How did a 30 year-old Su-22 defeat a modern AIM-9X?
combataircraft.net
combataircraft.net
Here's the bit about moths [1]:
> John said, “Listen, you can hear the jammer.” The what? “The jammer,” he said, “Watch the moths.” It turns out the moths, through evolution, had developed their own electronic countermeasures to jam the bat radar. They had developed ultrasonic receivers and ultrasonic jammers and physical countermeasures. When they picked up the bat radar illuminating them by sensitive hairs on their antennas, they would send out their own little squirt of ultrasonics by rubbing their legs together, jam the bat radar, and then they would immediately take evasive action and dive to the left and right.
> Through Darwinian selection over millions of years, these moths had developed an entire electronic warfare, electronic countermeasures, electronic countercounter-measures suite, and here was a guy in 1973 in Thailand who was figuring this stuff out. To be honest, it was my first insight that there was really a bigger picture.
> So, John’s point was, “I keep trying to tell officers way above me that there’s probably a ton we could learn from watching these natural systems. What we’re doing in the air war over the North is just nothing more than something that’s been going on in nature for millions of years, but I can’t seem to get anybody’s attention.” (Thirty years later MIT would develop the Insect Lab and work on swarm behaviors for UAV’s and robotics.)
[1] https://steveblank.com/category/secret-history-of-silicon-va...
http://arstechnica.com/science/2017/04/watch-militarized-mic...
[1] http://www.raytheon.com/capabilities/products/aim-9x/ [2] http://www.donhollway.com/foxtwo/
I consider it much more likely that the Russians at some point obtained some AIM-9X seekers and tweaked their flares and/or engines to make it less effective.
The is also the concept of the 'war load' or 'war paint'. In normal operation planes will have their radar cross section increased and corner reflectors added, engine burn is tweaked, etc, anything that could be leaked or sensed remotely (when flying in international airspace, or from space, or covertly through radar backscatter). When you think things will get serious you pull out those chunks of superfluous steel, tweak the engine exhaust nozzle, load different firmware onto the missiles and the EW system. If actual combat occurs there may be different war-only RADAR wave forms.
Probably none of those are available to Syria (and the US has been building RADAR signatures of them for many months), except maybe an upgraded flare dispenser.
This reminds me of a story where the USA got its hands on a new MiG and when they opened it up found that it used some kind of antiquated technology. Some time later the USA found out that this was intentional because the older tech could withstand nuclear radiation whereas the new tech would instantly fail.
Fun history, the Russians demanded it back off the US/Japanese so the Japanese government let the US take it apart, photo and test the parts (as quickly as possible) then shipped it back in crates and billed the Russians for the shipping. Which iirc they never paid.
"Unable to afford the thermal-resistance provided by a titanium frame, the MiG-25’s designers used vacuum tubes over transistor-based modern electronics — which made the planes resistant to high-temperatures and cheaper to maintain."[0]
[0] http://warisboring.com/one-soviet-defector-shoved-japan-into...
USSR could have replied by sending an invoice for the rental of the plane, reassembly of the components, and the intellectual property licensing for all of the technical data obtained. All of that would no doubt ought weigh the cost of crating and shipping the plane by orders of magnitude. Not that either side would ever have considered paying, of course.
In reality, some entirely secret concession could have been made that we might never find out about unless it was documented and is some day declassified.
There's a similar story about the "sloppy" riveting work on the Mig-25. Turned out to have significant beneficial effect in the airflow.
That was brought home to me in a documentary I watched about the Mig-29, the US/Nato avoided FOD (Foreign Object Damage) by scrupulously walking the runway/apron every day and cleaning up.
The USSR just put air intakes on the top for taxiing so crap didn't get sucked into the main inlets.
It was such a simple design and yet the advantages in a war situation operating from crappy debris strewn airfields where obvious, they had Mig-29's taxing over rough dirt berms and all sorts of crazy things (at least from a western viewpoint).
Given the age of the software in these missiles, the issue is likely relatively weak and brittle classifiers being used to separate noise from signal. It is not based on any kind of modern deep learning techniques.
You can't just say "blah blah propaganda, blah blah misdirection" every time you see a news article from a war zone.
"The answer: this is war propaganda. There are no real facts here, only half-truths and mis-direction." [Emphasis mine.]
Calling everything around you propaganda may seem like an easy way to look smarter than everyone else, but it is a painfully transparent move when you can't back it up with substance. It's even worse when you try to pretend you weren't doing it.
And you think this doesn't involve any propaganda at all?
I would assume that the primary purpose of the article is to generate advertising and subscription revenue.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/McDonnell_Douglas_F/A-18_Hor...
Super Hornets are still being produced, upgraded and improved and will probably still be in the assembly line in 20 years. A 30 second Google didn't show the year of the F/A-18 in question, but I assume it is from the mid 2000 or something like it.
This was even more true for Soviet tech. The American B-52 are ancient, but the Soviet Bears were produced, upgraded, replaced and improved until the very end. Cost-plus programs like the F-35 with enormous upfront R&D are good for the manufacturer, suppliers and lobbied politicians, but iterative designs, like evolution, also just works.
Edit: Maybe the F-104 starfighter program would be another good example.
The reason it is called "hornet" and why it shares so much external similarity is some kind of domestic propaganda reasons. To make people think that US Navy doesn't have modern equipment when they actually do.
On one occasion, a US ally shot down a hobbyist-sized drone with a Patriot missile. Very expensive, but it hit the target.
