I'm low key afraid that this stuff is gonna get popular for .mil usage.
Line of sight free space optics can be immune to many many forms of jamming. Its usage dots the sci books I've read over the years, but almost always for scary reasons.
Here's the Navy today announcing work on AirBorne System for Optical Relay and Broadcast (ABSORB), a (for now) low-cost prototype one-to-many (I maybe mis-inferring what multi-access means?) relayable free space system, https://defence-blog.com/us-navy-plans-to-revolutionize-nava...
> Line of sight free space optics can be immune to many many forms of jamming.
I’m a bit of two minds about this. Obviously jamming resistant high bandwidth communication enables some scarry possibilities.
But the lack of it is what drives and will drive militaries around the world to put more and more autonomy into weapons. It doesn’t matter what kind of treaties we write on paper to prohibit technologies. During a war if your drones/loitering munition are less effective than those of your enemies because your control signals are jammed you will give in and make your weapons find their target without that control signal. That leads to an arm race of ever more sophisticated autonomous weapons. That is scarry for many reasons, and probably a worse outcome for all of us.
On the other hand if communication is possible that puts a leash on this dynamic and ensurers that a human mind can remain in the loop. So… maybe being better at jamming resistant communication is actually better for humankind?
Ukraine's drones are already partly automated because of the jamming environment: they can visually lock the drone onto a target from up to 10km away.[0][1] They're also using drones that trail a fibre optic over several kilometres to avoid jamming.[2]
> already partly automated because of the jamming environment: they can visually lock the drone onto a target from up to 10km away
This capability is basically a reinvention of the walleye television bomb, which locked onto targets using edge detection on a signal from an internal television camera. 1960s technology.
Wire guided is still the primary means of guiding torpedos from submarines, because it gives you an unjammable, un-interceptible, consistent communication interface, and in torpedoes the wire spools out for tens of kilometers.
If you want something really cool, look up old fashioned TV guidance. We built weapons that guided based a TV signal, and edge detection in that signal. In 1958.
> On the other hand if communication is possible that puts a leash on this dynamic
I'm a bit more pessimistic than that. I think the driver for autonomy will be that the speed at which things happen on the battlefield. People being attacked with automated weapons might not be able to make response related decisions fast enough. The automation will be in place to enable a rapid response. It will become an arms race involving speed of attack and response. It will be the military equivalent of high-frequency trading, involving things like swarms and directed energy weapons.
I got seriously terrified by reading a PKD SF story at 15 about the few surviving humans hiding from war drones still hunting people long after the war had ended.
Haven't read the book, but I did see "Screamers". Wikipedia says: "Future Imperfect: Philip K. Dick at the Movies, writes that the film is more faithful than most other adaptations".
I can't comment on whether that's true, but the movie still haunts me. Odd, since as Wikipedia says "it received a mixed critical reception and failed at the box office". There was nothing mixed about my reception of it.
Similar but reverse, I felt unfortunate to have read the novelette after watching Terminator because part way in the story I thought - this is almost all of the AI/self replicating autonomous robot points of the Terminator movie just without the time travel. The movie addition of time travel adds a bit of hope to an otherwise totally bleak story resolution.
"People with blue and yellow patches are the enemy. I won't be able to communicate with you after you leave the forward base, but you need to navigate about 1 mile southwest then kill the people you find with a blue and yellow patch for as long as you can."
Then the quadcopter/Atlas/Spot/a Terminator/a tank driven by AI starts rolling across the landscape, while humans flagged as suspicious by Google because we lack sufficient tracking data in our browsers fill out reCaptcha images that say "Select all images that contain [soldiers] in this set."
Nearby, a scared local child distracts themselves from the distant horrors by drawing a picture of the sun in the sky with their crayons.
Some time later, the robot is able to transmit back a few bytes of telemetry to base, which publishes a press release that describes the number of enemies slain.
> Obviously jamming resistant high bandwidth communication enables some scarry possibilities.
This sounds like you would also be in favor of backdoored encryption. I disagree. It's a tool / improvement like any other, how you use it makes it scary.
BTW this is nothing new, it's just packaged nicely and (I assume) massively improved technology. DIY and open source solutions were possible in 2001 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RONJA (static ones tho)
> Line of sight free space optics can be immune to many many forms of jamming
The most powerful weapons on earth already are immune to jamming. ICBMs use celestial navigation (pictures of the stars) to course-correct, which is a form of navigation you cannot jam.
Have a read of how MERV part of some ICBMs works. Lots going on as far as targeting goes. Also take a look at Trident 2 which can use GPS for course correction but isn’t reliant on it.
The missile knows where it is at all times. It knows this because it knows where it isn't. By subtracting where it is from where it isn't, or where it isn't from where it is (whichever is greater), it obtains a difference, or deviation. The guidance subsystem uses deviations to generate corrective commands to drive the missile from a position where it is to a position where it isn't, and arriving at a position where it wasn't, it now is. Consequently, the position where it is, is now the position that it wasn't, and it follows that the position that it was, is now the position that it isn't.
