Secret Military Aircraft Possibly Exposed On TikTok (warisboring.com) 86
An anonymous reader quotes a report from War Is Boring: An OPSEC violation has once again made a case for why using TikTok should be a punishable offense in the military, this time after someone revealed some US stealth technology testing going on and posted it to the Chinese government-affiliated platform. The stealthy object -possibly a component of a new drone or plane- was filmed on a tractor-trailer platform at Helendale Radar Cross Section Facility. After making their debut on a social media platform tied to America's top adversary, images of the object quickly made their way to the internet, gracing everything from 4chan to Reddit. It is unknown what project the object is tied to, though speculation has ranged from a new Boeing product to even the famed "TicTac" UFO sighted by Naval Aviators in recent years. Steve Trimble of Aviation Week wrote in a tweet: "I showed this to Gen Mark Kelly, Air Combat Command chief. His immediate reply was that he had no idea what it was. And then he took my laptop and stared at it for about 20 seconds. His expression was (WARNING: my impression) somewhere between confused and impressed."
America (Score:1)
The only country that is good at building shit that other people can use to win a badly losing war.
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Right? https://www.cnbc.com/2018/11/1... [cnbc.com]
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Your point? Did you think I am Russian?
Re:Stealth tech does not work anyways (Score:5, Insightful)
It still works. It's just less effective because of several methods used to diminish it's effectiveness.
How do we know? The primary competition that is likely to field stealth detecting systems is developing aircraft and ships with clearly visible stealth features.
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Naa, that is just the usual "follow the crowd" stupidity and some people making tons of money pushing obsolete tech.
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Follow the crowd... across the systems that literally have been asymmetrically countering each other (i.e. using systems that are different than those that are fielded by the opposition, because they counter what opposition has better than simply mirroring what opposition has) for last 80 years like Russia vs US?
I want you to be very clear on this. Are you trying to say that Russians just did a complete 180 over last decade of weapons development, in spite of entirety of history, tooling and methodologies t
Re: Stealth tech does not work anyways (Score:2)
That's the one we use (Score:2)
> It would only be possible if the Chinese military was using the same "industrial complex" that we do
Whose industry do you think we use to get all our stuff manufactured? :)
Once upon a time, the United States was well ahead in industrial capabilities, including things like manufacturing chips. For the last few decades, the US has spent hundreds of billions of dollars building China's capability, by sending money over there for everything we want made.
For example Intel and AMD were far ahead of the res
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TSMC just makes what someone else has designed. It doesn't have any meaningful ability of making comparable designs itself. That's not what it does. Their expertise is in manufacturing, not design.
If you really need an example of a company that actually can do both manufacturing and design, Samsung would be a much better example. And no one is giving that capability to Chinese. They've been begging, pleading and trying to buy or steal it for two decades at this point. They couldn't. And so, they're several
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Just as a nitpick, TSMC is not in the People's Republic of China.
Considering everything, TSMC (in Taiwan) is (politically and geo-politically speaking) much closer to South Korea than to the People's Republic of China.
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And that is my point. If the companies that comprise our military industry do not also comprise the military industry of China, then our paths, paradigms and groupthink will not also be theirs - except insofar as they are constrained by the maxim of Form Follows Function.
Re: That's the one we use (Score:2)
I get your point, and they call their F-35 clone the J-31. It's built partly from the F-35 plans, with improvements. Meaning they ARE building. Planes designed by Lockheed Martin. It's an *unauthorized* use of the Lockheed Martin design, but they are using the design.
It uses some of the same parts that the US puts in the F-35.
https://thediplomat.com/2015/0... [thediplomat.com]
The US left 73 miliary aircraft in Afghanistan when they ran away. Those plus several others give the Chinese plenty of opportunity to make their own
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Okay, I understand what you mean, but that phrase still amuses the heck out of me.
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Why? "Stealth aircraft" and such are actually a pop culture misnomer. Stealth as a concept was described by a soviet scientist, and it includes a specific set of features.
There are also quite a few invisible stealth features. For example, the way certain aircraft will point the radar antenna at an angle when in maximum stealth mode to avoid radar itself from functioning as a reflector.
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Because stealth has more than one meaning. It's a pun.
Re:Stealth tech does not work anyways (Score:5, Informative)
That age is past.
No it isn't. Stealth still makes targeting anything accurately much, much harder than if the target is a flying/floating/diving radar/sonar reflector. Anybody who designs a ship/sub/aircraft without putting significant effort into minimising a multitude of different sensor footprints is basically asking to get blown out of the water or shot out of the sky.
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Right. It's all about playing the odds. Even on the best of days military gear often doesn't work as intended. Anything which makes it a little bit less likely to score a hit has some value.
