6 ms·

This isn't strictly just about a weakness in the F-35's radar resistance, but that the whole concept of "stealth" aircraft may be limited in the future thanks t

This isn't strictly just about a weakness in the F-35's radar resistance, but that the whole concept of "stealth" aircraft may be limited in the future thanks to ever increasing computation power and clever usage of existing radio waves (making effective, passive, "radar" that cannot be easily overcome). But as the article points out, this cannot yet be used for guided missiles, and is very early tech regardless. I suspect the future won't be "super weapons" like the F-35, but instead just "mass" weapons like tens of weaponized drones. Where the mission isn't to be invisible but to simply overwhelming enemy defenses (essentially the World War I strategy, but without the massive numbers of dead soldiers). PS - The people pointing out that the F-35 had radar reflective disks added didn't seem to have understand the article (or technology). This is using entirely different methods to detect the aircraft, not radar waves, so that's irrelevant. The F-35 could be broadcasting a transponder, and it wouldn't undercut the technology discussed.

ummonk 7y ago
I should also point out that we do already use mass weapons in the form of cruise missile strikes.
- Retric 7y ago
  Cruse missiles are really expensive (~1.5 million each) and not really used for mass bombardment. The basic reason to use aircraft/drones is to reuse expensive components like engines and complex sensors.
  - willvarfar 7y ago
    Iranian-made cruise missiles seem super-cheap yet very effective. They also have lots of even-cheaper drones. The Houthi use them to attack oil installations and Patriot batteries. I think the recent attack on the refinery with 18? Drones and 7 cruise missiles (3 fell short?) could be referred to as “bombardment”.
  - openasocket 7y ago
    Time will tell, but I think the answer will depend on the situation. Sure, $1.5M is a lot, but it's able to deliver 400+kg of explosives at a distance of over 1000 km, while cruising at 800+kph at an altitude of 50m. I think any drone you design with those same parameters is going to cost about the same. Now, the re-usability is nice, but that isn't free. For instance, you need to either double the fuel capacity or cut the range in half, since you want your drone to be able to make the return trip. And now you have to worry about the reliability and maintainability of the engine and sensors. Plus, you have to think about survivability of your drone: how many sorties can you expect that drone to go on before it is shot down? Whether you want to use cruise missiles or drone swarms will depend on the increased cost to purchase and maintain drone vs. a cruise missile, and the odds that it will be shot down after dropping the bomb. In a low threat environment where you have air superiority you definitely want drones, but in a high threat environment where you need to penetrate an integrated air defense network, I'm not sure.
    - Retric 7y ago
      The US had ~580,000 bombing missions in Vietnam each of which dropped several bombs on average. Doing that with cruse missiles would quickly hit 10+ trillion dollars. On top of that a cruse missile takes around an hour to reach a target making them of limited value vs a mobile target. They have real value vs thinks like air defenses or high value buildings, but building hundreds of thousands of them is never going to happen.
      - GordonS 7y ago
        > The US had ~580,000 bombing missions in Vietnam each of which dropped several bombs on average. Doing that with cruse missiles would quickly hit 10+ trillion dollars. I rather hope the US never does anything like this ever again. To this day people in Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos are still being injured, maimed or killed by the hundreds of millions of bomblets they dropped.
      - detritus 7y ago
        The point being that, in an 'ideal' world, you wouldn't need anywhere near that number of cruise missiles, assuming they are able to effect accurately-targetted strikes.
  - freeflight 7y ago
    Cheaper drones are already used in combination with more sophisticated missiles to overwhelm defenses. Afaik that's what happened with the attack on the Saudi facilities.
  - imtringued 7y ago
    Ok so just tell the engineers to fix that old B-52.
vonmoltke 7y ago
> The people pointing out that the F-35 had radar reflective disks added didn't seem to have understand the article (or technology). This is using entirely different methods to detect the aircraft, not radar waves, so that's irrelevant. It is relevant, and this system is absolutely using radio signals for detection and tracking; it just doesn't transmit them. The system described is a bi-static radar system that uses transmitters of opportunity (technical term "non-cooperative transmitters") to generate the signal and listens for the return from those signals hitting the target.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- dx034 7y ago
  From what I read (not an expert in this topic), the passive radar solution didn't rely on this and would've worked without deflectors. Maybe it worked a bit better, but I don't think they have much opportunity to test it with aircrafts flying stealth.
  - vonmoltke 7y ago
    A radar cannot function without some source of electromagnetic radiation. Passive radar[1] requires non-cooperative sources of such radiation. If they are detecting the plane by some means other than EM, then it isn't a radar. Now, their system may be using EM blocking as part of its tracking. The principle here is that a low-observable aircraft creates a "hole" in the background because it absorbs or scatters EM radiation away from the receiver. This method works best when the background is very noisy (i.e., there are lots of transmitters operating in the area). In that case the reflectors (and anything else that increases the radar cross section of the aircraft) would actually hurt the performance. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passive_radar https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passive_radar
ryanmercer 7y ago
>but that the whole concept of "stealth" aircraft may be limited in the future thanks to ever increasing computation power and clever usage of existing radio waves (making effective, passive, "radar" that cannot be easily overcome) This. One solution is to simply deploy a considerable number of ground and orbital (or even use blimps/balloons like some companies want to do for wireless internet, or for quicker deployment during a developing incident a fleet of autonomous drones) IR sensors and simply follow the exhaust, with low enough latency and a little predictive maths you could probably know where an aircraft is, and will be, for the next several seconds at any given second with an almost perfect degree of accuracy unless the aircraft is actively conducting evasive maneuvers. Tie that together with traditional radar, x-ray, terrestrial radio broadcasts, etc and you can make a system that would be hard to evade detection from. The larger an area you are attempting to detect aircraft in, the harder it would be, but you could protect specific facilities by deploying much smaller grids over likely approach paths with say ground based IR sensors to detect exhaust trails of anything on approach and then in a much tighter area close to the strategic target. You could also probably deploy atmospheric microphones in blimps/balloons that report their location with GPS and use some sound detection algorithm to detect aircraft moving away from them and use a network of such microphones to dial in an approximate location, heading and speed. Not unlike commercial gunshot/shooter detection systems that already exist.
