Gates: Future Jet Supporters are Risking Today’s Troops

[Vympel]

Whereas if you send UAVs after them, the enemy may well be faced with the dilemma that the attacking UAVs cost less than their heavy air defence missiles, and UAVs are similarly expendable.

Do you mean the literal missiles? Any aircraft designed to take off and return with weapons systems to find and destroy enemy SAMs is never, ever, ever, going to be cheaper than the missiles the SAM batteries they're hunting are shooting at them. That's just fantasy.

The appropriate selling point is that the extremely expensive pilot isn't as risk. The UAVs loss will always be keenly felt, they're just not that cheap, in reality.

Well that should be ideal for all the isolationists in this thread (Darth Wong etc) who only want aircraft to be usable defensively. The Typhoon is fine for intercepting enemy strike aircraft and attacking invading armor columns (unsurprisingly, since it's a cold war design originally pitted against the invading Soviet horde).

I can hear Mike coming down from orbit on that grotesque man o straw from here.

[Starglider]

Any aircraft designed to take off and return with weapons systems to find and destroy enemy SAMs is never, ever, ever, going to be cheaper than the missiles the SAM batteries they're hunting are shooting at them. That's just fantasy.

I don't know how much a missile for an S-400 costs, but I was assuming from the fact that a Predator airframe costs the US about half as much as an SM-3, that the low end of UAVs (that still have enough range and firepower for the role) overlaps with the upper end of SAMs. That's without even considering the costs of a pilot casualty.

Well that should be ideal for all the isolationists in this thread (Darth Wong etc) who only want aircraft to be usable defensively.

I can hear Mike coming down from orbit on that grotesque man o straw from here.

Hardly. Aside from the fact that the various F-22 threads blurred together in my mind, Wong, Elfdart etc were objecting to the Gulf War, the Vietnam War, in fact 'ever war the US has ever fought' (I assume he meant since WW2) as an 'invasion of a third world country'. So if you don't allow 'power projection' of any sort, either preemptive invasions or assisting an ally (I can't remember, does the left currently consider the US action in Somalia evil? Probably, it involves the US military), then aircraft that are only useful for defense are perfect. The only alternative is to admit that yes, the US may legitimately want to destroy other nation's air forces and air defence networks.

[K. A. Pital]

a Predator airframe

With or without the armament carried?

[Vympel]

I don't know how much a missile for an S-400 costs, but I was assuming from the fact that a Predator airframe costs the US about half as much as an SM-3, that the low end of UAVs (that still have enough range and firepower for the role) overlaps with the upper end of SAMs. That's without even considering the costs of a pilot casualty.

The SM-3's an ABM, not a SAM. How much does a fully equipped Reaper UAV cost compared to an SM-2, or a Patriot PAC-2 round, etc?

Hardly. Aside from the fact that the various F-22 threads blurred together in my mind, Wong, Elfdart etc were objecting to the Gulf War, the Vietnam War, in fact 'ever war the US has ever fought' (I assume he meant since WW2) as an 'invasion of a third world country'. So if you don't allow 'power projection' of any sort, either preemptive invasions or assisting an ally (I can't remember, does the left currently consider the US action in Somalia evil? Probably, it involves the US military), then aircraft that are only useful for defense are perfect. The only alternative is to admit that yes, the US may legitimately want to destroy other nation's air forces and air defence networks.

For my part one can easily see the difference between your silly 'isolationism' strawman on the one hand and aggressive, unjustified wars of choice - like the Vietnam debacle, like the Iraq War, etc - which is the kind of conduct the US routinely - and predominantly - engages in. Who knows why you're appealing to Somalia, unless you're causing that inane intervention some sort of proof of concept for the F-22A.

Quite frankly, the only conflict the US has been involved in since Korea that was remotely appropriate for it to be involved in was the 1991 Iraq conflict. And yes, I'm including the Kosovo debacle there. The very idea of a "preemptive invasion" as somehow a desirable thing is Orwellian. It's the clarion call of aggressive tyrants all over history.

The fact remains that unless you're going to claim that every other country in the world is isolationist, which is just absurd, there's a huge difference between "ZOMG WE DESIRE THE MOST AWESOME MILITARY EVARRRRR SO WE HAVE COMPLETE FREEDOM OF ACTION EVERYWHERE IN THE WORLD!!!!" and a rational, realistic military doctrine that accepts that there are some things you just can't do, and as a nation you should just deal with it and stop crying.