They wouldn't say what they were testing but it seemed fairly obvious. The whole engine block glowed hot as did the uppersides exposed to the Sun, let alone the exhaust, at what I guessed to be several kilometres distance. Before we were shooed away :)
(Similarly, during the Battle of Britain the Hawker Hurricane was notable for the way German 20mm cannon shells passed through its doped cloth-on-tube airframe. No impact to trigger the fuzes.)
Another interesting property of the An-2 is the incredibly high cross-section of the aircraft means slow flight speeds and very high lift, the aircraft really doesn't have a stall speed due to spring-deployed slats that snap out as airspeed drops... but whatever you want to call the stall speed it's lower than 30 kts. So in a stiff headwind you can fly the aircraft onto the ground in full control at zero ground velocity, or actually while being pushed backwards by the wind.
Wouldn't be enough to deter a dedicated attacker at short range especially with a sufficiently high radar frequency (the engine and other metal parts become a bigger multiple of the wavelength), but would you be able to pick it up at 50-100 miles with longband search radar? especially at low altitude? Probably not. Especially random ex-Soviet crap like a lot of countries have.
Don't knock primitive tech, sometimes it works. The An-2 is archaic but it's a very competent bushplane/light cargo aircraft for squad-level paratroop or liason operations. And it's well-adapted for rustic operations like Russian/Canadian bush, or Korea.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antonov_An-2
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A3tpV9vUTPo
http://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/why-north-korea-usi...
Doing the Taranto raid the low altitude of the Swordfish bombers caused the Italian navy to not just miss the planes but inflict collateral damage on themselves.
Today it's much harder to pull a similar stunt mostly due to night vision goggles/binoculars. But especially the US have a vulnerability as they have replaced proven effective systems based around cheap ammo and smart people, with systems based on dumb computers and expensive missiles.
Basically the Bismarck AA guns either had problem tracking them, or the ammo didn't do much.
And the torpedo that hit the Bismarck rudder was fired in part by the plane's navigator hanging over the side of the aircraft, and telling the pilot when to release to avoid the waves.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millennium_Challenge_2002
TL;DR: the Red team general, with Iran-equivalent forces at disposal, employed asymmetric tactics and WW2 equipment to sink an aircraft carrier, ten cruisers and five amphibious landing ships, estimated loss of 20 000 US military personell. Then they stopped the exercise because it was too embarrasing, refloated the Blue team ships and instructed the Red team to play by the instructions designed to make them lose.
Which is very surprising, typically short range missiles are cheaper. Apparently AIM-9X has gone through recent face-lift that still affects prices.
Su-22 is harder to find, but comparable aircraft SEPECAT jaguar goes for about 8 million.
an AIM120C is 300-400k
an AIM120D is 1.7M (I think it was listed as 1.2M last I checked this page)
According to this http://www.f-16.net/f-16_armament_article1.html a sidewinder in 1999 had a unit cost of 55k-85k which would be 9L,M, or P most likely. 9X did enter service until 2003
These toys, much like the planes carrying them get progressively more expensive in newer version.
But the cost ratio stay much the same. You get 4-6 AIM-9 for the cost of one AIM 120
I think ML will have a great impact in warfare.
Here's a funny story, ML people like to talk about the ROC curve and the AUC as a measure of how well a machine learning experiment worked on the test data. Do you know where the term came from? WW2 radar engineers.
Also consider that bread-and-butter ML techniques like logistic regression and k-means clustering have been around for decades.
How come "anti-establishment" doesn't mean anti-Russian/Syrian-dictatorship?
That's certainly a nice collection of links, yet don't seem to answer my question at all.
Also, claiming there are not freedom fighters in Syria is denying the whole civil uprising in 2011, and all of the utmost brutality and horrors perpetrated by the Assad regime against those protesters.
I'm not advocating funding terrorist groups, nor do I think the CIA and the Pentagon did a great job. (The whole intel/defense community is in shambles. Too much internal infighting, too few people taking responsibility, too much politics, funding issues, too much corruption because too much high-tech gadgets that must be maintained, produced, supported. You know.) But your worldview is overly simplistic if you think the story is that "a US plane was protecting terrorists". Those fighting on the ground probably have a very flawed sense of religion and what's right, how the world should be, but they're are currently fighting a fucking dictator. And that's a good thing.
The situaion around Raqqah (where Tabqah is) is basically the Rojava trying to purge ISIS from Raqqah while keeping Assad at bay at Tabqah.
see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rojava for who these folks are.
Edit: Between 1 F35 for $85 million or 5 F16 for $73 million total my money would most certainly be on the F16s.
And you seem to be implying that numerous SU-22s would have fared well against the Super Hornet? You could put 10 Fitters up against the Bug, and it'd still win before going winchester.
Hornet would not win with gun only against 4 missile armed fitters. If the missiles are modern. In air warfare numbers have always mattered and always will.
The Bug doesn't even typically carry 6 AAMs. The one that did the shootdown probably only had 3-4 depending on its mission tasking. They have to worry about bring back weight when landing on their carrier. But for our hypothetical, the Bug can carry 12 missiles without a lot of trouble (1). It might not have much range, and the drag would be a bitch, but the Fitters would go down in flames...
All A2A kills since 1999 have been with missiles. The F-16 have very preciously few A2A kills using guns.
I bet it was some old Soviet tech from the sixties.
https://medium.com/dfrlab/russias-fake-electronic-bomb-4ce9d...