and experience that would be needed to deploy the anti-stealth cell phone network, not to mention the immense cost of doing so.

    I seriously doubt that buying Playstations to run a military computer network is the answer to Iraq's problems either. Also, the plan doesn't address the problem of directing weapons to shoot down the stealth aircraft. So instead of knowing that the stealth aircraft is there after getting bombed, the cell-enabled anti stealth country has a few minutes warning.

    I suppose that such a thing could make a difference when considering the fact that other aircraft could be used to intercept the stealth aircraft, but that is also difficult without accurate information.

    I guess what I should say is that intercepting a stealth aircraft is not going to be an easy proposition any time soon. The "in the neighborhood" solution that this technology provides is not going to be good enough to make a significant difference. Even if you do manage to get fighter interceptors up "in the neighborhood" of the stealth aircraft, finding an aircraft within a few miles with the naked eye is a difficult process at best. Especially at night.

  • Yes, they aren't exactly invulnerable to, say, HARM missles...

  • Hahahahha! No, no one told me, and that is very funny!
  • This isn't even going to remotely affect any county's military for a couple of decades at best. Aside from the fact that most countries where military action is taking place at all, have sketchy cell phone networks at best, there is hardly a military that has the command and control facilities available to use the kind of information that would be collected by cell phone towers efficiently. Other than those militaries who already rely upon stealth aircraft.

    And this still isn't going to make that huge of a difference, because I seriously doubt that the technology could be used with the pinpoint accuracy needed to direct weapons fire.

  • Re:Junk Science (Score:3)

    by miracle69 ( 34841 ) on Monday June 11, 2001 @08:34AM (#160426)
    Except those darn birds don't fly so freaking fast!

    Seriously, though, stealth aircraft are designed to be stealthy against 1 type of radar station - a station where send and recieve occur at the same location. It is well known that separate send/recieve locations can reveal stealth aircraft, but there is a logistical problem when you shoot the send wave straight up.

    Plus, the stealth on the craft will still work against missiles and other plane radar.
    HI Mom!
  • Twenty feet up the mast of a sailboat, I easily detected a flock of four pelicans flying together very low, maybe 2-3 feet off the water, in a sort of "V" formation (one lead bird). I was able to "see" the flock about 1.5 - 2 miles away as a dim blip moving pretty fast, and its characteristics attracted my attention so much that I went abovedecks to see what kind of boat it was.

    Of course, I was tweaking the radar at the time, and it was a pretty clear, calm, early-to-pre-dawn morning as I recall, so it was probably ideal conditions to detect such things. Still, a pelican flying that low (they use "ground effect" over water to minimize energy spent flying) is a relatively stealthy thing I'd think, compared to anything that contains metal or is big. A pelican is pretty big for a bird, but very small compared to any airplane. They were flying lower than any military aircraft would, too, and I only found out what they were because they were flying toward me. As they got closer, I was even able to resolve the individual birds, though they were close together and it wasn't too clear on the screen IIRC.

    This was ordinary, mid-price Raytheon (Apelco) radar sold to any US boater without restrictions, and I'm no radar-expert, I was just messing with the knobs & buttons to see what I could see, and presumably both civilian and military technology have advanced a lot in the past decade+ since. This incident tells me that claims of aircraft stealthiness might be exagerated, especially if big-egos and big-budgets are on the line...
    JMR
    Speaking only for myself, and from relatively long-ago memory.
  • ...not that I care. If you are that pathetic, you can bookmark my userpage so you can be sure and downgrade as many of my posts as possible. I'll live. It was a JOKE you fricking idiot.

    Either mod or post. I'm fairly certain that you are the one who uses his mod points to lower ratings on disliked posts then posts anonymously to explain why.

    It looks like the troll kiddies have found themselves another way to abuse the discussions. SIGH.

