asymetric warfare

"Kevin Brooks" wrote in message
.. .
I think there are two issues here. The first is when the sensor is
attached to the weapon, as it is in a sensor in a missile. Here,
there is no sensor/shooter cycle, unless you choose to have a human
involved in the decision to fire.

That is way beyond even our capabilities. You are talking autonomous
combat
systems. The closest thing we have to that in service are the intelligent
antiarmor submunitions, which are already in service in cluter munitions
to
include WCMD dispensers, and will soon be available as a warhead option
for
the Army's ATACMS missiles. But they still require a sensor in the loop,
because you can't just fire them "in that direction, more or less", and
hit
anything--you have to have a pretty narrow determination of where the
target
is right at the time the weapon arrives.

I think that Phil is probably talking about weapons like the IAI Harpy. It
is a relatively inexpensive "CM" used in SEAD operations. The only
significant technology employed by this vehicle is in the sensor (and even
there, a "middle-ranking country" should not have a problem developing or
procuring).

The question really is if it is possible to integrate different sensors (TV,
IR) on such vehicles, if you can accurately identify targets (based on some
signature characteristics or library), and how effective it could be (at not
killing your own or being easily defeated by the enemy).

Now if you want to send a flock of
CM's out and about to go on a hunter-killer mission, you have some real
problems to confront, like: (a) How do you prevent fratricide or targeting
of the local version of the Sanford garbage truck (remember that not every
enemy is going to be able to discount collateral damage like the
insurgents
we are no facing in Iraq do)?

That depends on the programming of the weapon. The same thought process that
goes into autonomously targeted systems (ALARM, Harpy, SMArt, etc.) -
systems that can be launched against enemy positions and where the weapon
autonomously selects on locks on to its target - would be used.

(b) Are you going to send it in low, where it
MIGHT have a chance at surviving, but its field of view is extremely
limited, so it is that much more likely to not find any target to hit, but
which also requires oodles of (very accurate, and likely unavailable to
most
potential foes) digital topographic data to be uploaded and a complex
navigation system) or up high where the view is better, but also where it
becomes easy meat for the layers of Patriots and Avengers fielded by the
resident duckhunters, along with any covering Aegis controlled Standards
in
the littoral zone, and the ubiquitous F-15/F-22 CAP? and,

Good questions for the side employing them. If you are indeed talking about
a "massive" use of such weapons, I think that the Patriots (and other
anti-aircraft systems) would be quickly (and quite expensively) overwhelmed.
Overwhelming, confusing, and otherwise countering the sensor might be a
better approach.

(c) Development of
a reliable, compact, onboard sensor suite that provides enough resolution
to
find likely targets, and a darned intelligent software package to handle
target discrimination (from background clutter, earlier posited garbage
truck, etc.), and can also recognize an entire range of potential targets
and select the one you would want hit from amongst all of them.

If you are talking about a "massive" deployment of such inexpensive weapons,
you might not need to concern yourself with those that "miss". Depending on
the cost of the vehicles, the total number acquired, and the budget
allocated, the user might be satisfied with a success rate well below 100%.

Sorry, but I
don't see ANY potential foes we might face in your near term overcoming
one,
much less all, of those hurdles, and I am sure I have missed a few more.
[snip]

The Harpy has been around for a while. And in the mean time, technology has
progressed and costs of acquisition declined (for commercially available
components).

"Dionysios Pilarinos" wrote in message
...

"Kevin Brooks" wrote in message
.. .
I think there are two issues here. The first is when the sensor is
attached to the weapon, as it is in a sensor in a missile. Here,
there is no sensor/shooter cycle, unless you choose to have a human
involved in the decision to fire.

That is way beyond even our capabilities. You are talking autonomous
combat
systems. The closest thing we have to that in service are the
intelligent
antiarmor submunitions, which are already in service in cluter munitions
to
include WCMD dispensers, and will soon be available as a warhead option
for
the Army's ATACMS missiles. But they still require a sensor in the loop,
because you can't just fire them "in that direction, more or less", and
hit
anything--you have to have a pretty narrow determination of where the
target
is right at the time the weapon arrives.

I think that Phil is probably talking about weapons like the IAI Harpy. It
is a relatively inexpensive "CM" used in SEAD operations. The only
significant technology employed by this vehicle is in the sensor (and even
there, a "middle-ranking country" should not have a problem developing or
procuring).

