3 ms·

Have we outlawed inclement weather? Or just leave the gomers to their own devices until the cloud cover clears?

greedo 6y ago
Inclement weather would obstruct the vision of the A-10 pilots too. Today's CAS is largely a forward observer calling in a grid/GPS coordinate or lasing a target.
- redis_mlc 6y ago
  > Inclement weather would obstruct the vision of the A-10 pilots too. That's not generally true. For example, in WW2 the B-29 started at 20,000', and because Japan often has clouds starting at 5,000', so they had to fly under the clouds to see targets. The US Air Force is not going to allow their pilots to do that today, so that's a good situation for the Army to operate A-10s.
- caycep 6y ago
  how are pentagon planners dealing w/ emerging tech hacking/jamming/spoofing GPS signals? I recall something along this sort being posted to HN a few days back, as well as this being perhaps the means of how Iran captured a US drone several years ago...
  - greedo 6y ago
    GPS is problematic in a contested environment due to low signal strength. Even with GPSIII satellites being deployed, it's susceptible to both jamming and spoofing, at a trivial cost. Normally when an opponent starts emitting (say with a search radar), you can target it with HARM etc. But the GPS jammers are pretty cheap, and don't require much power to cause issues. This has led to dual/tri mode seekers on missiles. They use GPS until they reach an area where the mission planners feel GPS would be unreliable, then they fail over to IR, radar, or EO sensors for the final segment of the mission. If weather permits (and the threat is manageable), you can lase the target. Potential workarounds in the future are vision matching systems (kind of like the ALCMs tercom) that appear promising. Against a peer opponent, jamming will be pervasive across all frequencies. Your comms might be secure in terms of compromise, but the sheer amount of multi-band noise will be something that (at least the US) many militaries will be unprepared for.

Inclement weather would obstruct the vision of the A-10 pilots too. Today's CAS is largely a forward observer calling in a grid/GPS coordinate or lasing a target.

redis_mlc 6y ago
> Inclement weather would obstruct the vision of the A-10 pilots too. That's not generally true. For example, in WW2 the B-29 started at 20,000', and because Japan often has clouds starting at 5,000', so they had to fly under the clouds to see targets. The US Air Force is not going to allow their pilots to do that today, so that's a good situation for the Army to operate A-10s.
caycep 6y ago
how are pentagon planners dealing w/ emerging tech hacking/jamming/spoofing GPS signals? I recall something along this sort being posted to HN a few days back, as well as this being perhaps the means of how Iran captured a US drone several years ago...
- greedo 6y ago
  GPS is problematic in a contested environment due to low signal strength. Even with GPSIII satellites being deployed, it's susceptible to both jamming and spoofing, at a trivial cost. Normally when an opponent starts emitting (say with a search radar), you can target it with HARM etc. But the GPS jammers are pretty cheap, and don't require much power to cause issues. This has led to dual/tri mode seekers on missiles. They use GPS until they reach an area where the mission planners feel GPS would be unreliable, then they fail over to IR, radar, or EO sensors for the final segment of the mission. If weather permits (and the threat is manageable), you can lase the target. Potential workarounds in the future are vision matching systems (kind of like the ALCMs tercom) that appear promising. Against a peer opponent, jamming will be pervasive across all frequencies. Your comms might be secure in terms of compromise, but the sheer amount of multi-band noise will be something that (at least the US) many militaries will be unprepared for.