  • Carlin WAS right!! (Score:3)

    by dmaxwell ( 43234 ) on Monday June 11, 2001 @08:39AM (#160434)
    "swift, strong, hard rods" George Carlin has proposed that all foreign policies can be summarized by what he calls the Bigger Dick theory. It goes something like this: "What?!?! They have bigger dicks?!?! BOMB THEM! And have you ever noticed that all of the bombs and the rockets and the bullets are shaped like dicks. It's an attempt to project the penis into other people's affairs. It's called FUCKING WITH PEOPLE!." He goes on to make several more points that are equally hilarious. I wonder what Mr. Carlin would make the parent's 'penetration by swift strong rods"?
  • This is no different from the B2, since the flying wing concept produces inherently unstable aircraft. Without some serious fly-by-wire, both those planes would never fly.

    Hmm...they didn't have fly-by-wire in 1948, when the YB-35 [af.mil] first took to the air. There was also a jet-powered conversion, the YB-49 [af.mil]. There were some stability problems (especially when it came time to drop bombs), but the situation wasn't as bad as you put it.

  • Something doesn't make sense. Maybe someone with a better grasp of physics can comment, but isn't there a maximum rate of gravitational pull? In other words, once a falling object reaches that rate, further acceleration ceases. Or in still other words, there reaches a point where hauling something higher up won't make any difference. The speed of impact would be the same. (And all this is discounting atmospheric drag, and remember the physics that, absent that drag, a hammer and a feather fall at the same rate).

    So if this is true, why drop crowbars from outerspace? Why not just drop them from high in the atmosphere if that point where one could achieve maximum descent is at a point above the earth's surface but is still within the atmosphere.

  • "Actually, this is the equivalent of having *many* (transmitting) radar stations and a *single* receiving station. The bet is that *one* of the transmitters will be in the right place to reflect signals to your receiver."

    Wouldn't the solution then be to just *randomly* deflect the signal? I realize that may ruin the whole point of being "stealthy"...they'd know *something* was in their range of reception, but not know exactly where. Perhaps that's what normal "jamming" is anyway...

    (IANAAeornauticalEngineer...)

  • Re:why do they assume it'll be scattered? (Score:5)

    by jguthrie ( 57467 ) on Monday June 11, 2001 @09:08AM (#160440)
    On the contrary. In order to design a stealthy shape, one mostly just avoids shapes that are particularly unstealthy. The rule to accomplish that is simple: No concave right angles. Since, for aerodynamic reasons (the term "interference drag" is significant) right angles are rarely sought out by aircraft designers, the bulk of what makes an F-117 or B2 more stealthy than your typical aircraft is the radar-absorptive coating. However, it is quite difficult to create a radar-absorptive coating that works over a broad range of frequencies.

    One example of a radar-absorptive coating is a layer of conductive paint a quarter wavelength above the metal surface of the aircraft. This is very simple to do, doesn't require any particular care, and doesn't require any exotic materials. If, however, the radar is at twice the frequency that the coating is designed to absorb, that particular coating enhances the return rather than attenuates it.

    Please note that even an absolutely stealthy aircraft can't necessarily escape detection. There are techniques for using backscatter from the atmosphere (developed primarily for wind shear advisories around airports) that can detect an aircraft's passage from the air that is disturbed around it. Even flying slow (which defeats a doppler-based system for low-observability aircraft) won't defeat that because it doesn't look at the aircraft, but at the air and an airplane is going to move a lot more air than a bird and is going to move it a lot faster than the bird would.

  • In addition to the Mode C transponders mentioned by other posters for safe civilian airspace transit, if you look at almost any picture of stealth aircraft in a non-combat setting, you can see several double-diamond shaped protuberances at various locations around the airframe.

    These are essentially corner cube reflectors, designed to give nice bright returns on radar frequencies.

