"Kevin Brooks" wrote

"Paul F Austin" wrote

"Chad Irby" wrote
"Keith Willshaw" wrote:

"Rune Børsjø" wrote
How the hell is gonna tell friendly from enemy? Civilian from
combatant? The only thing it'll be good for is knocking out armor.
Attack helos still present a flexibility and presence that you
can't
get out of a glorified model airplane kit.

You havent heard of IFF I take it

You mean like the IFF that fails from time to time, or that can be
spoofed and jammed quite easily?

You have some of the following problems:

IFF jammed, UCAV won't shoot.
IFF jammed, UCAV shoots down anything in front of it.
IFF spoofed, UCAV hunts down friendly targets.

IFF is easy enough, but "robust" IFF is a real pain.

BFT (Blue-force tracking) is going to revolutionize IFF. Because it
depends
on geo-location knowledge, that's tough to spoof or jam. Spoofing
requires
breaking encryption in real-time and jamming has to be done continuously
into multiple aperatures.

Gee, how many times did we hear that, "Product X is going to revolutionize
the way you do process Y!", only to spend the next ten years doing process
Y
the same way we always did because Product X never quite lived up to its
promises, or ran way over budget and got the axe, etc.? The Navy's A-12
Avenger, the Air Force's AMST, the Army's DIVADS, Grizzly, Wolverine,
M180,
various digital command and control packages, the laughable attempt to
field
those original big honking green monster boxes (TACS computers)... A good,
reliable, and discrete IFF for ground units will be wonderful, but I am
not
holding my breath while waiting for it to be fielded. Till then I'll take
the manned shooters in the close fight.

That hits close to home. But equally, other much maligned systems performed
exactly as advertised: Abrams, Bradley, APSJ and (oh yes) Apache. Remember
how all of those systems were 'way too complex for ham-handed GIs to operate
and maintain and they were all overpriced gas-guzzlers...

GPS performed beyond the planners wildest expectations as have the C-17s
(son o' AMST).

BFT worked well enough in Iraq-2 to get everybody's britches tight.
Currently, it requires a CINCGARS radio, making it tough to migrate down to
every troop. According to AvWeek, "RFID tag technology" is intended to make
BFT as ubiquitous as GPS is now. I have trouble picturing that since the
signal levels from such an approach will necessarily by_very_low, making
jamming much easier. We'll see, it isn't here yet.