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>without putting significant effort into minimising a multitude of different sensor footprints is basically asking to get blown out of the water or shot out of the sky.
This is simply wrong. After Rafale's performance in Libya it has been made crystal clear to everyone that stealth is merely one of the many methods to achieving the goal of being difficult to target.
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>without putting significant effort into minimising a multitude of different sensor footprints is basically asking to get blown out of the water or shot out of the sky.
This is simply wrong. After Rafale's performance in Libya it has been made crystal clear to everyone that stealth is merely one of the many methods to achieving the goal of being difficult to target.
Libya? There were hardly any air defences worth mentioning over Libya in 2011. Now try to send a force of Rafales and another force of F-22s deep into Russian airspace through a belt of S400 and S500 batteries and squadrons upon squadrons of Sukhois and MIGs and see which force has the better survival rate (Hint: It won't be the Rafales).
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>There were hardly any air defences worth mentioning over Libya in 2011.
Interesting, considering that all allied nations flying non-stealth, non-Rafale aircraft had a strict policy of not fielding those aircraft without direct support from available Growlers, specifically because of SAM threat. Are you also unaware that pre-intervention Libya was the richest nation on the continent after South Africa?
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>There were hardly any air defences worth mentioning over Libya in 2011.
Interesting, considering that all allied nations flying non-stealth, non-Rafale aircraft had a strict policy of not fielding those aircraft without direct support from available Growlers, specifically because of SAM threat. Are you also unaware that pre-intervention Libya was the richest nation on the continent after South Africa?
I seem to remember claiming that if you don't put significant effort into minimising a multitude of different sensor footprints you are basically asking to get blown out of the water or shot out of the sky. To which you responded:
This is simply wrong
So now you are supporting an idea you previously stated was "simply wrong"? Make up your mind. The very argument that anybody flying non stealth aircraft into Lybia in 2011 needed shit tons of EW assets to survive just goes to my point. Stealth has value and anybody who does not s
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I don't understand the problem. I just read the paper, and it appears to be in total agreement with my point. Pretty much entirety of non-stealth bombardment was conducted by non-stealth platforms. There was only a small handful of B-2s available for the strikes. And these non-stealth aircraft were protected by Growlers.
The only marginal point of contention in the narrative is common in any story coming from anglosphere source is that they really don't like to mention the French, who anyone who actually rea
Re:Stealth tech does not work anyways (Score:5, Insightful)
What are you wittering on about? Are you referring to the fact that long wavelength radar can detect stealth aircraft? If so then so fucking what, it can't track them with sufficient resolution as to support any kind of engagement, certainly not sufficiently to launch any kind of missile.
At best it means you can send your own fighters up to intercept, but those fighters are going to be searching for a needle in a haystack, and if they're not stealthy themselves they'll just get shot down by the stealth opposition anyway.
I think you don't know what you're talking about. Stealth is still massively advantageous, suggesting it's not demonstrates absolute cluelessness.
Even if stealth technology was significantly diminished (it isn't) it would still hold significant value in that electronic warfare suites are far more easily able to hide something with a smaller radar cross section than something screaming "HEY GUYS I'M OVER HERE" because it has no stealth features. The more stealthy an aircraft is, the harder it is not simply to detect, but to track; even if you can detect it then you're still at a significant disadvantage if you can't track it and you can't shoot it down if you can't track it even if you know it's there. That's really the point of stealth; not absolute invisibility, but to guarantee that your vehicle gets to shoot first, because 99% of the time the one that shoots first wins the engagement.
So sure, track away with your UHF/VHF radars that'll tell you there's a stealth aircraft somewhere within this 100 mile radius; enjoy the HARM that flies into your face because you gave your position away long before you had any useful idea of where the stealth aircraft actually was.
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While you can carry a usable long wavelength radar into a "several semi-trailers" sized installation, you can't fit it into a missile.
As such, a radar-controlled missile have a much smaller engagement radius (and a much higher chance to "lose lock") against a stealthier opponent.
Re:Stealth tech does not work anyways (Score:4, Interesting)
We don't really know and can't really know until we use the F35 and F22 in an actual shooting war with someone who can put state of the art technology into the field.
Even then it's going to be a moving target. Right now we're avoiding operating F35s near Russian-made S400 installations, and when Turkey bought an S400 system we kicked them out of the F35 consortium. That suggests a kind of security by obscurity: the success of F35's stealth evidently depends on the enemy being ignorant of characteristics that can be observed with a sufficiently advanced radar.
