asymetric warfare

On 21 Dec 2003 17:57:58 -0800, George William Herbert wrote:
phil hunt wrote:
Which requirements am I underestimating? (Bear in mind I'm
considering missiles for several different roles).

Let me give you an example... assume that you need a certain
pixel width of an object to successfully identify it
(say, 10 pixels across) with a certain contrast ratio.

You also have certain limitations on the maneuverability
of the airframe this is all one. It can't pull more than
a certain number of G's etc.

I can imaigne a small, light wooden airframe, designed for low
detectability, pulling much lower Gs than a faster airframe, which
might be made of metal.

To successfully design the homing mechanism, you need to
assess the distance and light or background noise conditions
of the frequencies you're looking at (visual, IIR, whatever)
and the magnification of the imaging system and its optical
resolution. You need to have a wide enough field of view that
you can see the targets as you fly along searching, but not
so wide that you won't be able to discriminate a target
until it's so close that maneuvering to hit it becomes
a serious problem.

I think that examining how nature has solved similar problems is
useful. The human eye has lots of closely-placed pixels at the
center, and in the periphery pixels are much more widely spread.
Perhaps the system could use one (or more) wide angle lenses, and a
(possibly movable) telephoto lens for giving more detailed attention
to an object.

You need to assess the impact on
the sensor and field of view of the background coloration
across the target areas, etc.

Human eyes have 3 colours. There no reason in principle why an
artificial eye would have that number. (Though if we are using cheap
hardware, it probably would).

If a vehicle is stationary, and camoflaged, it's going to be a *lot*
harder to spot than a moving one. I think going for the ability to
spot moving vehicles well, and stationary vehicles a lot less well,
is adequate performance.

With a much simpler system, laser spot homing,

But who shines the laser on the right spot? Or are you assuming
there's a human with a laser designator in the loop?

I spent
some months working out that nested set of problems.
Taking one shortcut made the weapon not lock on if
the ballistic miss trajectory was too far off.
Taking another meant that it typically locked
on early in a portion of its flight that led to
it flying out of control as it lost energy trying
to track the laser spot as it flew out.

I'm not with you there... could you explain?

It would
scrub too much forwards velocity off early and then
start to come down too short of the target and stall
out trying to correct for that.

Because it was manouvring too much at the start?

You actually have to sit down, design a notional design,
put a notional sensor on it, figure out what the
parameters are, and simulate it for a while to see
what the gotchas are.

That makes sense -- I'm sure lots of things wouldn't work right
first time.

That requires models of the
sensor, guidance, optics or transmitter, target
behaviour, aerodynamics, and trajectory / movement
dynamics of the weapon.

Even getting a rough first pass of that to tell you
what the roughly right answers are is nontrivial,
can easily be months of work, and requires experience
across a very wide range of diciplines (or a keen
ability to figure out what you don't know and find
it via research).

How much are simulated environments used in designing missile
homing systems? By a simulated environment, I mean the missile
software is working as it would be on the real missile, but output
instead of going to control surfaces, goes to a flight simulation
program, and input, instead of coming from a visula sensor (or
whatever) comes from a program which simulates what the output of
that sensor would be under those conditions?

But few of those have progressed to production.
The new Marines/Navy Spike missile is one
exception,

This is the Israeli ATGM, isn't it?

No, there are two missiles named Spike,

And two named Javelin, incidently.

and I'm referring to the US Navy / China Lake one.
http://www.nawcwpns.navy.mil/~pao/pg...es/SpikeND.htm

I can't load that URL.

--
"It's easier to find people online who openly support the KKK than
people who openly support the RIAA" -- comment on Wikipedia
(Email: , but first subtract 275 and reverse
the last two letters).

Simon Morden wrote in message k...

Which is what I would suggest. No country could currently defeat the USA in a
stand-up fight. So disperse your army globally and take out US-interest soft
targets: embassies, companies, tourists, registered shipping, anything that
flies a US flag.

The losses would be sickening, and it makes me nauseous to think about the
scenario. Especially if army elements managed to get on US soil.

I see serious problems regarding command, control, communications, and
morale of the dispersed army in such a situation. I also see another
serious problem, in that you are buying yourself potential war with
_every_ country that your dispersed army is operating on -- other
countries are unlikely to take a very positive attitude towards your
"soldiers" (they would more likely be viewed as "terrorists" or
"homicidal maniacs") blowing themselves up on their soil to attack
Americans.

What is likely is that most of your "army" would defect or desert, a
few attacks would be carried out alienating virtually the whole world
against one, and your regime would finish their lives as criminals
wanted by pretty much every country on Earth.