The question really is if it is possible to integrate different sensors
(TV,
IR) on such vehicles, if you can accurately identify targets (based on
some
signature characteristics or library), and how effective it could be (at
not
killing your own or being easily defeated by the enemy).

And those questions are the kind that even the US, with its multi-billion
dollar R&D structure, is tangling with--do you really see some second/third
world potential foe solving that dilemma over the posited period of the next
ten years? I don't.


Now if you want to send a flock of
CM's out and about to go on a hunter-killer mission, you have some real
problems to confront, like: (a) How do you prevent fratricide or
targeting
of the local version of the Sanford garbage truck (remember that not
every
enemy is going to be able to discount collateral damage like the
insurgents
we are no facing in Iraq do)?

That depends on the programming of the weapon. The same thought process
that
goes into autonomously targeted systems (ALARM, Harpy, SMArt, etc.) -
systems that can be launched against enemy positions and where the weapon
autonomously selects on locks on to its target - would be used.

Those home on active emitters, keeping their last transmitting location in
their memory in case they drop off the air. That is a big difference from
going after targets that are purely passive and are not radiating (or not
radiating anything you can actually read with a system that could be placed
in such a small weapon--detecting the frequency agile signals from vehicle
FM radios is not going to work).


(b) Are you going to send it in low, where it
MIGHT have a chance at surviving, but its field of view is extremely
limited, so it is that much more likely to not find any target to hit,
but
which also requires oodles of (very accurate, and likely unavailable to
most
potential foes) digital topographic data to be uploaded and a complex
navigation system) or up high where the view is better, but also where
it
becomes easy meat for the layers of Patriots and Avengers fielded by the
resident duckhunters, along with any covering Aegis controlled Standards
in
the littoral zone, and the ubiquitous F-15/F-22 CAP? and,

Good questions for the side employing them. If you are indeed talking
about
a "massive" use of such weapons, I think that the Patriots (and other
anti-aircraft systems) would be quickly (and quite expensively)
overwhelmed.
Overwhelming, confusing, and otherwise countering the sensor might be a
better approach.

I disagree. On the one hand you are going to have to use a pretty complex CM
of sorts, as we have already seen from the discussion to this point, if you
are going to engage previously unlocated targets, so the idea that these
things will be cheaply turned out in some converted auto garage is not going
to cut it. They will also be expensive--the R&D effort is still required,
since what has been postulated is essentially an autonomous attack system
that does not currently exist even in the US. Third, the number of Patiots
that can be made available is not a trivial number--count the number of
missiles available in the uploaded canisters of a single battery, not to
mention the reminder of its ABL that is accompanying them. Finally, we have
a rather substantial stock of Stingers, including ones mounted on Avengers
and BFV-Stinger, along with the regular MANPADS. Sorry, this just does not
look realistic to me. Other posters have taken the more proper tack--don't
try to confront the US on conventional terms and instead go the
unconventional warfare route--much more likely to at least stand a chance at
success of sorts.


(c) Development of
a reliable, compact, onboard sensor suite that provides enough
resolution
to
find likely targets, and a darned intelligent software package to handle
target discrimination (from background clutter, earlier posited garbage
truck, etc.), and can also recognize an entire range of potential
targets
and select the one you would want hit from amongst all of them.

If you are talking about a "massive" deployment of such inexpensive
weapons,
you might not need to concern yourself with those that "miss". Depending
on
the cost of the vehicles, the total number acquired, and the budget
allocated, the user might be satisfied with a success rate well below
100%.

I'd be surprised if this approach yielded a system that acheived a success
rate that reaches even double digits--for the commitment of significant
resources that would have been better used training irregulars and creating
caches of weapons and explosives.


Sorry, but I
don't see ANY potential foes we might face in your near term overcoming
one,
much less all, of those hurdles, and I am sure I have missed a few more.
[snip]

The Harpy has been around for a while. And in the mean time, technology
has
progressed and costs of acquisition declined (for commercially available
components).

Again, there is one heck of a difference between going after an active
emitter like an AD radar and passive targets, especially if you are the
disadvantaged party in terms if ISR and C-4, which we can bet the opposition
would be in such a scenario.