In the event that the position that it is in is not the position that it wasn't, the system has acquired a variation, the variation being the difference between where the missile is, and where it wasn't. If variation is considered to be a significant factor, it too may be corrected by the GEA. However, the missile must also know where it was.
The missile guidance computer scenario works as follows. Because a variation has modified some of the information the missile has obtained, it is not sure just where it is. However, it is sure where it isn't, within reason, and it knows where it was. It now subtracts where it should be from where it wasn't, or vice-versa, and by differentiating this from the algebraic sum of where it shouldn't be, and where it was, it is able to obtain the deviation and its variation, which is called error.
Not just an online gag, that's related to an excerpt of an alleged December 1997 issue of "Association of Air Force Missileers" on the GLCM Guidance System. Likely submitted in jest.
Every nuclear weapon in the active US stockpile has a secondary fusion stage, the last pure fission weapons were removed from service and dismantled in 1992.
Most of the cost in a nuclear weapon is in the primary. It only makes sense to build pure fission weapons when you want very low-powered nukes for close range tactical use; the DoD has determined that don't see enough use for them to justify the upkeep of specific weapons.
This form of navigation is probably only accurate enough for nuclear weapons, you’re not going to get meter-Range CEPs with that. You probably have to select a city you want to hit.
This is a very good read on the state of the art when it comes to submarine-launched missile accuracy, which are presently inertially guided with a stellar update during flight.
Thanks for the link, very interesting. So CEP is estimated to be around 100m. Better than I thought but I wouldn’t call it hitting a specific house yet.
That’s why I said the guidance is only really usable for nuclear weapons. I wasn’t saying the guidance is bad, I was saying it’s not accurate to a few meters.
I don’t know if it matters now but at some point certain targets were hardened to near misses of certain sizes but not direct strikes. So the better your accuracy the smaller the weapon (or fewer) you can use to take out those targets.
So you could say the use would be increased certainty your enemies command and control and other bunkers would be destroyed increasing the odds of “winning” whatever happens afterwards.
While you probably can't target a cigarette butt on the street, you could definitely hit a building. Especially if the ICBM is paired with image recognition (which it has already for star nav) and/or backup positioning mechanisms like cell tower locations or well-known broadcasting tower locations (think television stations).
An ICBM is coming in at hypersonic speeds in the terminal phase, you’re not going to guide it anywhere using cell tower signals. The guidance is done much earlier.
And I would doubt image recognition for ground features would make it that accurate, too. Before reentry, you’re very high and fast and reentry isn’t that predictable to get you accurate enough to hit a house. And during reentry, you’re not going to see anything though plasma. And after reentry, you probably don’t have enough time and control authority to still guide into a specific house.
ICBM guidance is very different from cruise missiles.
> An ICBM is coming in at hypersonic speeds in the terminal phase, you’re not going to guide it anywhere using cell tower signals.
Hypersonic glide ICBMs have been successfully tested by China, and are under development in the US, so it's entirely possible to maneuver, and optionally guide them in the terminal, though perhaps not advisable on a jammable channel, except perhaps as an anti-radiation weapon.
well there is this now as well - you don’t need to use the stars when you already have detailed aerial images of the earth - https://www.spectacularai.com/gps-free
At this point though, couldn’t you just blow up your own country and thus accelerate warming so much as to doom the rest of humanity in a dozen years? I might have read the wrong article on that though so don’t quote me.
Those work in vacuum though so you need a bit less laser power. The atmosphere attenuates your signal if you’re doing ground to ground or ground to aircraft links so you probably need a bit more laser power. But I agree that that’s probably not the difficult thing about the whole system.
Free space optics were attempted extensively in the ISP space 15, 20 years ago for FDD 1 Gbps links at short distances roof to roof in major metro areas, they're EXTREMELY vulnerable to falling over in rain/snow conditions, and path length limitations, compared to 71 to 86 GHz millimeter wave (using a 2000 MHz wide FDD channel going each way in a high/low split). I'm very skeptical.
Jam resistant comms are critical for drones, and other precision weapons and their infrastructure. Even if line of sight is interrupted modern drones can return to signal nowadays, relay information, and return to target with corrections. You may not need optical cable anymore
Missiles generally go from point A and then blow up point b. Are there any missiles that leave base, fly around for a bit trying to identify targets, and if they can't identify any targets then return home?
I said that somewhat tongue-in-cheek, but the line between "drone" and "missile" seems to have gotten pretty blurry with the Ukraine war featuring FPV drones holding a hand grenade that are effectively a human-piloted missile.
Some modern missiles can fly around to identify targets, but they can't return home. They can blow up harmlessly if nothing is a target, though. They can also dodge and weave the way FPV pilots do.
Obviously, "drone" has a much more expansive mission profile than "missile."