But for now I'd distrust any confident predictions one way or the other, at least for any initial match-up of stealth and anti-stealth technology. It's bravado either way. In the long term, our massive fixed investment in stealth aircraft is going to make it hard (expensive) for us to keep up with anti-stealth technology. We need to operate those F35s for decades to recoup our costs, but the other side may simply need software upgrades.
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Note that the F35 and F22 are already boring tech (in the US at least), and we are working on a new, better fighter (NGAD) to replace them.
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Or another way to read that is that we aren't that certain that those aircraft can deliver, and if they do for how long.
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If the age of stealth tech is past then how come we still have multiple UFO/UAP incidents every year. If stealth tech is dead shouldn't we have shot down at least one of these and finally answer what they are?
8^)
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Shooting down random aircraft without a good reason is generally frowned upon, so no. Nobody is ever going to shoot down a "UFO" because by definition it hasn't been identified as a threat.
Re:Stealth tech does not work anyways (Score:5, Insightful)
LO doesn't mean you can go barrelling straight in to a target, there still has to be planning to avoid detection.
Sure the Russians keep saying they can do all sorts of wonderful things with detecting stealth, but ask yourself if this is true why are they developing their own LO technology?
Very low frequency radar can tell you that there is something out there, but it can't give you specific information. There's a reason throughout WWII that the British kept going to higher frequency radars.
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>Once the radars start emitting, good bye.
Dodging this is not just old but ancient at this point. You use intermittent radiation, shift radiation patterns and use sacrificial emitters when launch is detected. Not to even mention the fact that pretty much all of the radar sites of aforementioned SAM sites are doctrinally going to sit behind medium and short range systems specifically looking for HARMs to kill.
HARMs are for killing radar of adversaries several generation behind that do not have a proper do
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And those battles happened in late 1990s. You're almost 30 years behind the time, and time is linear.
The problem isn't TikTok (Score:5, Insightful)
If the US military goes after TikTok, then it's either incredibly incompetent or trying to protect a senior officer.
As the article says that it's an "OPSEC" (Operational Security) issue and it needs to be addressed at the personnel level - clearly somebody had their phone out and recording when they should know that (if the aircraft in the video is actually secret) that it's a crime to take photographs/videos of anything appearing on the site.
There are (a lot of) times social media is the problem, but not in this case.
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While true, that doesn't mean that phones with Tiktok installed should be allowed on military bases. This was probably a stupid blunder that was amplified by the post on Tiktok. And you aren't going to get rid of stupid blunders...but you can get rid of the amplification.
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s/phones with Tiktok/any device capable of recording \/ transmitting \/ secret information/
You spelled that wrong. I fixed it for you.
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Indeed. That's why a lot of places will tell you to keep the phone either at home or in your locker. I'm sure even Google-glass or it's like wouldn't be allowed.
Re: The problem isn't TikTok (Score:2)
Blackberry had phones in their lineup without cameras, long after smartphone cameras were ubiquitous. There were (are?) buildings that would allow phones in but only if they didn't have a camera, so there was a small but loyal audience.
Alas. Blackberry did so many things right. But they did just enough wrong, that they failed.
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s/phones with Tiktok/any device capable of recording \/ transmitting \/ secret information/
You spelled that wrong. I fixed it for you.
That is a rule in many areas. If they were transporting something classified in an open area it should be covered, a simple rule even before cell phones. A bigger issue is the ability track locations and so as to get an idea of where troops are, which is a better reason to ban the use of some apps by military personnel.
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This could have just as easily been posted to any number of social media networks. It has nothing to do with TikTok whatsoever. It is the general act of recording at all which is the problem.
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While true, TikTok is (IIUC) a lot worse than most other such applications, though Facebook is in the same league, because it incentivizes posting pictures carelessly.
That said, there's a decent argument that phones with cameras should not be allowed near secure areas. Or even that portable phones should be prohibited. How far you want to go along that line is questionable, and there can be reasons why phone owned by the base could be allowed, as one balances benefits against risks.
But I can't think of an
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That said, there's a decent argument that phones with cameras should not be allowed near secure areas.
They aren't. If you bring a phone to a truly secure military area, it might end up destroyed.
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TikTik is owned by a Chinese company, and is therefore a de facto source of intelligence information for the Chinese government.
TikTok should not be installed on any phone, but especially one whose location, etc. would be useful to the Chinese government/military.
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Re:The problem isn't TikTok (Score:5, Interesting)
Could also be deliberate. Mock up something to throw the spies off the scent, and "leak" it on to TikTok.
Could even be a spy's own dead drop kind of thing. Post it to an anonymous TikTok account, no real way to tell who it was intended for.
Re: The problem isn't TikTok (Score:3)
Yes. There is a lot about those pictures that don't make sense.