    One important aspect of these devices is to make it difficult for an adversary to bring RCS (radar cross section) profiling equipment into an airshow or other venue and take detailed measurements of just how big that "little bird" is.
  • We should never forget that research and development is always useful in the long term. Yeah, the military and government fund a lot of it, but that doesn't mean that its still not useful.

    The military gave grants to the development of the IC 40 years ago, The 747 aircraft was a design for a military transport. The microwave is an application of radar technology. The list goes on and on. Even stealth technology has lead to better software and better simulations of radar and radar resonation cavities. Its also lead to funky new designs for aircraft. (Like that faceted one.)

    Then, what is that jet that runs supersonically WITHOUT afterburners? Will we maybe be seeing designs inspired by it coming out into commercial production in another 10-20 years?

    Actually, what led to the invention of the jet, perhaps decades before it would have othewise come into widespread use. Military aerospace research!

    Any organization that funnels billions of dollars a year into research is doing humanity a long-term good, whether its medical research, biotechology, vacination, aerospace, computing, radar etc.

    Research is research. The more thats done, the better humanity will find itself.

  • War Obsolete? (Score:3)

    by Louis Savain ( 65843 ) on Monday June 11, 2001 @09:28AM (#160446) Homepage
    Many countries are spending large amounts of their defence budgets designing stealthy aircraft

    It would be much more impressive if Roke Manor Research could figure out a way to make war obsolete so we can concentrate instead on exploring the universe. Wouldn't it be something if countries did not have to spend any money at all on defence? Is there not a way for the world to organize itself so as to live in peace? I think there should be.

    Oh OK. Sorry. I was daydreaming there for a second.
  • Of course it has. How do you think one of the F117s got shot down in Yugoslavia a few years back? You really think the bombing of the Chinese embassy was an "accident"? Rumor has it that the US bombed the Chinese embassy "by accident" because the Chinese provided this passive detection technology to detect stealth aircraft to the Yugoslavians and it was used to shoot down the F117.
  • Perhaps you can use this to detect scatter and locate an aircraft, but this inferred position information is not the kind of thing you will be able to use on a seeking missile for example. Maybe you can use it to target some more sophisticated system to down the plane.
  • they either have to be in LEO to be able to be delivered quickly, in which they need a big reserve of fuel to stop their orbit decaying to quiockly, and when the fuel runs out they eventually will rain down upon you anyway. Or they are put in a high orbit in which case they deploy slowly and need a lot of fuel to bring them down ..... and eventually they rain on your grandkids ....

    Neither stops the bozo with the FAE bomb (or biotoxin, or satchel nuke) in front of your govt building, or on a boat coming into NY harbor

  • I can just see the conversation right now....

    PILOTS :
    "The minute we move in there they are going spot us on their radar."
    "Nu-nuh,"
    "Uh-huh,"
    "Nu-nuh, not if we Jam it."
    "Ah- ha."

    MOBILE BASE STATION JAMMED!!!!!

    ENEMY:
    "There's only one man who would dare give me the raspberry! LONESTAR!!! ::crash sounds::

  • looks like a pretty clear-cut case of access-control circumvention. broadcasts or accounts of this aricraft's location may not be disseminated without the express written consent of the DoD.

    When will those hackers ever learn?
  • All they are describing is bistatic radar - really, in this case, multistatic. It might be a problem for the F-117 which achieves stealth by reflecting the waves away from the source, but not for other stealth aircraft which use radar-absorbent coating. And, bistatic radar is hardly new. Many years ago an experiment was performed in the US which showed that aircraft could be tracked using the transmissions from geosynchronous TV satellites as illumination.

    Also, Stealth aircraft tend to fly pretty high. This means that the signals are attenuated through distance, and the phone grid would have to cover a wide area to catch oblique reflections. Cellular towers put out aggregate powers if a few hundred watts at most, with the beam intentionally directed below the horizon. TV stations put out hundreds of thousands of watts... but they weren't mentioned! Military radars, OTOH, put out thousands to hundreds of thousands of watts (megawatts of peak power) with highly directional antennas pointed at the target, and with the advent of stealth, bistatic military radars are under development or in place. In fact, the F-117 lost over Serbia may have fallen prey to a bi-static trap - help by knowing its exact path and time to target.