Brooks

On Thu, 18 Dec 2003 08:21:03 GMT, "Kevin Brooks"
wrote:


That is a decent description of the selective availability (SA) function of
GPS. SA renders the average (non-US military) receiver incapable of
determining a precise fix, and you need precision for the kind of weapons
the poster was postulating. SA was shut down a couple of years back so that
civil users (i.e., surveyors, commercial aircraft, etc.) could take
advantage of its precision (prior to that occuring surveyors had to use what
is known as "differential GPS", a more time consuming method of achieving a
precise location), but according to the official USG website on the subject
it can be reinstituted over a particular region at will.


Denying the US use of GPS would have a negative impact on US military
capability, but it would not eliminate it.

Actually, I don't think SA adversely affects US military systems.

Brooks

Processors and computing power are getting cheaper every year - and
there are a lot of US weapons with military GPS around - so it's
conceivable to me that someone could obtain one of these weapons and
reverse-engineer the GPS system on them.

If there is no sort of "auxiliary code input" to the weapon (i.e. some
sort of activation code that has to be input) the reverse engineered
weapons would work just as well as the US weapons, so the US would
have to make the choice of whether it was better for everyone to have
(accurate) GPS or nobody to have GPS.

Without knowing for sure, I would personally expect that current
weapons would have some sort of auxiliary code, and that this code
would have to be entered as part of the target programming process
(which is quite long according to news reports, though it's getting
shorter).

Even without auxiliary codes, the US could still activate the system
at random times. Unless the enemy knew when the US was going to
activate the system, the US might be able to have some "windows of
opportunity" to use their GPS weapons. Of course the enemy might be
able to take advantage of these same windows if they could respond
quickly enough and if they could detect the US launches.

Assuming (as I suspect) that "auxiliary code input" to the weapon is
required, things get more complicated. Basically the question is how
long it would take for the enemy to figure out what the auxiliary code
was to activate their weapons.

One extreme scenario to illustrate the concept - the satellites could
send out random hash until, say, 6:03 am when a major US strike was
planned. At this point, the satellites would start transmitting valid
information according to some specific agreed upon code which the
enemy didn't know in advance. When all US weapons reach their target,
the satellites would go back to sending random hash.

The enemy would have to figure out what the code was in a very short
time period, and program and launch their weapons before the code
expired. This would be extremely difficult.

Pessimistically assuming that the current military GPS system does get
compromised, and that the code breaking process could be done in
minutes, the US is of course free to build a better one with more
modern (and longer) codes. Of course, retrofitting existing weapons
to use the new GPS system might be a bit involved. OTOH, it could be
as simple as pulling out a modular "black box", and replacing it with
a new improved one.

In article ,
Simon Morden wrote:

Michael Ash wrote:

Well, don't forget that only a very tiny percentage of any regular army
will be composed of people fanatical enough to become suicide bombers.
Your four-million strong Elbonian People's Happy Army will turn into a
handful of suicide bombers and a whole bunch of deserters if you tried
that strategy. Not to say it may not be the best use of that army, but I
don't think it would be that effective.

Of course. I 've no idea of your background, but AFAIK suicide terrorism is
very
much a minority sport. November 17, IRA, INLA, Bader-Minhoff, and most of the
worlds' terrorist/ex-terrorist organisations much rather killed their
'enemies'
than themselves. A bombing campaign by a cell is a much better use of human
resources.

My background isn't much. The closest I've come to any experience in
this area is visiting Israel smack in the middle of the two week
ceasefire they had in June of 2001.

In any case, I fully believe you. My statement was mostly CYA. I don't
think that making everybody be a suicide bomber is terribly effective,
but I don't know enough to rule it out. I do recall thinking, during the
fall of Iraq and the immediate aftermath, that a trained monkey could
probably do a better job of defending that country. Take all of those
army units that got surrounded/wiped out/whatever and simply distribute
them throughout the cities. Give each one a rifle, give RPGs to as many
as you can. Tell them to wait in a building by the window. When they see
Americans, shoot (at) them. As it was, I suppose the high ranks were too
busy trying to get out of harm's way with as much cash as possible to
put any effort into making life hard on the US Army.

In article ,
Timothy Eisele wrote:

In rec.arts.sf.science Michael Ash wrote:
Well, don't forget that only a very tiny percentage of any regular army
will be composed of people fanatical enough to become suicide bombers.
Your four-million strong Elbonian People's Happy Army will turn into a
handful of suicide bombers and a whole bunch of deserters if you tried
that strategy. Not to say it may not be the best use of that army, but I
don't think it would be that effective.

