Comment by Animats | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Animats | Hacker News Reader

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.

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.

Or shipped to a precise location in a container

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.

>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?

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.

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.

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.

>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.

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