ranger207 7y ago
>the whole concept of "stealth" aircraft may be limited in the future thanks to ever increasing computation power and clever usage of existing radio waves I have to disagree. Manufacturers will continue to build stealthy planes and drones, simply because it makes it harder to detect them. Yes, you may be able to detect a stealthy plane at, say, 100km, but using the same techniques you would be able to track a non-stealthy plane at 200km. Stealth isn't an end-all be-all tool that makes vehicles completely invincible, as the Bosnian shootdown of the F-117 showed, but it does make it harder, and I don't know of any technologies that could render it completely useless.
- Someone 7y ago
  All else being equal, they will still choose the more “stealthy” plane, yes, but all else rarely is equal. If the stealthier choice adds cost, weight, or maintenance costs, decreases top speed, maneuverability, or MTBF, the better choice may be the less stealthy plane, and if being stealthy gets harder, the choice may be more often that of extra speed, extra weaponry, or more airplanes.
elsonrodriguez 7y ago
> I suspect the future won't be "super weapons" like the F-35, but instead just "mass" weapons like tens of weaponized drones. Where the mission isn't to be invisible but to simply overwhelming enemy defenses This is basically the endgame that Diamond Age predicts.
- kadoban 7y ago
  Yes, exactly what I thought of! For those not familiar, the book describes nanotech drones on the scale of dust mites, and cities protected by essentially artificial immune systems. When a battles occur in this setting you can tell because everything is blanketed in soot, the microscopic corpses of dead drones. Lots of cool ideas in that book, tech and otherwise.
  - SamPatt 7y ago
    It's my favorite Stephenson novel, and he's written so many excellent books.
    - kadoban 7y ago
      That and Snow Crash are my go-tos of his. Diamond Age is slower and for me a lot of the plot and characters are less memorable, but the world, tech and ideas are amazing. Snow Crash is a force of nature. That manic, brilliant opening set up of the world, style and characters using the Deliverator blows my mind every time. Hard to believe it's even the same author.
      - Smoosh 7y ago
        > Hard to believe it's even the same author. I had the same thought when I read Zodiac, after first reading his later novels. It makes Snow Crash more clearly part of a progression.
snowwrestler 7y ago
> I suspect the future won't be "super weapons" like the F-35, but instead just "mass" weapons like tens of weaponized drones. Where the mission isn't to be invisible but to simply overwhelming enemy defenses (essentially the World War I strategy, but without the massive numbers of dead soldiers). I think this point of view will come to be seen as anachronistic, much as the WWI strategy was not long after WWI. Why? There is a fundamental disparity between the complexity needed for a forward-operating offensive weapon, and the complexity needed for domestic defensive weapons. Offensive drones need to avoid defenses and navigate to a particular target. Defensive drones just need to interfere with the offensive drones. Any offensive strategy you can think of that depends on simple numbers, can be countered with numbers at lower cost. If it's drones, I can build more defensive drones than you can build offensive drones for the same total cost.
- oconnor663 7y ago
  > Any offensive strategy you can think of that depends on simple numbers, can be countered with numbers at lower cost. If it's drones, I can build more defensive drones than you can build offensive drones for the same total cost. Mobility can complicate that picture. If I have a million attack drones, and you have a million defense drones, there's still the question of where you put your defenses. If you have a hundred cities to defend, you might realistically need a hundred million drones.
  - ectospheno 7y ago
    I imagine they will spot whatever you are using to transport your million drones...
    - D-Coder 7y ago
      Transport? You can't just fly them there?
      - sq_ 7y ago
        I mean, it seems like any drone cheap enough to be expendable by the millions would probably be lacking enough in range as to need a carrier/mothership of some sort.
AgloeDreams 7y ago
This is spot on, Ace Combat 7 pretty much hit the nail spot on, the future of arial war is mass production mid-scale drones that are incredibly hard to down along with rapid moving low-altitude stealth weapons.
- LoSboccacc 7y ago
  eh, ciws are cheaper than drones and laser weaponry will counter hard both maneuvering or loitering far from the action, all these stealth things are there for asymmetric warfare were the political cost of losing hardware is greater than the benefit of winning cheaply. the future of arial war is likely constant emp blasting over airfields and factories preventing combat to evern happen.
  - noodlesUK 7y ago
    Maybe CIWS ammunition is cheaper than drones are, but I’m pretty sure the installations as a whole are incredibly expensive.
JumpCrisscross 7y ago
> the future won't be "super weapons" like the F-35, but instead just "mass" weapons like tens of weaponized drones The difference is plausible deniability. Stealth weapons let one plausibly deniably launch attacks. (Perhaps to the point of letting the attacked pass it off as an accident, which could let them save face when returning to the negotiating table.) Swarm tactics have no such deniability (though attribution can be complicated if non-state actors are used as a front).
- Skunkleton 7y ago
  I don't think anyone is arguing that stealth isn't useful. I think the argument here is that equating stealth with radar evasion is no longer accurate.
- nyolfen 7y ago
  small drones can fly very low. wondering why none of those saudi patriot batteries managed to knock out any? probably because they would have difficulty distinguishing them from birds if they picked them up at all
elihu 7y ago
> "The people pointing out that the F-35 had radar reflective disks added didn't seem to have understand the article (or technology). This is using entirely different methods to detect the aircraft, not radar waves, so that's irrelevant." Passive radar is just radar that takes advantage of existing radio broadcasts (such as TV and radio stations). This particular passive radar setup may well use a different frequency range than military radars, but it's still working on the same basic principle of any other radar. It seems plausible that a plane equipped with RF reflectors would reflect a broad range of signals, and that a skeptical person could reasonably want an explanation of any claim that the reflectors are in fact non-reflecting in the relevant bands.
gowld 7y ago
This is what happened in naval warfare -- 100 subs beats 1 aircraft carrier.
- ambicapter 7y ago
  What? Subs are not made in mass quantities and subs' advantage over carrier mostly comes from...stealth.