Which is why the ideal complement to this strategy would be the intensive
development of a really effective brainwashing technology. Once your amoral
dictatorship has the ability to really deeply convince people on a wholesale
basis that the regime is worth dying for, then you're in business.
Especially
since this will have the useful side benefit of greatly improving your hold
on power with the general populace, if you can apply similar technology to
them as well.

Is 'brainwashing technology' somehow not in the same realm of fantasy as
'magic fairy dust'? I was under the impression that it was something you
only found in bad novels and movies.

On Thu, 18 Dec 2003 05:26:01 GMT, Kevin Brooks wrote:

I think there are two issues here. The first is when the sensor is
attached to the weapon, as it is in a sensor in a missile. Here,
there is no sensor/shooter cycle, unless you choose to have a human
involved in the decision to fire.

That is way beyond even our capabilities. You are talking autonomous combat
systems.

Yes. The progrsamming for this isn't particularly hard, once you've
written software that can identify a vehicle (or other target) in a
picture. It's just a matter of aiming the missile towards the
target.

Weapons like this were in existance 20 years ago, for example the
Exocet anti-ship missile. I'm not bsure what problems you envisage
with doing this; perhaps you could elaborate?

because you can't just fire them "in that direction, more or less", and hit
anything--you have to have a pretty narrow determination of where the target
is right at the time the weapon arrives.

What you could do is have the missile, if it doesn't find a target
to hang around in the area looking for one. (The British ALARM
missile does this literally :-)).

Now if you want to send a flock of
CM's out and about to go on a hunter-killer mission, you have some real
problems to confront, like: (a) How do you prevent fratricide or targeting
of the local version of the Sanford garbage truck (remember that not every
enemy is going to be able to discount collateral damage like the insurgents
we are no facing in Iraq do)?

You can't prevent fratricide all the time, and most countries would
have a higher tolerance from losses caused by friendly fire than
most western countries do. The missile would know (at least
approximately - within a few km) were it is, and therefore whether
it is over land occupied by its own side.

Discriminating between military and civilian vehicles is a lot
harder, I agree.

(b) Are you going to send it in low, where it
MIGHT have a chance at surviving, but its field of view is extremely
limited, so it is that much more likely to not find any target to hit, but
which also requires oodles of (very accurate, and likely unavailable to most
potential foes) digital topographic data to be uploaded and a complex
navigation system)

The topographic data would probably be available if the missile is
flying over the territory of its own country.

Otherwise, there are other methods of nagivation: dead reckoning,
celestial, a LORAN-like system could be set up.

or up high where the view is better,

It's possible that a mission might require some of the flight to be
at high level and some at low level. I imagine the missiles could
be programmed for a mission by sticking a computer with an Ethernet
cable into a slot on the missile.

--
"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).

On Thu, 18 Dec 2003 09:14:26 +0000, Mike Williams
wrote:

Wasn't it phil hunt who wrote:

What would be sensible strategies/weapons for a middle-ranking
country to employ if it thought it is likely to be involved in a war
against the USA or other Western countries, say in the next 10
years?

I think that any middle-ranking country that went up against USA/The
West using military weapons would get seriously stomped on. The only way
to have a chance would be to win the propaganda war, turning popular
opinion in the USA against contesting the war. Infiltrate your
supporters into the US media many years before war is likely. Be aware
that the peril of one individual that the US media can identify with is
worth an awful lot more in propaganda terms than the death of anonymous
thousands. Design any military actions with their propaganda value as
the primary consideration, ignoring conventional military value almost
completely. Employ well-equipped media crews on the ground who
understand the US media, and have them rapidly release their (edited)
footage to the guys you've got planted in the US.

"The only way to understand the battle is to understand the language.
War is as much concept as execution."

Provoke your opponents into making the first media-visible aggressive
step, and make yourself appear to be implementing passive resistance, or
using a minimal defensive response. Meanwhile, if you can find any
targets that are not media-visible (i.e. the US government can't
publicly admit that the targets exist) then attack them aggressively.

I believe that can work quite well

Killing people and bombing no longer has the same positive impact
as a good media campaign
--
Jim Watt http://www.gibnet.com

On Thu, 18 Dec 2003 10:32:11 -0800, pervect wrote:
On Thu, 18 Dec 2003 08:21:03 GMT, "Kevin Brooks"
wrote:

That is a decent description of the selective availability (SA) function of
GPS. SA renders the average (non-US military) receiver incapable of
determining a precise fix, and you need precision for the kind of weapons
the poster was postulating. SA was shut down a couple of years back so that
civil users (i.e., surveyors, commercial aircraft, etc.) could take
advantage of its precision (prior to that occuring surveyors had to use what
is known as "differential GPS", a more time consuming method of achieving a
precise location), but according to the official USG website on the subject
it can be reinstituted over a particular region at will.

