"Survivability and lethality in a contested environment now have more to do with stealth, sensors, data fusion, and the ability to network, than just pure turn performance. Unfortunately, it’s difficult to quantify these capabilities in an unclassified environment."
This makes me think about naval development before WW2. Everyone had lots of ideas about battleships and how to pack more guns onto a faster ship and all these other things, but lots of people missed how aircraft carriers would change things. I'm sure the next war will be different. The obvious development is drones, but I also think about the plotline of the second Battlestar Galactica series where the protagonists only initially survive because their ship eschews network connections. It seems like we aren't quite sure what future battles will look like and the US is making a guess in the form of a $1.5tn plane project.
Its a well known proverb, "Generals always fight the last war" going back to at least 1934 as a criticism of military doctrine. And while it is true, it is also inevitable because nobody wants to lose knowing that the enemy did X in the last war and they didn't bother to develop a countermeasure Y to defend against that.
That said, there are always new things to try on the battlefield as well and they are. Stealth bombers in Serbia, "three layer" attacks (top B-52, middle F-18, low Tomahawk) or any of the other tactics that appear as "new" in a conflict and then become "Yeah, they always do that." One of my classmates in high school went to West Point and at a reunion we were talking about the difference between engineering school and military school. There is a very deep base of knowledge there. And while it wasn't my destiny to go that path (even though the Marines tried really really hard to recruit me :-)) I recognize that fighting effectively is just as complex and nuanced as making a circuit that has 160 dB of noise margin.
What has been interesting about F-35 project is what was called out in the article, developed during unprecedented visibility into the unvarnished ups and downs. And there are always people who exploit that to paint a narrative of incompetence and gross negligence. The real test though is when they go to war and whether or not they provide the capabilities that overcome the enemy or not right?
I'm okay with not ever needing to find out :-) I think there is a Sun Tzu saying about not fighting a war is the best way to win it. But yeah, it would be disappointing to need it and have it not meet expectations. That is always true of course.
I believe the last time that happened was with the F-111.
I think it will be a combination of drones and cyber/electronic warfare capabilities.
Drones have already shown their potential in the Azerbaijan-Armenia conflict recently. From large swarm based attacks to kamikaze mode, I think drones should overtake frontline fighter planes in capability soon.
Suicide drones (aka cruise missiles) have been on the forefront of any first strike mission the US have conducted in modern times with manned planes being relegated solely to roles where they need to drop larger quantities of cheap munitions or fly Close Air Support missions.
This of cause meant that the navy gradually took over the "first strike"/"suppression of air defenses" from the Air Force and the F-35 was born as an attempt to bring that back into the ranks of the Air force as stealth theoretically allows the F-35 to almost compete with submarine launched cruise missiles.
The problem is that the F-35 is way to expensive/fragile for the CAS role and might be so expensive to operate that it begins to make sense to depend entirely on missiles and drones for pre-planned strike missions, making it kind of the modern equivalent of post dreadnought battleships.
I think it will all come down to one plucky and very clever outsider who stumbled into the situation by accident. Oh yeah, and the girl who needs rescued from the system against which she has rebelled.
The thing is, if increased cyberwarfare capabilities allow you to exploit some large percentage of the drone force, then that would leave an extremely large gap to exploit by the enemy. If you can't fly drones because you risk them being crashed (or worse, turned on you), then you need some backup force. That might be real pilots, or it might be non-remote-controlled drones, or some combination of things like that.
> the protagonists only initially survive because their ship eschews network connections.
I always wonder if the next big military development is actually going to involve more technology, rather than less. America’s main military weakness is that it is very reliant on things like GPS or connections to other devices. What’s to stop a foe from developing jamming tech and counteracting the US’ lead? From what family tells me, the army still teaches people to dig trenches and use old-fashioned maps (among other things) just in case.
As a former Marine (07-12), yes, they do still teach basic land navigation using a map and compass.
However, the skills are not reinforced or even practiced really. It is not as easy to conduct EW against GPS as you would think, at least not military specific capabilities. There are contingencies and capabilities in place for that.
Bigger concern would be the GPS satellites being destroyed altogether.
Which is also why when you hear news reports about China or the US destroying their own satellites using ship launched missiles, the message intended to be conveyed is more than meets the eye.
Those demonstrations are really about telegraphing to adversaries what you can/would do in the event of a conflict.
I’m not very familiar with the technologies you linked. However, bear in mind the military operates at a scale that’s hard to fathom. Fielding new capabilities requires substantial level of effort when it’s military wide. Aside from that, many times they already have some tricks up their sleeves if push ever came to shove.
Anyways, what I linked to are the key components for inertial navigation systems. Not all of them together, but several options. The first is that chip-scale 'atomic clock' thing from microsemi, a very precise time source. Something like that would be needed in every case.
The others are different possible paths to precisely measure (speed of) movement and (change of) orientation. Based on those you could construct inertial navigation 'on the go' in small form factors. Not smartphone-like small at the moment, but close to.
Regarding the scale of fielding/roll-out, ask Apple, Honeywell, or someone like that...
Thinking about it, maybe that is why 'the others' play at shooting things in orbit because they allready have 'Mao's mighty map' available? Who knows? Whatever. The end of GPS/GNSS wouldn't necessarily have to be 'the end of navigation'.
1. Ship- and ground-based transmitters are ridiculously powerful, and use lots of jamming-resistant tech like spread spectrum.
2. Viewed at the right wavelengths, jammers are like looking at Las Vegas at night. They’re very visible, and attractive targets for RF-seeking munitions.
> 2. Viewed at the right wavelengths, jammers are like looking at Las Vegas at night. They’re very visible, and attractive targets for RF-seeking munitions.
This may not be super intuitive until you start playing around with the technology and understand what’s possible with phased array antennas. I’m fairly confident that somewhere in the planet is an integrated, real-time, broadband view of RF illumination over the surface of the earth.
Yeah, your missiles don't need fancy GPS guidance when their programming can basically just be "travel towards the radio jamming signal and explode on impact"
With the advent of UAVs (ex: from the ordinary to the RQ-170 and beyond), hypersonic capabilities (ex: SCRAMJET), and even action in space (ex: destruction of satellites enabling GPS & remote communication, to severely limit an opponent’s capabilities), I have to agree.
I imagine the “next war” will be one with severe consequences, perhaps through means which the general public is not even aware of, despite those known & listed above.
If scifi has taught us anything it's that destabilizing currency, hacking infrastructure, biological warfare & moon trebuchets are the next/current stages in waging war if you're attacking a nation with unmatched stockpiles of nuclear and conventional weapons.
This makes me think about naval development before WW2. Everyone had lots of ideas about battleships and how to pack more guns onto a faster ship and all these other things, but lots of people missed how aircraft carriers would change things. I'm sure the next war will be different. The obvious development is drones, but I also think about the plotline of the second Battlestar Galactica series where the protagonists only initially survive because their ship eschews network connections. It seems like we aren't quite sure what future battles will look like and the US is making a guess in the form of a $1.5tn plane project.