    It looks like a P.R. flack wanted some free publicity for his companies cellular products.

  • Re:Altitude (Score:3)

    by jheinen ( 82399 ) on Monday June 11, 2001 @10:55AM (#160458) Homepage
    The daylight bombing campaigns carried out against Germany were done at high altitudes; 30,000+ ft. The P-51 was developed precisely because a high-altitude, long range escort was needed to shepherd these missions over Europe. It became quickly apparent that the B-17 and B-24 were horrendously vulnerable to flak at low and medium altitudes, and at high altitudes the bombing formations were jumped by hordes of German fighters as soon as the Spitfires had to break off because of low fuel. The P-51 was able to stay with the bomber formations much longer, and the Norden bombsight enabled very accurate delivery of weapons from high altitude.

    -Vercingetorix
  • I would imagine that if you spent that money DIRECTLY on the research, instead of being happy of getting those research results as an incidental benefit of learning how to kill people more efficiently, society would be much better off. (Granted, at least some of that money is spent trying to figure out how to avoid getting killed.)

    I regard the military as a distasteful (but necessary) overhead for a society to protect themselves from the forces of greed & irrationality. I also think that, as a species, we'd be a helluva lot more advanced socially & technologically if we spent the same amount of resources directly seeking to improve our standard of living.
  • I seem to recall that the biggest problem with the patriot was a fortran floating point error. The system worked fine as long as you rebooted it every few hours to clear the error.
  • Even if you detected the airplane...
    Even if a single pixel was devoted for that tiny return received by the dish covering hundreds of square miles...
    Even if you could track that return between radar zones...
    You'd still have a hard time telling it apart from all the other birds happily flapping around.
  • allied forces firebombed Dresden, and some argue that the destruction was greater then Nagasaki

    No. Some people have never looked at the actual numbers, or they would know that the firebombings of Dresden and Tokyo were definitely more destructive than the damage done to Hiroshima and Nagasaki. More casualties, more area destroyed, more total explosive yield, etc. Here's one sample link [time.com].

    It's the calculus of war: lots of "small" weapons delivered continuously will outgun a single big kaboom. Bringing this back on topic, it's similar to the way a bunch of ordinary cell phone towers can help shoot down a billion dollar bomber.

  • After a jaunt to my local library [jhu.edu], I can say with reasonable authority that we were both wrong.

    Out of my head, about 200,000 died on Aug. 6, 1945

    The best accepted figures say approximately 80,000 were killed by blast/fire at Hiroshima, and another 60,000 died later of radiation. Some articles claim 60,000 more long-term deaths (leading to the 200k you cited), but causation is often disputed. A comparable number died in the firebombing of Tokyo and Yokohama [google.com] (March 10, 1945). A total of 500,000 were killed by firebombs in Japan, with similar counts (a bit lower) in Germany.

    found this article. (Dresden around 20,000.)

    Other souces say the Dresden bombing killed over 100,000 [ulib.org] people. However, the best respected figures are about 40,000 -- same as the people blown up at Nagasaki (plus another 40k from radiation).

    Although any single incident is not quite equivalent, the total firebombings killed more civilians.

  • "The 117 can't even fly without a huge array of computers adjusting its attitude"

    This is no different from the B2, since the flying wing concept produces inherently unstable aircraft. Without some serious fly-by-wire, both those planes would never fly.

