Air Force to ground the 117

And black helicopters. Don't forget the black helicopters.

Who cares if it is "ancient."

It's STILL BETTER THAN ANYTHING OUR ENEMIES HAVE.

Frequency agile, digital communications, with all coms happening within line of sight.

True enough, but there's a lot of reason to never fully give up manned aircraft and such. There's a lack of wisdom in putting all your eggs in one basket.

It would be more fun to fight with forts and Winchester Repeater Rifles though.

The problem with unmanned is that it is then controlled by a signal over the airwaves and any signal can be interfered with. Spies could easily find out the carrier frequ that we are using or whatever and then we would think we have an arsenal until our shit quits working. The Taliban might not be able to figure this out but a real enemy could and would do this. Don't you know that the Chinese are watching all this.

Yup, it'd sure be embarassing when all our attack aircraft just go cruising off in random directions and start crashing. Really puts a crimp in the battle plan.

Restricting to LOS is a death warrant, IMO

It ain't optimum, but don't our rules of engagement still require visual ID of a target before firing?

He's not talking about seeing your target, he's talking about controlling things.

Tell me if I understand you - your definition of LOS is controller to satellite to satellite to satellite (etc) to controll object?

If so, what do you do about those nasty china men, and their ability to blow our satellites out of the sky?

Blow them up first.

That's right. We don't need line of sight on Trident II.

Yup. In terms of naval history, my kind is the next 'battleship'.

Here's the thing: We have radios that can frequency-hop. They jump across a wide range of frequencies hundreds of times a second. So if you're going to jam them, you need a jammer powerful enough to not only reach out and do it, but it needs to be able to jam a wide range of the spectrum.

A piece of gear like that is going to suck a lot of power, so it is likely in a large building with a large dish on top. Makes it a pretty easy target to take out--whether by a manned or unmanned craft.

^ Nuke the site from orbit. It's the only way to be sure.

I always assumed that unmanned combat vehicles would be controlled by an aircraft similiar to an AWACs.

A nation is facing an attack by 30 or so U.S. unmanned vehicles.

Why not just send 5 or 6 Mig-25 Foxbats after the controlling plane?


You take it out and the attack by an entire squadron falters.

And any aircraft transmitting signals is detectable.

Six Mig-25s (which have been flown by Syrians and Libyans even) roaring in at Mach 2.75 and firing two missiles each are going to make any command plane break off and run for their lives.

They don't even have to shoot it down. Just force it to abandon it's control over the unmanneds by halting its transmissions. That is a mission kill.

Or, force it to recall the unmanneds to protect the controlling plane.

That is a mission kill.

Which reminds me of another thing about UAVs: They can be a lot stealthier than a manned plane. So it would be possible that they could slip in and take out any countermeasures designed to stop them before anyone even knew they were attacking.

Or take out an unsuspecting, innocent cargo ship.

"Daystrom! DAAYSTROOMM!!"

Not necessarily

stealthiness is not a component of size

...then why do they compare the effectiveness of stealth planes to what size object the stealth features reduce it's radar signature to?

simplicity of argument

Like when they say it reduces the radar signature to that of a basketball.

Ignoring the fact that a basketball doesn't give off a radar return

A B-2 bomber is roughly 75% of the size of a B-52 yet gives has a radar return less than 1 THOUSANDTH IIRC of a B-52.

Likewise, the small Quail missile once used by the B-52 could produce a radar return that was as large as the B-52 that carried it.

For that matter,

the radar return of a 3,000 ton Perry class frigate is about the same as that of a Nimitz class carrier. Some 30 times its size.

Yes, but the limitations required by having to carry a human (and naturally keep him alive) adversely effect stealthiness. If you don't have a person, you don't need a plexi canopy (that reflects radar), you can do some more creative things with your intake ducting, etc. AND you can make it smaller and lighter.

You're being deliberately obtuse AND comparing apples to oranges when you say size doesn't matter. Yes, you can have something that is large and designed with stealth technology and compare it to something small that isn't stealthy and they'll look the same size, but if both things are stealthy, the smaller thing will naturally produce a smaller radar crossection, meaning it is harder to "see" on radar.

In other words, you could take a beach ball, paint it green and put it in a woods, next to a blaze orange golf ball and then yell "SEE!? Size doesn't matter!" But you'd be full of shit.

God i'm so glad you don't teach.
A Basketball would give a radar return.

The actual techniques involved in remote control of combat aircraft is very sophisticated and very hard if not impossible to break into. It's nothing as simple as a radio controller.

No. In fact modern fighters such as the F-22 are designed to engage and shoot down the enemy well beyond visual range.

Even the 70' vintage Phoenix missile had a 60+ mile range well beyond visual.

She done good in Gulf War I, but her time has passed.




Oh and Forbin, I also heard that the F designation was needed to get the best test pilots to come help with the testing. And since she made the U2 seem as easy to fly as a P-51, the needed the best!

Does anyone even have the ability to crack a SINGARS? And we've had that thing for God knows how long.

And when I ask, I mean including ourselves.

Yes, I know, but capability is not the same as rules of engagement. You're talkinag about what the equipment CAN do, I'm talking about what the pilot is allowed to do.

Lobbing Phoenixes at something you KNOW to be a flight of Backfires coming over the pole is one thing. Shooting in an environment where the target could either be a hostile Iraqi MiG, a friendly Saudi F-15, or a passing Iranian airliner is another. I'm pretty sure I recall the rules of engagement in Gulf War One to require the pilot to make visual ID before firing on another aircraft.

I could ask at work. Our other division builds that puppy.
Bobcat?

Since the early '90s. Preliminary models were fielded for Desert Storm.

Ten years ago, SINCGARS was a VHF platform. When you programmed it, you had a frequency range--the broader the better--and a psuedo randomized algorithm called a "hopset". The radio also has a clock. The hopset makes the radio jump throughout the frequency range, hundreds of times a second, sychronized to the time.

So if you don't have the freq range, you aren't talking to anyone. And if you don't have the hopset you aren't talking to anyone. And if your radio's timing is more than a couple seconds (the software allows for the slight variance) out of time from the other radios in the network...you aren't talking to anyone.

Then on top of that, the transmissions themselves are encrypted. You don't have the crypto fill and...yup, you aren't talking to anyone.

So you could conceivably jam SINCGARS, but you'd need to throw out a signal across pretty much the entire VHF spectrum and powerful enough to override the communication signals in that spectrum.

Which brings me back to the issue that, to do it, you'd likely need a network of big, honkin' buildings with big, honkin antennas, spread across your country. And you'd need to blot out all wireless communication in your country when you turned them on (and suck up a substantial amount of power). So you do what we've done since at least 1991--send in stealthy planes (manned or unmanned) and blow up these buildings (or the power stations that supply power to them) and that'd pretty much end any jamming ability.



And this is just unclassified hypothesizing. The actual way we talk to our UAVs and safeguard their comm links is likely far more sophisticated than my ten year old, unclassified information.