Blimps Protecting Washington, D.C | Hacker News Reader

Blimps Protecting Washington, D.C

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57 pointsdnetesn47 comments

This is Raytheon's JLENS tethered radar surveillance blimp. It's not a new system, or particularly exotic.

Sales pitch video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q8hkpQ8ujyM

The dumbed-down version: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SiJWBszuq-c

Detailed procurement history: http://www.defenseindustrydaily.com/jlens-coordinating-cruis...

Tethered radar blimps aren't new. One of them provided the first warning of the invasion of Kuwait in 1990. (http://www.tcomlp.com/aerostat-system-kuwait/) That system had just been installed, and hadn't even been turned over to the Kuwaiti military, what there was of it, yet. A radar operator from TCOM, the manufacturer, detected a big group of approaching tanks. They called in a warning. Unlike Pearl Harbor, it wasn't ignored; the Kuwaiti royal family immediately left the country, escaping the invasion.

The JLENS system, unlike older systems, has fire-control capability. That means it has not just a surveillance radar, but can lock onto targets and direct weapons. The real question to ask is what weapons systems are being installed in the Washington area for it to direct. There's no point in having fire-direction capability without weapons to direct.

There is an optical surveillance add-on for JLENS, but it's supposedly not on the Washington area blimp.

It's surprising this is going up now. I would have expected something like this to have been deployed around November 2001.

Old tech designed to protect the President, very likely.

    A 2013 test confirmed the ability to track short-range ballistic missiles in their boost phase.

If a Nuke is to hit Washington DC, we'll want to make sure that the President is warned in time and can enter his nuclear bunker.

That said, "Captain America 2: The Winter Soldier" just came out, so people are probably thinking this is some sort of auto-kill sky cannon mounted on Helicarriers for the purpose of suppressing the US Population.

What kind of a short-range nuke is going to hit Washington, DC? If it was installed in Seoul, South Korea then maybe, but not DC. There is already a large system in place to detect long-range ICBMs.

A missile in communist Cuba, potentially.

The presence of anti-short range ICBMs would discourage Cuba as a base for Communists.

Yeah, the Berlin Wall fell a long time ago. But bureaucracy takes time.

Or shipped to a precise location in a container

The kind fired from a submarine.

This looks roughly down from about 10k feet. For a midcourse or terminal ballistic missile, you want to be looking up, like the cobra dane radars or THAAD or patriot batteries. To find the launch, we rely on infrared satellite sensors like cobra brass, and use radar to track. But again, this would be inappropriate, and other radars would be used.

Who said it was ballistic? A submarine launched, nuclear armed cruise missile could be potent and worth defending against.

You're right. That's exactly the sort of weapon this was designed to detect.

>we'll want to make sure that the President is warned in time

WHY? How about warning whole population?

This always amazed me about US. President is not a god, he is just a function, there is a hierarchy of replacements. Why do you keep making one man above all citizens?

US President has the nuclear launch codes.

It is unlikely that the US can defend from an ICBM, although if warned in time, the President can survive and then command a retaliatory strike.

US President is probably the weakest world leader by far. He's extremely constrained by Congress, and can't even negotiate a treaty without Congress breathing down his back.

But in a war situation... which a nuclear strike would definitely be... the first priority is to keep the Commander-in-Chief alive so that he can organize the counter-assault. That is his job after all.

Tempting a decapitation strike makes a bigger attack more likely.

Sure, the President as Commander and Chief can be replaced, but there could be a lot of confusion and time taken in the process, especially if many of the people in the hierarchy are also killed or otherwise indisposed.

Does President Biden sound pleasant to you? How about President Boehner?

With that aside, a presidential death, homicide or otherwise, would be extremely jarring to the US population. Ask anyone who was alive when JFK got shot. And plus, if there ever is a major national crisis, we would need a strong leader with a strong mandate, not someone who just stepped in because the one before perished in said crisis.

>There is an optical surveillance add-on for JLENS, but it's supposedly not on the Washington area blimp.

Yet.

Anyone who thinks these won't be outfitted with high-resolution facial/license plate detection systems and used to track people's movements is incredibly naive.

From 10,000 feet, looking down? Wrong tool for the job.

In practice, the main use of this thing will probably be identifying lost light plane pilots flying VFR into the Washington ADIZ. Over 1000 of them since 2009, which makes one wonder about the qualifications of general aviation pilots. This is a huge and ongoing headache; if it even looks like it might head for downtown Washington, two F-16s and a Coast Guard helicopter are launched to intercept. This has happened several hundred times now. Nobody has been shot down yet, but it's been close. A few times, fighter pilots have had to fire flares to get the attention of a light plane.

(Explanation of Washington ADIZ/FRA: http://www.aopa.org/News-and-Video/All-News/2014/October/Pil...)

Can you explain what lost light plane pilots mean and what "flying VFR" means?

Small planes navigating primarily visually, by landmarks, might stray into restricted airspace.

VFR = Visual Flight Rules, as opposed to IFR = Instrument Flight Rules.

Then we had CAPs overhead all day and avengers on highway overpasses. Now we have a few patriot(?) batteries and special flight rules. This thing might help early warning for both of those.

"As of press time the aerostats are intended to stay in the air 24/7, and to be taken down only for a monthly maintenance cycle and during extreme weather events such as hurricanes."

To any potential attackers, read that statement carefully. There's a clue in there.

Disclaimer to NSA etc.: not advocating attacks on the US. Just spotting an apparent loophole.

Probably they'll keep their detection areas overlapping and take down one blimp at a time...

And probably aerial attacks against the United States are even less practical during a hurricane.

Depends on how much you trust the guidance systems on your cruise missile.