Denying the US use of GPS would have a negative impact on US military
capability, but it would not eliminate it.

Actually, I don't think SA adversely affects US military systems.

No, it doesn't, by design. SA only affects the accuracy of the
GPS satellites' coarse positioning signal. Military GPS receivers
can receive additional signals from the satellites that allow
more precise position determination.

Processors and computing power are getting cheaper every year - and
there are a lot of US weapons with military GPS around - so it's
conceivable to me that someone could obtain one of these weapons and
reverse-engineer the GPS system on them.

If there is no sort of "auxiliary code input" to the weapon (i.e. some
sort of activation code that has to be input) the reverse engineered
weapons would work just as well as the US weapons, so the US would
have to make the choice of whether it was better for everyone to have
(accurate) GPS or nobody to have GPS.

The military GPS signal is encrypted. A receiver needs to know
the current encryption key to decrypt the signals and use them
to compute its position, so just duplicating the hardware somehow
won't do you any good.

Encrypting the signal also makes it very difficult for
an enemy to spoof GPS signals -- spoofed signals would have
to be encrypted with the correct key to fool a receiver.

Without knowing for sure, I would personally expect that current
weapons would have some sort of auxiliary code, and that this code
would have to be entered as part of the target programming process
(which is quite long according to news reports, though it's getting
shorter).

Encryption key, not "auxiliary code".

I don't know any details of how the keys are distributed, but
I suspect the people who designed the current GPS system thought
a lot about the issue and came up with a solution that is
relatively secure and not terribly inconvenient.

[...]

One extreme scenario to illustrate the concept - the satellites could
send out random hash until, say, 6:03 am when a major US strike was
planned. At this point, the satellites would start transmitting valid
information according to some specific agreed upon code which the
enemy didn't know in advance. When all US weapons reach their target,
the satellites would go back to sending random hash.

The enemy would have to figure out what the code was in a very short
time period, and program and launch their weapons before the code
expired. This would be extremely difficult.

See

http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/library/report/2003/iraq-and-gps_faq.pdf

for a discussion of these issues. According to the author, the
use of selective availability (SA) to prevent opponents from
using civilian GPS receivers to get accurate position fixes is
a thing of the past:

"The technique the U.S. military developed which allowed them to
switch off SA is selective in-theatre jamming of the SPS signal."

Another poster suggested that SA could be turned on and off on
GPS satellites individually as they overfly the area of conflict --
this is rather unlikely. The orbital altitude of the GPS
constellation is approximately 10,000 miles. This means that
at any given time, a single GPS satellite is above the horizon
and visible to GPS receivers over almost half of the earth's
surface. It would be possible to selectively impose SA on one
hemisphere of the earth at a time, but not in an area much
smaller than that.

To return to the original topic of this thread, I think the
Elbonians would be better off spending money on developing
cheap inertial navigation systems for their hypothetical
low-cost cruise missiles (HLCCMs) than going to any effort to
try to outsmart the U.S. Air Force so they can use GPS.

Inertial navigation systems can't be jammed or spoofed, and
are accurate enough to get HLCCMs within hypothetical low-cost
terminal seeker range of their targets.


ljd

"Pete" wrote in :

Instead of trying to build *up* to defeat a western/Nato/US opponent, the
only possible solution would be to build *down*, and grow self aware,
mobile, small scale explosives.

A 20 year old with a backpack full of C-4, as is done now.

Why send a man to do a boy's job?

"Arved Sandstrom" wrote in message ...
Incidentally, the other Western countries *are* middle-ranking countries, so
this is really a "how do we defend against the US" question. Under those
circumstances I think one simply does not attempt conventional warfare - not
in the time frame you suggest. You'd lose everything you have. You allow
yourself to be occupied, then you start making life bad.

Does this mean that any war the US can win without occupying you is a
lost cause?

There are two obvious types of such wars: throwing country A out of
country B (Serbia, Desert Storm), and "We don't particularly care what
replaces government C, but government C is going to be destroyed."
(Afghanistan 2001, maybe if NK decides to nuke us either directly or
via a third party)...

-jake