ummonk 7y ago

I should also point out that we do already use mass weapons in the form of cruise missile strikes.

Retric 7y ago
Cruse missiles are really expensive (~1.5 million each) and not really used for mass bombardment. The basic reason to use aircraft/drones is to reuse expensive components like engines and complex sensors.
- willvarfar 7y ago
  Iranian-made cruise missiles seem super-cheap yet very effective. They also have lots of even-cheaper drones. The Houthi use them to attack oil installations and Patriot batteries. I think the recent attack on the refinery with 18? Drones and 7 cruise missiles (3 fell short?) could be referred to as “bombardment”.
- openasocket 7y ago
  Time will tell, but I think the answer will depend on the situation. Sure, $1.5M is a lot, but it's able to deliver 400+kg of explosives at a distance of over 1000 km, while cruising at 800+kph at an altitude of 50m. I think any drone you design with those same parameters is going to cost about the same. Now, the re-usability is nice, but that isn't free. For instance, you need to either double the fuel capacity or cut the range in half, since you want your drone to be able to make the return trip. And now you have to worry about the reliability and maintainability of the engine and sensors. Plus, you have to think about survivability of your drone: how many sorties can you expect that drone to go on before it is shot down? Whether you want to use cruise missiles or drone swarms will depend on the increased cost to purchase and maintain drone vs. a cruise missile, and the odds that it will be shot down after dropping the bomb. In a low threat environment where you have air superiority you definitely want drones, but in a high threat environment where you need to penetrate an integrated air defense network, I'm not sure.
  - Retric 7y ago
    The US had ~580,000 bombing missions in Vietnam each of which dropped several bombs on average. Doing that with cruse missiles would quickly hit 10+ trillion dollars. On top of that a cruse missile takes around an hour to reach a target making them of limited value vs a mobile target. They have real value vs thinks like air defenses or high value buildings, but building hundreds of thousands of them is never going to happen.
    - GordonS 7y ago
      > The US had ~580,000 bombing missions in Vietnam each of which dropped several bombs on average. Doing that with cruse missiles would quickly hit 10+ trillion dollars. I rather hope the US never does anything like this ever again. To this day people in Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos are still being injured, maimed or killed by the hundreds of millions of bomblets they dropped.
    - detritus 7y ago
      The point being that, in an 'ideal' world, you wouldn't need anywhere near that number of cruise missiles, assuming they are able to effect accurately-targetted strikes.
- freeflight 7y ago
  Cheaper drones are already used in combination with more sophisticated missiles to overwhelm defenses. Afaik that's what happened with the attack on the Saudi facilities.
- imtringued 7y ago
  Ok so just tell the engineers to fix that old B-52.

