"Paul F Austin" wrote in message
. ..

"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...

You are misunderstanding my intent a bit, no doubt because I provided less
than stellar examples in some cases. My beef is more with the more minor
"transformational" packages; some years back we were promised a workable
engineer module to the Army's battle command and control system which was
going to make us oh-so-much-more effective. It languished; the maneuver
control system itself was a pain in the butt, and not well liked at all. The
saving grace for the engineer side of the house was a couple of pretty sharp
captains assigned to the 3rd ID engineer brigade, who took it on themselves
to develop a more workable, and available, HTML based system (SapperNet)
that quickly became rather popular throughout a lot of the engineer
community, nad became the basis for the 3rd ID's own "MarNet". Of course the
MCS weenies who visited us and saw how we used it during a V Corps
Warfighter feigned being impressed and I was told that they were planning to
use it as the basis for a reworked MCS-E system. I don't know if it has ever
gone beyond that point.


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

GPS has been great (though the PLGRS was overly heavy and complex compared
to civilian GPS receivers then available). But how easy has it been to
decide on a common mapping system for use in the command and contol systems?
Not very, last I knew (a 20th EN BDE conference I attended got all balled up
on that issue, with about three different systems being proposed).
Meanwhile, the Aussies bought a civilian GIS package and had it adapted to
meet their requirements for battlespace visualization. Where are US Army
forces now in that regard? How many have any real capability to transfer
digital mapping or at least layer info for resident base mapping? The
promise has been greater than the reward to date, by far.


BFT worked well enough in Iraq-2 to get everybody's britches tight.
Currently, it requires a CINCGARS radio,

That's "SINCGARS", IIRC (Single Channel Ground Air Radio System).

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.

I presume BFT is the elementry locating system that ties into the CAS
platforms (those so configured) and gives them a rather crude sketch of the
locations of friendly units? If so, that requires the later block SINGARS,
with PLGRS input, and it is from what I understand a very basic capability
as yet. We are not at the point of having a decent IFF package for ground
systems; we may get there, but who knows when? As a 2LT at EOBC, we were
taught to use the M9 ACE wrok estimate tables, because we were told, "That
is going to be the system you will be using." Three years later I left the
active duty side of the house without ever having laid eyes on one.

Brooks