Missle is a projectile, propelled by rocket motor. Drone is an aircraft vehicle, capable of transporting explosives or whatever. There is a fat line between drone and a missile, there are different in everything: control, speed, trajectory, weight, flying principles. I don't know how you can say they are even close. Just because both fly and do boom? Then you can say there is a thin line between cow launched from catapult and a missile.
The term you're looking for is loitering munitions. From Wikipedia: "Some loitering munitions may return and be recovered by the operator if they are unused in an attack and have enough fuel"
I was doing communications in military. For temporary networks, we used microwave links and they requires line of sight. The reason to use direct link is that missiles can be easily targeted to any radio source you can hear and take down the network.
Yeah, I was aware of this because of work with telecommunications in rural locations. Nobody is burying a cable over a mountain, that's too expensive and too much work. So instead, they'll setup microwave towers. Being on a mountain has the benefit that you are already in elevated locations that are easy to shoot a phone signal across the range.
It's worth noting that free space laser comms would also have this problem though: the atmosphere has dust, and any IR detector will see bloom and reflection of dust from a laser which will draw a straight line right back to the emitter.
so you have a laser and want to jam the comms channel. How do you find where the comms channel is, where is the receiver, where do you point your laser to jam enemy comms?
I agree it is not an easy task. But lasers can be detected with the right equipment (think the classic "laser through fog" but happening to plain air molecules), unit movements can be tracked and straight sight line is a significant logistical restriction.
But if they were only receiving. Well, that's going to be pretty hard to confirm and even if you "jam" it, then so what?
> But lasers can be detected with the right equipment (think the classic "laser through fog" but happening to plain air molecules)
You are assuming that the only source emitting at the specific wavelength is the laser you are targeting. This is not how it would work, the side using laser comms would also fly decoy drones that bathe the sky in the same wavelength as the comms channel.
This is also key part of how LPI radars on stealth aircraft work. Yes, in a spherical cow in vacuum environment you can in principle always trace a radar signal back to its source. But add a whole bunch MALDs radiating on the same band as the radars, and suddenly it becomes impossible to pinpoint the sources.
Should the military not have internet? If laser based internet is better than satellite or microwave or wireless (I assume the military uses these three). Then isn't that good?
That's the interesting paradox of technological development. If it's out of the bag, then it's out of bag, but that cuts both ways. You can never control who will gain access to advancements. Even if you trust the custodians now, you don't know who they will be in the future, &c. Eventually you end up at a fork: either pursue and endless technological arms race or find some way to build lasting cooperative and peaceful relationships. As they say, the surest way to destroy your enemy is to make them your friend. Still a massive challenge, but presumably that's why empires eventually always fail. They don't know how to make friends.
> As they say, the surest way to destroy your enemy is to make them your friend.
Defeat, not destroy. The best way to defeat an enemy is to make them your friend. Destroying someone would not be very friendly (unless they want to be destroyed).
What specifically are you worried about? Better comms will always help people, be it to flourish more in peace or more efficiently killing one another. Most inventions in the 20th century either came from the military or ended up being used by the military.
Why afraid? It's obvious it'll be used, nothing to be afraid, more like expect it to. Mount a base station on an AWACS and you've got the whole theatre covered. Clouds are an issue, obviously.
At the same time, fibre-optic drones have being successfully fielded by Russia and now increasingly by Ukraine. Immune to jamming with a minimum range of 10km.
There is no way these technologies won't be at least trialled for mil use, not when electronic warfare is employed to this degree.
I'm low key afraid that this stuff is gonna get popular for .mil usage.
They've probably had it for decades. Laser communication was being used by commercial TV stations in the U.S. in the 1990's. WNBC-TV in New York used a laser to transmit video from its Manhattan skyline camera in New Jersey back to 30 Rock.
I have a vague notion that it didn't work great in all weather conditions, but it was a long time ago.
Militaries have been using point to point laser or microwave for things for decades. They've also used coiled fiber optics (and still do) for missles, etc.
It's really easy to blast an area with high power disruptive radiation (EFI, RFI, laser, etc.) to deny comms, though.
Hasn't this been possible with microwaves for a long time? I remember site-to-site microwave Internet between tall buildings being used commercially in the 1990s
Laser light can be dispersed or bent by atmosphere and whatever is suspended in it, like smoke or drizzle. Also, it needs precise targeting.
I can assume that laser links work wonderfully in outer space.
On land or sea, I can imagine using tactical smoke generators to disrupt laser links and visual navigation, giving an advantage to to systems that use e.g. microwaves for "vision", and radio channels for communication.
Line of sight free space optics can be immune to many many forms of jamming. Its usage dots the sci books I've read over the years, but almost always for scary reasons.
Here's the Navy today announcing work on AirBorne System for Optical Relay and Broadcast (ABSORB), a (for now) low-cost prototype one-to-many (I maybe mis-inferring what multi-access means?) relayable free space system, https://defence-blog.com/us-navy-plans-to-revolutionize-nava...