    ---

  • This seems to be a similar approach to one discussed in a previous SlashDot thread, http://slashdot.org/articles/99/11/28/1723230.shtm l [slashdot.org]:

    Detecting Stealth Planes
    Posted by Hemos on Sunday November 28, @05:23PM
    from the now-we've-got-you dept.
    Zurk writes " Newsweek said China's new Passive Coherent Location (PCL) system tracked the signals of civilian radio and television broadcasts and picked up aircraft by analysing the minute turbulence their flight caused in the commercial wavelengths. cool huh ? " They hope to use it to detect the F-117A and potentially the F-22. Very cool use of technology to fix a problem.
  • If you figure out a way to detect the plane, the military will just develop a new way to be undetectable by your new methods. It doesn't mean we shouldn't make new stealth planes, it means we just need to do a little more research.

    Yeah, this theory has been proven by the MPAA.

    But seriously, a moving object by its very nature displaces material and changes the relationship of its neighbouring bodies. There will *always* be an effect. Thus, there will always be something to detect. You can't outrun physics.

  • Looks like this would require a country to blanket their territory in receivers and if they did detect something the chances of it being a bird or a cloud are probably higher than it being an enemy plane.

    I can just see it now, military detects something using this system, lobs a couple of missiles at it:

    "Lietinaunt What did we get?

    "No plane commander but we nailed a bald eagle, should I make a report?"

    "No Lietinaunt, the last thing we need here is the EPA or any of those other green %!@#$!";


    "One World, one Web, one Program" - Microsoft promotional ad

  • prolly yeah, but I'm suspiscious about this for a number of reasons ... Siemens is a big military contractor ... this information could have been worth hundreds of billions if kept secret and sold say to, the united states.

    But since they've chosen to tell everyone about this -- I think its an oveture -- "Ohh all those poor countries building stealth aircrafts that can be detected by our unproven technology" ... "let *US* build your stealth aircrafts and we'll make sure this dosen't happen to your military projects!"

  • Spotting this should be easy. Just look for the 'large bird' traveling at mach2.

  • Re:Stealth aircraft in Kosovo (Score:3)

    by mszeto ( 133525 ) <mszeto&scompton,ca> on Monday June 11, 2001 @09:02AM (#160515)
    >that the only plane to be shot down by
    >Milosevic's army was a stealth aircraft. And
    >they don't even have mobile phones...


    ... okay, lets say your being bombed, and you can't see who's attacking you, because they're obviously stealth. Even the ones that you *can* see, are going too fast for you to target. What do you do? You pepper the sky with your AA guns.

    The fact that a stealth bomber got hit means that one of those AA rounds was really really lucky, that's all. If AA guns could target, they'd hit more often.

    SAM batteries is a different story - but also require targeting.

  • Re:Stealth aircraft in Kosovo (Score:3)

    by Tassach ( 137772 ) on Monday June 11, 2001 @08:55AM (#160525)
    Engage brain before putting mouth (or keyboard) in gear. F-117's get assigned the most dangerous missions, because they are the most survivable. If you put enough lead in the air, you're going to hit something, even it it's only by luck - which is what happened in Kosovo. Sometimes in military operations (or anything else, for that matter), you can do everything right, but the other guy just gets lucky.

  • Re:that's not the only aircraft (Score:3)

    by Tassach ( 137772 ) on Monday June 11, 2001 @09:08AM (#160526)
    B-2's were not used operationally in the Gulf War - they were all at their bases performing their strategic Nuclear deterrance mission, which freed up a bunch of B-52's for Desert Storm. When it comes to delivering huge quantities of (dumb) iron bombs, not even the B-2 can compare to the venerable BUFF (big ugly fat *ucker). The B-2 isn't really optimized for delivering gravity bombs - even in a conventinal strike role the B-2 is equipped with standoff weapons like the Tomahawk cruise missle or the SLAM. In military parlance, B-2's are HVU's - high value units (like aircraft carriers and ballistic missle submaries) HVU's are typically your most potent weapons, but you use them in such a manner to minimize their exposure to counterattack. Think of chess - you wouldn't sacrifice your queen to take a pawn unless you had a VERY good reason for doing so (like setting your opponent up for a checkmate)

  • Re:Nokia ad (Score:3)

    by Drone-X ( 148724 ) on Monday June 11, 2001 @08:45AM (#160533)
    I think this is just another Nokia advertising campaign...
    I guess they got jealous at Sony for selling all those PlayStations to Iraq.