Hauling a aircraft by flatbed? Maybe.
Letting an top secret craft outside during the day without a covering? No way in hell. Major opsec error
Letting expiramental aircraft near all sorts of active construction? Without protection. Nope major fail.
Those picture more scream movie to me. Sort of like the pictures of the planes from the horrible movie stealth showing up on real carrier decks.
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"Hauling a aircraft by flatbed? Maybe."
"Black Hawk Down" in Bucharest.
During a training flight, a "Black Hawk" helicopter suffered from a warning light issue and did an emergency landing.
It was towed on its own wheels, no flatbed necessary:
https://www.digi24.ro/stiri/ac... [digi24.ro]
(page in Romanian)
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Agreed. It would be just as much of a problem if it was instagram, twitter, or someone's personal blog. The problem is someone took the picture on a personal device and sent it anywhere.
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Off topic but I don't think your tag line means what you think it means.
I don't do anything that anyone in good physical condition and unlimited resources could do. - Bruce Wayne
I suspect you meant to say...
"I don't do anything that anyone in good physical condition and unlimited resources couldn't do."
The on-topic comment... (Score:2)
This was taken at Helendale Radar Cross Section Facility. That isn't a US government base. It is a Lockheed Martin facility. I suspect cries of foul or that assertions that taking a video there is a crime are somewhat overstated.
And since it isn't even known if the object in question is secret, and/or that the video release wasn't intentional and/or sanctioned, how about we all just put away our torches and pitchforks and stow the moral indignation. Besides, even in the worst case, this is less an issue
Re: The problem isn't TikTok (Score:2)
Either way, no such functionality should be permitted anywhere near anything classified. Spies have been shot trying to get cameras in range of military prototypes, that they are now attached to phones changes nothing. Iâ(TM)d ban them entirely. There should not have been a cell phone within ten miles of that facility.
Unless of course it was intentional. It could well be that the DoD wanted other nations to see t
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As the article says that it's an "OPSEC" (Operational Security) issue and it needs to be addressed at the personnel level
And, when it is, there will be an article calling it unfair and Slashdot post about it will be full of rage about it.
Or someone is spoofing you (Score:2)
Why should we believe this ?
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Why should we believe this ?
Yep. This could be some old test form, abandoned design, or just something purpose built that they "leaked" just to fuck with Russia and China.
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Why should we believe this ?
Because of the OUTRAGE! It must be true if there is official outrage over it! We must spend money to duplicate it, so we don't fall behind!
Seems to me it's a great way to "dispose" of ideas that didn't work out.
Re: Or someone is spoofing you (Score:2)
A Tic Tac on Tik Tok? (Score:3)
Wouldn't be surprised. The few UFO sightings that can't be explained by mundane events make far more sense as secret military projects (and who better to test stuff on than say your own unwitting F15 pilots). Triangle UFOs were all the range amongst the UFO nutters in the 70s. Strangely once the F117 was revealed most UFO shapes suddenly changed. I'm sure thats just a complete coincidence however *cough*.
Oh, and remember those pyramid UFOs supposedly following that US naval fleet?
https://nypost.com/2021/04/21/... [nypost.com]
Lol (Score:1)
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"Rest assured that this happened because the military wanted it to happen."
This guy on the intertubes sez the military wanted it to happen. He must be getting the secret memos.
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The military wanted your comment to happen too.
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You vastly overestimate the competence of random 18-to-24-year-olds.
Top secret area-51-style military tech (Score:5, Insightful)
Maybe TikTok is suspect, but anywhere that TikTok should be disallowed, pretty much all personal cell phones would be too.
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If you can't beat 'em, join 'em. (Score:2)
Since it is evidently impossible to stop young servicemembers from posting images of sensitive aircraft on social media, what we ought to do is build a bunch of cheap, preposterous mock-ups then trailer them around where they'll get photographed and shared.
President Raegan? (Score:2)
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I said *cheap* preposterous mock-ups.
Probably fake (Score:1)
And every other social media platform (Score:2)
Probably smoke and mirrors (Score:1)
re: Military TikTok (Score:2)
"An OPSEC violation has once again made a case for why using TikTok should be a punishable offense in the military...."
Stupid over-generalization. Nothing to do with TikTok. It's why cellphones are generally prohibited in areas where particularly sensitive activities occur, though rules have unfortunately become more lax in the last 14 years since I left working in such areas. Can't inconvenience the poor device-addicted populace. Plus, why automatically blame military personnel when it is more likely a bor
Looks a bit like... (Score:1)
project winterhaven tech.
Another traitor in our government (Score:1)
Problem with Tiktok (Score:1)