vonmoltke 7y ago

> The people pointing out that the F-35 had radar reflective disks added didn't seem to have understand the article (or technology). This is using entirely different methods to detect the aircraft, not radar waves, so that's irrelevant. It is relevant, and this system is absolutely using radio signals for detection and tracking; it just doesn't transmit them. The system described is a bi-static radar system that uses transmitters of opportunity (technical term "non-cooperative transmitters") to generate the signal and listens for the return from those signals hitting the target.

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
dx034 7y ago
From what I read (not an expert in this topic), the passive radar solution didn't rely on this and would've worked without deflectors. Maybe it worked a bit better, but I don't think they have much opportunity to test it with aircrafts flying stealth.
- vonmoltke 7y ago
  A radar cannot function without some source of electromagnetic radiation. Passive radar[1] requires non-cooperative sources of such radiation. If they are detecting the plane by some means other than EM, then it isn't a radar. Now, their system may be using EM blocking as part of its tracking. The principle here is that a low-observable aircraft creates a "hole" in the background because it absorbs or scatters EM radiation away from the receiver. This method works best when the background is very noisy (i.e., there are lots of transmitters operating in the area). In that case the reflectors (and anything else that increases the radar cross section of the aircraft) would actually hurt the performance. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passive_radar https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passive_radar

ryanmercer 7y ago

>but that the whole concept of "stealth" aircraft may be limited in the future thanks to ever increasing computation power and clever usage of existing radio waves (making effective, passive, "radar" that cannot be easily overcome) This. One solution is to simply deploy a considerable number of ground and orbital (or even use blimps/balloons like some companies want to do for wireless internet, or for quicker deployment during a developing incident a fleet of autonomous drones) IR sensors and simply follow the exhaust, with low enough latency and a little predictive maths you could probably know where an aircraft is, and will be, for the next several seconds at any given second with an almost perfect degree of accuracy unless the aircraft is actively conducting evasive maneuvers. Tie that together with traditional radar, x-ray, terrestrial radio broadcasts, etc and you can make a system that would be hard to evade detection from. The larger an area you are attempting to detect aircraft in, the harder it would be, but you could protect specific facilities by deploying much smaller grids over likely approach paths with say ground based IR sensors to detect exhaust trails of anything on approach and then in a much tighter area close to the strategic target. You could also probably deploy atmospheric microphones in blimps/balloons that report their location with GPS and use some sound detection algorithm to detect aircraft moving away from them and use a network of such microphones to dial in an approximate location, heading and speed. Not unlike commercial gunshot/shooter detection systems that already exist.

ranger207 7y ago

>the whole concept of "stealth" aircraft may be limited in the future thanks to ever increasing computation power and clever usage of existing radio waves I have to disagree. Manufacturers will continue to build stealthy planes and drones, simply because it makes it harder to detect them. Yes, you may be able to detect a stealthy plane at, say, 100km, but using the same techniques you would be able to track a non-stealthy plane at 200km. Stealth isn't an end-all be-all tool that makes vehicles completely invincible, as the Bosnian shootdown of the F-117 showed, but it does make it harder, and I don't know of any technologies that could render it completely useless.