  • Re:Mach 3 Bumble Bees (Score:3)

    by djrogers ( 153854 ) on Monday June 11, 2001 @04:17PM (#160536)
    Sorry, but your argument here is full of holes. First of all, we don't have a stealth bomber that goes Mach 2 (the -22 isn't a true stealth plane, it's just 'stealthy'). Second, the radar returns from a stealth bomber are highly variable, and wholly inconsistent, dissapearing, re-appearing, shifting, and then dissapearing again. A single object travelling ~800 knots would stand out, however a stealth bomber wouldn't appear as a single object, rather a series of seemingly unrelated, extremely small objects - ie. noise.

    Now, at close range, with a known location, a good RSO could probably pick out a stealth bomber with fair accuracy, but how often do we tell our enemies exactly where we are going to be and then fly right over their radar installations? That would kind of defeat the purpose....

  • Re:This'll happen...in 20 years... (Score:3)

    by SubtleNuance ( 184325 ) on Monday June 11, 2001 @10:20AM (#160595) Journal
    I seriously doubt that buying Playstations to run a military computer network is the answer to Iraq's problems either.

    In case no one told you: Iraq never bought Playstations for their Defense Dept. This was propaganda released for(by) Sony in order to add an air of 'technological wonder' to the device - something that goes along way with consoles (they are like drugs to techno-fetishists). In other words, the idea was an orchestrated lie in order to 'puff-up' the Playstation image, there was no reality there.

  • How do you figure the flying crowbars or brilliant pebbles or whatever are "weapons of mass destruction"? The whole point is that they hit small targets, like a single tank, rather than large targets, like a city.

    Many small weapons do not constitute one large weapon, unless you want to claim that weapons of mass destruction were employed in (for instance) the American Civil War.

  • Re:I wonder if this has been demonstrated yet? (Score:5)

    by bombadill ( 213382 ) on Monday June 11, 2001 @02:02PM (#160622)
    Actually, there is a better explanation. However, it requires some background.

    Stealth tech has the effect of reducing the effective radious of a given radar station. Modern air defense relies on setting up a series of stations such that their effective areas over lap. The idea is to have a continuos net of detection across a given area.

    When using stealth tech, the effective radius of these stations was drastically cut, thus creating holes in the network. Note that if a stealth craft were to fly over a radar station, that station would still detect the craft. So, part of an effective stealth raid is good intelligence on the location of these stations and plotting a course through the holes.

    In the case in question, the USAF got sloppy (more or less ) and began to use the same route through the network more often than was prudent. The FRY ( Fedreal Republic of Yoguslavia ) forces got wise to this route and stationed several stations along the route. Once observers on the forward part of the route detected the F-117, the radar stations on the rear part of the route opened up.

    So, you see, it has nothing to do with secret Chinese technology, but rather with a clever FRY AD commander and lax planning on behalf of the USAF.

    It must be remembered that on the modern battlefield, there is rarely one dominating system. Rather it is the case that these systems must be used in conjunction with other systems and in the proper way in order to acheive the proper effect.

  • From What I Understand... (Score:5)

    by deebaine ( 218719 ) on Monday June 11, 2001 @09:04AM (#160627) Journal
    The minimal reading I've done on this topic indicates that the theory behind this is not entirely new. It has long been known that with a scattered network of receivers and some extensive computational power stealth aircraft can be tracked. After all, the Yugoslavs got one (not sure if it was blind luck, but I think I recall reading something about a reasonably effective trap).