[Ryan Thunder]

Back in reality, European nations seem to be going down the UAV route for air defense suppression, which does make a lot of sense.

Certainly, from quite a few angles it does seem like a good idea, but couldn't the enemy just jam them?

[TheLostVikings]

Back in reality, European nations seem to be going down the UAV route for air defense suppression, which does make a lot of sense.

Certainly, from quite a few angles it does seem like a good idea, but couldn't the enemy just jam them?

Modern military equipment are actually damn hard to jam successfully, among other things thanks to frequency hopping. Which is basically piping the signal over a very narrow frequency in order to get maximum "oohmp" out of a given power source, but at the same time "randomly" changing the frequency of the signal back and forth over a wide spread of available frequencies.

Thus anyone trying to interrupt the signal wont know which frequency is used at any give time, and therefore be forced to jam all the possible frequencies simultaneously, which takes a lot of power to accomplish. So the defenders have to spread themselves thin, yet still somehow get enough power into their signal to drown out the UAVs communication. Meanwhile the UAV is free to focus all of its energy into a very narrow frequency in order to maximize the power of its signal.

[MKSheppard]

Modern military equipment are actually damn hard to jam successfully, among other things thanks to frequency hopping.

Which you know, works when you're doing a simple voice channel, which doesn't need a lot of bandwidth. Try frequency hopping with sufficient video to control several dozen UAVs, and then coordinate their hopping, so they don't run into each other.....

[MKSheppard]

To elaborate a bit further:

The human voice requires 56 kilobits per second; but with some clever tricks such as tossing high and low end frequencies that aren't used very commonly; you can transmit intelligble speech on a rate as low as 2.4 kilobits per second.

By contrast; if you want to send say; a digital 200 x 200 greyscale (256 colors) image at 30 fps; you'll need at least 9.6 megabits per second to transmit it. That's a huge increase in the bandwidth needed. Yes, I know this is uncompressed; but bear with me...

To put this in context; on a 20.2 MHz Band, you can have either:

101 channels of FM Radio (200 kHz bandwidth per channel)
or
3 channels of Broadcast television (6 MHz bandwidth per channel)

And there's a finite frequency band; and you WILL be told that entire swaths of the band are off limits, due to civilian use; like weather radars, cell phones, television, etc.

[erik_t]

Of course, even human speech is wasteful (2400 bit/sec ~= 200 words/min ~= maybe 20 characters per second).

Let's say you're flying in an AWACS' region, and he wants to update you on the positions and trajectories of fifty aircraft, once per second, out to 1000km and up to Mach 5. We'll need six numbers (position in XYZ and velocities along XYZ, relative to some previously-agreed-upon coordinate system) per aircraft, plus an identifier (let's call it an integer); we'll want to send perhaps 50 characters for each new track, but this won't need to be resent every second. We'll go with 32-bit reals (4 bytes each) for commonality, although this is rather excessive (we'll be able to represent location and speed well enough to trim the pilot's hair, if we had arbitrarily good radar). We'll therefore need a data rate of 50*(6*4 + 1) = 1250 bytes per second, with an additional burst capability of 50 characters per (some time) for new track acquisition, plus some overhead. We can go ahead and build for 1400 bytes per second and have pretty excellent situational awareness (and we can gracefully degrade our refresh rate to keep track of many more tracks). This is more than Shep's minimum voice requirement, but I think a little more reflective of reality.


For comparison, standard-quality Youtube video (marginal, I think, for a UAV) is in the 1.5Mbit/sec range.

[Sea Skimmer]

The SM-3's an ABM, not a SAM. How much does a fully equipped Reaper UAV cost compared to an SM-2, or a Patriot PAC-2 round, etc?

Reaper costs about 10 million, though that price will go down substantially once production ramps up. Predator is still around 4 million. Meanwhile an SM-2 costs 4 million dollars, and since SAM sites are always going to fire a two round salvo, minimal, that means the costs are in fact close to equal. Reaper is damn big for a UAV too, while an SM-2 is nothing special at all for a heavy SAM in terms of size and weight.