That said, I can't see the advantage to any one player in taking out Washington DC unless they can shift attribution to someone else. I mean the small crazies (DPRK etc.) might want to do so but have to know that even success would be fatal to them. And the big crazies (Putin, the Ayatollahs, whoever's really running the show in China) would be too concerned about the consequences.

Not saying it couldn't happen, but the odds are, any entity capable of carrying out such an attack successfully has enough to lose that they would be dissuaded from doing something that would have extremely unpredictable consequences.

How does this compare to traditional ground-based radar?

Ground-based radars a typically constrained by line-of-sight on the horizon, and the curvature of the earth - you can't see anything beyond the horizon. Being elevated gives you a much larger range as that tangent line moves significantly outward.

Tethered to the ground from almost 2 miles up? I'd imagine this would require a decent sized exclusion zone for air traffic.

Also, there's always going to be some wind aloft pulling the blimp away from its anchor. It would be interesting to see a risk assessment for the land immediately surrounding the anchor point given the worst case of the cable separating from its attachment point on the blimp.

Yes, it's within a restricted area ('R'):

http://skyvector.com/?ll=39.34010380401439,-76.1800231869041...

Ah, the sectional I was viewing on flightaware.net didn't show that note. I was just reading[1] how a similar aerostat is flown from Cudjoe Key, Florida by the DEA. That one appears to be marked in its own 4 mile wide zone.[2]

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cudjoe_Key,_Florida

[2]: http://skyvector.com/?ll=24.664298,-81.482339&chart=301&zoom...

I'm curious whether it is common to test this kind of technology right on top of large US cities?

Don't most missile defense technologies get tested in more practical, or at least, remote settings? Why aren't these hovering over places that actually are subjected to, or at least more likely to be subjected to missile attacks, like Korea or Israel?

I suspect they're interested in tracking aircraft (and drones) to enforce the flight restrictions around the White House and other areas. As it can track ground vehicles, it could also be useful for tracking vehicles of interest for undetectable surveillance.

If I were a Secret Service agent, my biggest fear would be swarm of off-the-shelf drones carrying grenades into something like inauguration. Something like this could give the early warning they need.

Not sure about that being feasible to detect things of that nature with this system. For example you can build a mini quadcopter (size of a bird) weighing 5-800gms that can provide 2+KG of thrust. Back of the napkin math says a 400gm m67 grenade is easily within the payload capacity (Assuming 70% throttle to hover all up payload would be 1400+-gms). I would be very impressed if this could differentiate "bird sized flying objects" from birds. With that in mind I think we can be glad that complicated plots of that nature stay in the realm of James Bond rather then reality. Also I think the Boston bombings show that bad people don't need complicated technology to do bad things.

Sound like an entry in Bruce Scheiers Movie plot competition - I would assume that the Secret service and other TLA's have been thinking about this already - off the shelf drones would be a bit to easy to jam I feel.

I believe that the IRA did experiment with RC planes but found that DIY mortars where simpler - they very nearly hit downing street a few years back.

They actually tested these in Dugway, Utah - way, way out in the remote desert - the deployment in Washington isn't as much of a 'test' as it is a real-life use.

These blimps have been used for well over a decade in the southern US border to detect low flying drug smuggling aircraft.

For example, the aerostat that's been tethered at cudjoe key since about 1980.

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tethered_Aerostat_Radar_Syste...

It's not on top of a large US city. They're tethered at Aberdeen Proving Ground which is ~35 miles from downtown Baltimore and ~70 miles from downtown Washington, DC.

Washington DC is a valid nuclear target, is it not?

It seems like the blimp is designed to at least try to track ICBMs (which are notoriously hard to find and track).

This has a range from DC to Boston. If it saw an ICBM, it would be the reentry vehicle, and it would be too late.

Too late to stop, but maybe not too late to warn a few critical people to GTFO to their nuclear bunkers.

I thought ICBMs were trivial to track. They emit a vast plume when they launch, and in the cruise phase they're way up in space, far away from anything that might confuse radars. The threat of ICBMs isn't that they're hard to track, but that their great speed makes them extremely difficult to intercept.

This seems more likely to be used against ground targets (u.s. Citizens) than any arial threat that ground based radar couldn't detect. What non-state actors have cruise missiles?

Ground based radar is blind below the horizon, and generally blind near the horizon.

At 3.2km (2 miles) up the horizon is 202km away. At 12m (40ft) for a ground based radar (pulled that out of my arse, just for an example) the horizon is at 12.4km.

Then we discuss things like the Clutter Zone, which is a big issue for ground based radar systems. Planes and helicopters can fly Nap-of-the-Earth - below about 500ft is the usual stated height - because everything from buildings to wind over 15mph can make it unreliable for ground based systems.

An elevated system eliminates most of these problems, and this system has a radar horizon that covers all water and land from DC out to the Atlantic coast.

There's a lot of areas where a submarine could launch from unnoticed, and I'm guessing trying to detect a sub in busy waters is a lot harder and less reliable than a radar system to target a missile launch and try to take down a short range ICBM.

Or a nuclear tipped supersonic missile like the Mach 3 Sunburn (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P-270_Moskit), or back in the '80s I heard of the concept of using SLBMs in a "depressed trajectory" mode, where they didn't really get up high but used their rocket energy to travel horizontally really really fast.

Putting these sorts of defenses in D.C. is in part about avoiding a "decapitation" attack.

It looks like something out of Half Life 2. Very creepy.

Surprised that nobody mentioned blimp's usefulness for real-time tracking of crowd of revolting citizens in streets.

Cool. But are we fighting the last war?

The threat of MAD and nuclear WWIII never actually went away. People just sort of forgot about it.

The current proximity of this story to "The weirdness of 50s bomb shelters" on the front page seems remarkably apt.

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