    Nevertheless, stealth technology remains useful for several reasons. For starters, it is impractical to deploy this system (as far as I can tell) on aircraft, meaning that interceptors are going to be vectored right into the engagement by ground controllers. Ground controlled intercepts are generally considered to be tactically inferior to intercepts in which the controllers vector fighters into the vicinity and allow the fighters autonomous control in the final phases of the intercept (and has more or less been proven as such over the Persian Gulf and the Middle East). Shooting the planes down will still require an enemy pilot to find and track the stealth fighter, which remains difficult.

    Additionally, the ordinanace involved encounters the same problem. Provided the stealth aircraft is not transmitting, a missile has to home in on a very small radar or IR signature, which may cause additional issues.

    Finally, stealth was never meant to be the end-all technology. Like most military advances, it requires a tactical and strategic shift on the part of the enemy force that may make them less effective against conventional aircraft or may cause them to make an error that can be exploited. Implementing this requires command and control additions, organizational shifts, reanalysis of defensive planning, etc. At the very least, the enemy has expended substantial time, money and effort implementing a response. The onus now becomes to develop a response to the response. In this case, widespread implementation of this technology might well see the design of a cellular-frequency homing missile. Now Wild Weasels hit SAM sites, radar sites, and cellular towers (causing an additional problem when in wartime a substantial chunk of a countries cellular network goes down the first night of the war).

    Witness too that, at least in the case of the USAF, the military is moving away from pure stealth. The F-22 was acknowledged to be the less stealthy of the two entries in the ATF competition, but won out due to its somewhat higher performance and usefulness as an air superiority weapon. Its stealth characteristics are useful, but it is not a stealth aircraft in the way that an F-117 or B-2 is a stealth aircraft.

    Does this technology alter the landscape with regard to air defense somewhat? Absolutely. But I would judge Siemens' title "Stealth Aircraft to be Rendered Useless" to be roughly as accurate as an article appearing around 1940 or so touting radar as the invention that would "Render Bombers Useless." Stealth aircraft were only "undetectable" if one listened to the media. They will remain powerful weapons, if only because of the strategic and tactical problems they cause.

    -db

  • This is why we must militarize space! (Score:3)

    by Hairy_Potter ( 219096 ) on Monday June 11, 2001 @08:29AM (#160628) Homepage
    One by one, our new high tech miltary tricks are being nuetralized, either by selling the secrets to the Chinese for a few million and a blowjob (thanks Bill) or by cunning high tech ingenuity.

    We almost have a monopoly on space, we need to partner with the Russians to militarize space. Jerry Pournelle wrote about the High Frontier, and proposed flying crowbars. Basically, a 10 pound crowbar with tiny guidance fins and homing sensors. You drop it from orbit, it strikes at about Mach 15 (after drag), and nothing can withstand it. If we have the shuttle drop a satellite of flying crowbars or two off every trip, in several years we would be able to blanket the Earth with them, and rain Mach 15 hellfire down on anyone who attempts to disrupt the peace or endanger the American way.

    There's no real defense against this, even Saddam in his Sadam-bunker would eventually be penetrated by these swift, strong hard rods.

    Best of all, this is not nuclear, so it doesn't break any international treaties!

  • Military Spending (Score:3)

    by hillct ( 230132 ) on Monday June 11, 2001 @08:31AM (#160638) Homepage Journal
    This, of course will have no impact on military spending relating to stealth aircraft. This is why military contract work is so profitable. First they hire you to develop a technology, then they hire you to make it inefective, then they hire you to develop a new more effective technology... A nice little perpetual spending machine. Imagine those little balls handing on strings from a bar on your desk cost the tax payers $1 million every time they complete an arc.

    Don't get me wrong, I'm all for a strong national defense, I'm just saying that It's a good business to be in.

    --CTH
    ---

  • Two related articles... (Score:3)

    by hillct ( 230132 ) on Monday June 11, 2001 @08:53AM (#160639) Homepage Journal
    I came across these two tidbits, both of which I found interesting:
    I found both sonewhat interesting but vary light on details...
    Enjoy!