Someone 7y ago
All else being equal, they will still choose the more “stealthy” plane, yes, but all else rarely is equal. If the stealthier choice adds cost, weight, or maintenance costs, decreases top speed, maneuverability, or MTBF, the better choice may be the less stealthy plane, and if being stealthy gets harder, the choice may be more often that of extra speed, extra weaponry, or more airplanes.

elsonrodriguez 7y ago

kadoban 7y ago
Yes, exactly what I thought of! For those not familiar, the book describes nanotech drones on the scale of dust mites, and cities protected by essentially artificial immune systems. When a battles occur in this setting you can tell because everything is blanketed in soot, the microscopic corpses of dead drones. Lots of cool ideas in that book, tech and otherwise.
- SamPatt 7y ago
  It's my favorite Stephenson novel, and he's written so many excellent books.
  - kadoban 7y ago
    That and Snow Crash are my go-tos of his. Diamond Age is slower and for me a lot of the plot and characters are less memorable, but the world, tech and ideas are amazing. Snow Crash is a force of nature. That manic, brilliant opening set up of the world, style and characters using the Deliverator blows my mind every time. Hard to believe it's even the same author.
    - Smoosh 7y ago
      > Hard to believe it's even the same author. I had the same thought when I read Zodiac, after first reading his later novels. It makes Snow Crash more clearly part of a progression.

snowwrestler 7y ago

> I suspect the future won't be "super weapons" like the F-35, but instead just "mass" weapons like tens of weaponized drones. Where the mission isn't to be invisible but to simply overwhelming enemy defenses (essentially the World War I strategy, but without the massive numbers of dead soldiers). I think this point of view will come to be seen as anachronistic, much as the WWI strategy was not long after WWI. Why? There is a fundamental disparity between the complexity needed for a forward-operating offensive weapon, and the complexity needed for domestic defensive weapons. Offensive drones need to avoid defenses and navigate to a particular target. Defensive drones just need to interfere with the offensive drones. Any offensive strategy you can think of that depends on simple numbers, can be countered with numbers at lower cost. If it's drones, I can build more defensive drones than you can build offensive drones for the same total cost.

oconnor663 7y ago
> Any offensive strategy you can think of that depends on simple numbers, can be countered with numbers at lower cost. If it's drones, I can build more defensive drones than you can build offensive drones for the same total cost. Mobility can complicate that picture. If I have a million attack drones, and you have a million defense drones, there's still the question of where you put your defenses. If you have a hundred cities to defend, you might realistically need a hundred million drones.
- ectospheno 7y ago
  I imagine they will spot whatever you are using to transport your million drones...
  - D-Coder 7y ago
    Transport? You can't just fly them there?
    - sq_ 7y ago
      I mean, it seems like any drone cheap enough to be expendable by the millions would probably be lacking enough in range as to need a carrier/mothership of some sort.

AgloeDreams 7y ago

This is spot on, Ace Combat 7 pretty much hit the nail spot on, the future of arial war is mass production mid-scale drones that are incredibly hard to down along with rapid moving low-altitude stealth weapons.

LoSboccacc 7y ago
eh, ciws are cheaper than drones and laser weaponry will counter hard both maneuvering or loitering far from the action, all these stealth things are there for asymmetric warfare were the political cost of losing hardware is greater than the benefit of winning cheaply. the future of arial war is likely constant emp blasting over airfields and factories preventing combat to evern happen.
- noodlesUK 7y ago
  Maybe CIWS ammunition is cheaper than drones are, but I’m pretty sure the installations as a whole are incredibly expensive.

JumpCrisscross 7y ago

> the future won't be "super weapons" like the F-35, but instead just "mass" weapons like tens of weaponized drones The difference is plausible deniability. Stealth weapons let one plausibly deniably launch attacks. (Perhaps to the point of letting the attacked pass it off as an accident, which could let them save face when returning to the negotiating table.) Swarm tactics have no such deniability (though attribution can be complicated if non-state actors are used as a front).

Skunkleton 7y ago
I don't think anyone is arguing that stealth isn't useful. I think the argument here is that equating stealth with radar evasion is no longer accurate.
nyolfen 7y ago
small drones can fly very low. wondering why none of those saudi patriot batteries managed to knock out any? probably because they would have difficulty distinguishing them from birds if they picked them up at all

elihu 7y ago

> "The people pointing out that the F-35 had radar reflective disks added didn't seem to have understand the article (or technology). This is using entirely different methods to detect the aircraft, not radar waves, so that's irrelevant." Passive radar is just radar that takes advantage of existing radio broadcasts (such as TV and radio stations). This particular passive radar setup may well use a different frequency range than military radars, but it's still working on the same basic principle of any other radar. It seems plausible that a plane equipped with RF reflectors would reflect a broad range of signals, and that a skeptical person could reasonably want an explanation of any claim that the reflectors are in fact non-reflecting in the relevant bands.

gowld 7y ago

This is what happened in naval warfare -- 100 subs beats 1 aircraft carrier.

ambicapter 7y ago
What? Subs are not made in mass quantities and subs' advantage over carrier mostly comes from...stealth.