Sincerely Yours,
Jordan

"George William Herbert" wrote

Done properly, especially with one time pad encryption,
one can handle this sort of situation.

Consider... the use of CD-R's for pads. They give you 650
megabytes of storage. Assume one message of 1k contents
per minute is sent; that works out to a bit over 43 megabytes
of pad per month, or about 518 megabytes per year. Each receiving
station can have its own pad and its own recipient keying.

And then when one of those CD's gets lost or captured...

Pete

In article ,
"Carl Alex Friis Nielsen" wrote:

The entire idea behind assymetric warfare is to refuse to play by the
enemy's rules - so if fighting the US use a doctrine not reqirering an C3I
infrastructure, which can be attacked - have lots of small dispersed units capable of
operating on their own initiative.

One problem here; totalitarian regimes tend not to tolerate lots of
initiative in their underlings, which makes preparing for this sort of
fighting somewhat harder.

On Mon, 22 Dec 2003 15:48:46 GMT, Fred J. McCall
wrote:

pervect wrote:

:On Mon, 22 Dec 2003 08:45:07 GMT, (Derek
:Lyons) wrote:
:
(George William Herbert) wrote:
:
:This is all pretty easy to jam, since the frequencies are
:all known beforehand, but that general *approach* is very
:hard to penetrate with traffic analysis.
:
:note: This is more-or-less how the SSBN comm system works in fact.
:
:It's hard to penetrate with traffic analysis, yes. However a station
:transmitting 24/7 is a station that's easily located, and a station
:that will eat a gross of ordinance at H hour + .01 second.
:
:So everyobody goes on red alert as soon as the primary station stops
:broadcasting, and the targetting information has to be sent by the
:second backup station.

Then we're back to traffic analysis. If they stay up, they get
killed. If they don't stay up, coming up tells you something is going
on. No way around that.

Actually there's something I forgot to mention - using similar spread
spectrum techniques as, for instance, GPS, it will in general be
fairly hard to tell that a high tech wide bandwidth low power
transmitter is "up" at all.

So even the 24 hour radiating link might not be terribly conspicuous
from an emissions point of view. And the backup links will be even
less conspicuous.

OTOH I would guess that good (high altitude with good field of view)
locations for antenna systems will be bombed as a matter of principle,
including anything that even looks like an antenna farm.

In any event, one of the first profitable investments for Elbonia
might be a modern C&C infrastructure that will be hard to monitor,
spoof, or take down.

On Mon, 22 Dec 2003 17:46:51 GMT, (Derek
Lyons) wrote:



You and Phil, and to a lesser extent George, who should know better,
don't seem to realize that killing the enemy C&C is how the US fights
wars today. The days of grinding towards the Capital worrying only
about the front line and hoping a golden bullet takes out the Leader
are dead and gone. This is 2003 not 1943.

I think there are technologies that our fictitious nation of Elbonia
can use that will make disrupting their C&C structure a lot more
difficult. I would even go so far as to say that investing in a
modern C&C infrastructure would probably be the best first investment
Elbonia could make. Probably the best approach would be to grow their
own experts (rather than to rely on commercial systems of others and
think that they can just buy one).

This isn't the position I started out with, BTW, but as the discussion
proceeded the point sort of grew on me.

I think that the US is well aware of this, and is doing its level best
to suppress and discourage such actions. Hence some of our
silly-seeming export regulations that ban this, that, and the other
thing for export. (I don't expect these regulations will actually
accomplish much, BTW.)

I also think there will be an increase in the use of nuclear weapons,
and that the wave of current US military actions will, as a side
effect, encourage nuclear proliferation. I don't think that this will
be widely announced, though - I think that everyone will claim not to
have weapons of mass destruction, and when intelligence turns up
irrefutable evidence of nuclear weapons, they will merely blink and
calmly state that said weapons are purely defensive for use against
military targets only and are in no way classifiable as being WMD.

pervect wrote:

:Actually there's something I forgot to mention - using similar spread
:spectrum techniques as, for instance, GPS, it will in general be
:fairly hard to tell that a high tech wide bandwidth low power
:transmitter is "up" at all.

So we've established the following so far in this discussion:

1) Tanks can't kill anything, since it can dodge.

2) ECM doesn't work.

There was another equally silly one, but I forget what it was. No
matter.

Even trolls should know more about their subject than we're seeing
demonstrated here.

--
"Nekubi o kaite was ikenai"
["It does not do to slit the throat of a sleeping man."]
-- Admiral Yamamoto

In article ,
"John" writes:
"Duke of URL" macbenahATkdsiDOTnet wrote

John's cutesy-pie combat methods were interesting, slightly, but
suited to a 1930's Boys' Book of How to Have a War.