    --CTH

    ---

  • This is illegal under DMCA (Score:3)

    by necrognome ( 236545 ) on Monday June 11, 2001 @09:41AM (#160648) Homepage
    Siemens' new technology has circumvented the stealth fighter's access protection.

  • because flying in civ airshows and other public demonstrations requires them to be detectable. Besides, knowing where he is kind of helps a missile system, if you don't see it you ain't going to target it.

    This is as much fallacy as the claimed Austrailian "we can detect B2s by their atmospheric disturbances"...

    too bad the ones that bombed Serbia (they used B2s) were not detected by any European country they flew over or even the NATO stations not informed about their flight. (they flew non-stop, dropped bombs, and flew out without the local commanders being told to expect them - guess who never saw them?)

    Never underestimate the military, the use air shows to both show off and to make somethings appear as they are not. (which is where these stories of "stealth" planes being tracked come from)

  • Re:This'll happen...in 20 years... (Score:5)

    by markmoss ( 301064 ) on Monday June 11, 2001 @09:05AM (#160672)
    Cell phones are actually quite common in the third world. For instance, in rural India a quite common "small business opportunity" is to buy a cell phone and rent it out by the minute. When you only need to serve about 1 phone per hundred people, it's much cheaper to put in a network of cellular towers than to run copper everywhere. If the total bandwidth is not too high, you can avoid running copper at all, just interconnect the towers by microwave beams. It might be necessary to give each tower it's own power supply -- but most of these countries are sunny, so use solar cells and lead-acid batteries.

    I seriously doubt that the technology could be used with the pinpoint accuracy needed to direct weapons fire. I agree. What that technology might do is to vector a fighter to somewhere near the stealth bomber (they are NOT fighters, no matter what the Air Force says), and then it will have to aim the guns by other means: eyeball, or fly above it and look for the infrared glow of the jet exhausts. (They put the exhausts above the wings so people on the ground with IR goggles can't see them, but from the right angle they still must be very visible. It is harder to pick out a target looking down because of all the other heat sources on the ground, but campfires don't move at 500 knots.)

    The bigger weakness is, how long do you think that cellular network is going to continue working once the USAF finds out it is vectoring in the interceptors?
  • > It might work.

    It will work. I sent this idea in to DoD ten years ago. I just didn't think of using existing cell service. I bet they did.

    --Blair
  • Both craft have radar absorbing properties on the aircraft skins, but the primary stealth device is reflective.

    The reason the -117 is ugly and the B-2 is pretty has to do with computing power. In 1977 (when the -117 prototype, called the Have Blue) they did not have enough computer power to calculate the reflectivness of a rounded surface, but triangles are 'easy'. The B-2 uses the same math, but 10 years of Moore's law later.


    Brant

  • Mach 3 Bumble Bees (Score:3)

    by Belly of the Beast ( 457669 ) on Monday June 11, 2001 @09:14AM (#160726)
    It has alway been possible to track Stelth aircraf. Stealth effectively reduces the cross-section of a fighter to say the size of a bee. Now you might expect that a radair return from a bee is rather small (about -100dB) and would get lost in the noise. If you just filter for return amplitude you would be correct. On the other hand if you filter for speed you can pick out a bee traveling mach 2 with little effort. In fact, you know that it is a stealth aircraft. 20 years ago building a 22 to 28 bit ADC to grab the the data real time was a problem, now you can can just call Creative Labs and get a gross of them FedExed. The truth of the matter is that the Navy has always been able to track Stealth aurcraft, even with their original SLC8 RADAR. Counter-measures are a whole nother issue, Throwing out a ton of RF noise is not a good idea if the whole point of your aircraft is to be silent. On the other hand, if you are dealing with a bunch of ill-trained draftees Stealth does seem tooffer some advantages (Vs. gulf war) -S

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