More importantly though, you don’t need or really even want a Reaper for SEAD. A much smaller drone is entirely capable of doing the job and the US currently has numerous projects for small cheap drones which will have mission specific payloads, and often air launch so they can have decent range. Not that range even matters since someone has already flown a UAV that weighs less then 20lb across the Atlantic. It’s really just a matter of how much speed you want really… but very low speed is useful since it makes the UAV immune to pulse dopplar radar and lets it search effectively for concealed positions. Also keeps down noise since the main enemy defence would end up being AAA and armed helicopters cued by ground observers. The armament need not be heavier or more complex then a three pound mortar bomb delivered by a suicide crash along with a WP smoke grenade. That’s more then enough to damage a radar or command van and mark the target for other assets.

Meanwhile an unpowered TALD decoy is a mere 18,000 dollars and the powered version around 75,000 dollars, which is still so cheap it might get ahead in the count with the enemy firing MANPADS and AAA at the thing.

You might also consider the fact that all those people buying S-300 systems, almost none of them buy more then one load of missiles per battery. That means a weapon fired is a weapon gone, and the batteries capability will steadily decline. This also places a serious limit on the cost effectiveness of the heavy SAM system, since you easily spend a quarter to a half a billion dollars on the radar and command systems for one battery and once it has no ammo it’s worthless except as a high priced surveillance aid. Personally I’d tell my S-300 radar to go hide in a cave long before I used it for general air search.

The appropriate selling point is that the extremely expensive pilot isn't as risk. The UAVs loss will always be keenly felt, they're just not that cheap, in reality.

Yeah, they are. Heavy SAMs will be horrendously uneconomical for destroying UAVs and other unmanned flying weapons, end of story. Even smaller SAMs won’t be any better if they rely on high end guidance systems like active radar. The only good counter at the moment to UAVs is the same only good counter to cruise missiles, an airborne interceptor.

[Sea Skimmer]

Thus anyone trying to interrupt the signal wont know which frequency is used at any give time, and therefore be forced to jam all the possible frequencies simultaneously, which takes a lot of power to accomplish. So the defenders have to spread themselves thin, yet still somehow get enough power into their signal to drown out the UAVs communication. Meanwhile the UAV is free to focus all of its energy into a very narrow frequency in order to maximize the power of its signal.

That is mostly true. But some people have frequency hopping jammers now, which can actually even follow a radar system that changes regency every single pulse, and still manage to jam part of the pulse. It will work even better on radios since the radio can’t maintain a useful data rate of it was to change regency for every single bit of information transmitted. Frequency agility also simply means uneconomical use of the total pool of radio bandwidth, which is already very hard used. At the moment jamming like this is something we only expect from a handful of countries, but that might not be true in the near future.

The real solution to UAV command and control is high power communications lasers. The first such communications satellite is expected to orbit by 2014 (also has conventional radio relay capabilities), though of course the number of platforms it can control will be limited by the number of onboard lasers. However nothing is stopping a ‘time share’ approach, particularly for UAVs engaged in simple but data intensive tasks like radar ground mapping.

They expect at least 2.5 gigs a second for the operational lasers, though over 10 gigs a second has been demonstrated in the laboratory already. In comparison a Global Hawk with every gadget we want needs about 500 megs a second of uplink. It is unlikely any other drone will ever need more then that.

[Vympel]

Reaper costs about 10 million, though that price will go down substantially once production ramps up. Predator is still around 4 million. Meanwhile an SM-2 costs 4 million dollars

What? 4 million dollars for one missile? Have you got a link or something for that? That sounds completely insane.

[Void]

UAV's can be used to destroy air defenses, but not a Predator. That's kind of silly. A Predator is to big, slow and expensive to wasted flying into the teeth of SAMs.

Israel leads in that area with the Harpy, Harop (aka Harpy 2) and Delilah (which is really a cruise missile derived from an air launched decoy, but it does the same thing).

Wiki:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IAI_Harop
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IAI_Harpy
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delilah_missile

Germany has a similar weapon derived from it's KZO UAV called the Taifun and is developing a new enhanced version that allows for man-in-the-loop guidance called TARES.

Defense Update:
http://defense-update.com/products/t/taifun.htm
http://defense-update.com/products/t/TARES.htm

I wouldn't be surprised if they are cheaper than most high-end SAM missiles (like the ones used by the S-300/S-400 or Buk) because for a SAM to defeat modern ECM requires a very sophisticated seeker. Even if they aren't it isn't a major issue because they will be far cheaper than the SAMs multi-million dollar radar which is generally the target to begin with.