Everything after the SUV/otto-76 was a bit tongue in cheek though.

Peter did a fine job of dismissing them all.

In the case of the SUVs Peter didn't.. To dodge a tank round all you need do
is side-step half the width of your vehicle. Claiming that the tanks will
close to ploint blank range is stupid when they are facing concentrated AT
fire. I'm also not sure he understood the potential of the Otto-76 to shoot
down smart munitions.

Actually, John, you don't seem to have much of an understanding of how
tanks work, or what the typical engangement ranges are.
Five miles is right out.
The longest range kill achieved by a tank to date is a 3,000m (roughlt
1.5 Statute Mile shot by a British Challenger II vs. an Iraqi T72 in
the 1990-91 Gulf War. Even in open country like Iraq, the usual
longest range for a Main Gun shot on an opposing tank was 2000m. In a
European rural environment, the most likely engagement range would be
1000m. In more closed country, like, say, the Northeastern U.S., or
Maritime Canada, engagement ranges as close as 50-100m are not
unlikely. (Lots of irregular terrain, lots of trees & brush - European
forests are like gardens in comparison.) Engagement ranges within
urban areas are very short - usually on the order of 200m or so.

Time of Flight for a main gun round to 2000m is about 1.2 seconds.
Time of Flight to 200m, is (Wait for it - 0.12 seconds.
Now, Sport, How much are you going to be dodging your SUV in 1.2
seconds. Be aware that you'll have to shave at least 0.5 seconds off
of that for the driver's reaction time.

Also consider that your millimeter-wave emitting SUV is ligking itself
up like a neon sign in a part of the radio spectrum that nothing else
is on. A couple of sinple horn antannae on the turret sides (Sort of
like the old coincidence rangefinder ears) for DFing, and an
omnidirectional antenna up with the Wind Sensor on the turret roof for
general detection, and you won't, say, be able to hide your
Tank-Killer SUV in Madman Morris's SUV Dealership's parking lot.


And I especially agree with the last one - countries where all the
citizens are heavily armed are not countries like Iraq, where people
the ruler doesn't like get fed alive into shredding machines. So they
aren't the kind of country we'd be needing to invade.

However the question wasn't about poor countries, but middle-ranking ones,
which I took to mean ones comparable to most european nations. Of such I'd
say only Britian or France had the capacity to blunt a US attack, and only
because they can both MIRV task-forces whilst they cross the atlantic.
Nuclear buckshot will kill most things, and doesn't need to be too accurate
either.

Time of Flight of IRBM, 30 minutes. Speed of CVBG, 25 kts. Detection
of launch, instantaneous. DSP Sats, y'know. Radius of circle that
could contain the target - 12.5 Nautical Miles.
U.S. Supply Convoys hump along at 20 kts, these days, so you're
looking at a 10 NM circle there.
Time of arrival of U.S. ICBM ('cause we're Nice Guys, and aren't going
to unleacsh somethig on the order of 10 Trident MIRVs on your country,
and only take out single targets, roughtly 1.0-1.5 hours after launch.
Your Command Centers and missile bases, or Missile Sub ports don't
move, and you made the mistake of going Nuclear first.

--
Pete Stickney
A strong conviction that something must be done is the parent of many
bad measures. -- Daniel Webster

On Sun, 21 Dec 2003 15:46:29 GMT, Fred J. McCall
wrote:

"Pete" wrote:

:
:"phil hunt" wrote
:
: I imagine the missiles could
: be programmed for a mission by sticking a computer with an Ethernet
: cable into a slot on the missile.
:
:Here ya go. Code to this explanation, and you're all set.
:
:http://www.techblvd.com/Rvideo/Guidance.wav
:
:Easy.

What's really spooky is that this isn't all that bad a description of
how ProNav works. :-)

what's ProNav?

ess (phil hunt) wrote:
He went to the NZ government before starting the project, told him
what he was about to do, and they told him it was legal.

That's not entirely clear, and he somewhat obfuscates the issue. It
appears that what happened is he told the goverment he was going to
sell pulsejet technology, and *that* is what they told him was legal,
not the cruise missile project.

Then a few months later, they shut him down by making him bankrupt.

Another half truth, though I don't know if it's you, or you parroting
his half truths. They collected a judgement against him for failing
to pay his taxes.

D.
--
The STS-107 Columbia Loss FAQ can be found
at the following URLs:

Text-Only Version:
http://www.io.com/~o_m/columbia_loss_faq.html

Enhanced HTML Version:
http://www.io.com/~o_m/columbia_loss_faq_x.html

Corrections, comments, and additions should be
e-mailed to , as well as posted to
sci.space.history and sci.space.shuttle for
discussion.