[Vympel]

The appropriate thing to do is to make sure the S-300/ S-400's best missiles aren't wasted on inappropriate targets - they can either use their 9M96 'small' missiles to do the job of defending themselves at range, or use a Pantsir-S1 (or a similar system) to perform close range defence.

[Pelranius]

The appropriate thing to do is to make sure the S-300/ S-400's best missiles aren't wasted on inappropriate targets - they can either use their 9M96 'small' missiles to do the job of defending themselves at range, or use a Pantsir-S1 (or a similar system) to perform close range defence.

Or you could even have some modified utility helicopter flying around with very light air to air missiles, like those modified Stingers or the TY-90, assuming that said targets aren't going too fast, working in conjunction with the EW assets and close defense AA systems (whether or not said helicopters can be used effectively elsewhere is a matter of priorities).

[Simon_Jester]

Yeah, they are. Heavy SAMs will be horrendously uneconomical for destroying UAVs and other unmanned flying weapons, end of story. Even smaller SAMs won’t be any better if they rely on high end guidance systems like active radar. The only good counter at the moment to UAVs is the same only good counter to cruise missiles, an airborne interceptor.

What about AA guns?

More generally, it occurs to me that most of the countries trying to use UAVs against enemy air defense networks are richer than their enemies. That should probably affect our calculations. If my country has three times more money than yours does, and I expend a ten million dollar UAV to kill your five million dollar SAM site, I'm probably going to come out ahead in the long run. Not as far ahead as I'd like, but I'll still have UAVs left over after you run out of SAMs.

[Sea Skimmer]

What? 4 million dollars for one missile? Have you got a link or something for that? That sounds completely insane.

No, insane is the ability of THAAD to cost 40 million apiece for the preproduction rounds, though this is essentially paying for them to build the factory. These missile prices do include certain pieces of test and support equipment, that’s not really a large fraction of the price tag. It’s the lack of really mass production that does it. R&D funding is counted separate too.

http://www.defenselink.mil/comptroller/ ... ystems.pdf

The appropriate thing to do is to make sure the S-300/ S-400's best missiles aren't wasted on inappropriate targets - they can either use their 9M96 'small' missiles to do the job of defending themselves at range, or use a Pantsir-S1 (or a similar system) to perform close range defence.

Small is relative, those missiles are still getting close to 1,000lb apiece as I recall. Given the active radar guidance they are not likely to be overwhelmingly cheaper then the big missiles. In fact it is entirely likely that one of the older TVM guided big missiles is cheaper then new production small missile. However that only helps out Russia, which is the only nation on earth with a large stockpile of older S-300 missiles.

Pantsir-S1 is nice for close defence, but the costs of adding systems like that to every SAM firing battalion spiral very quickly especially when the very relevant costs of then needed logistics and maintenance units are considered. Not to mention that everyone else will be screaming to deploy the things to defend other key targets like command bunkers and airfield dispersal areas.

What about AA guns?

If the AA guns have modern radar fire control like Pantsir-S1, they’ll be effective but costs start getting very high very quick while effective range is still very short. Automatic AA guns also have limited ceilings, usually less then 5,000 feet and many pieces of cheap enemy UAV spam may fly higher then this. This is especially true of decoy drones simulating a conventional air raid.

AA guns with no modern fire control, or only simple night vision devices are much cheaper (basically free, anyone likely to deploy AA guns alone probably already has the guns themselves) but the crews are large (read expensive) and you’re stuck as a primarily daylight only system. Finding suitable firing positions in modern friendly urbanized areas can also be difficult, particularly if one wishes to retain mobility and thus cannot simply have a crane lift the guns onto the roofs of apartment blocks.

More generally, it occurs to me that most of the countries trying to use UAVs against enemy air defense networks are richer than their enemies. That should probably affect our calculations.

Yes this is very true, the US has no need to spend less money destroying an air defence system then the air defence system cost, and even a country like Germany spends far more money then say Iran does. Also in the end, the air defence system is not a objective in and of itself. Its destruction is only a means of opening the way for attacks on strategic infrastructure and military forces. It might cost 30 billion dollars to destroy 5 billion dollars worth of SAM hardware… but you can make that back up mighty quick by then blowing up bridges and oil refineries with cheap JDAMs or cluster bombing mechanized infantry battalions.

The goal of the air defence system is to ensure that by the time it dies the enemy has no assets left with which to conduct those strategic attacks. This is very hard to do if the attacker sends out only very low value assets like UAVs, and very hard to kill assets like F-22s for the SEAD role.