One problem with these hypersonic endeavors and DOD development in general is there are too few tests (And done too slowly) to iterate. The developers do not get lots of opportunities to learn from real-data, like at SpaceX. Instead, there are low-single-digit numbers of tests with tons of political attention ready to pounce at the smallest (And most common!) failure.
A lot of the success of SpaceX can be attributed to their rapid incremental development model that they established with Falcon 9 and continued with Starship.
But at least with civilian rockets all the competitors have clear success metrics: they all launch with some regularity, and it's obvious if those launches were a success. Lots of weapon systems have one or two tests and then take a decade before they see any action, if at all.
Fore example the Patriot system is operational since 1981, but when first used in combat a decade later its accuracy came under heavy scrutiny, and continues to look suspect on a per-missile basis [1]. But that's one of the weapons systems that actually sees active combat, and sees improvements based on that. Now think of all the systems that are deployed but never used.
It should be noted that the Patriot was being used outside of its original design goal when tasked with shooting down missiles. It was designed to shoot down Soviet interceptors, but had to pivot when the Soviet Union collapsed. Missiles were a stretch goal of the original project, but ended up being its primary mission.
If I were a company in this space, I would try to keep my tests secret for exactly that reason. If I was successful, they would not be available for scrutiny by hacker news.
Public tests are still independently necessary and failing them is still an embarrassment, of course.
I think keeping actual hypersonic flight tests secret is pretty hard. At least in IR they should be very well visible from space.
>DOD development in general is there are too few tests (And done too slowly) to iterate. The developers do not get lots of opportunities to learn from real-data, like at SpaceX
i suppose cost is among the major reasons. The SpaceX had an objective to take the cost down which is synergetic/self-enforcing with the many tests and iterations approach. DOD is opposite - the goal for the contractors is the smallest number of tests done at the highest billed price to DOD as that maximizes the contractor's profit.
In other words, if you aren't actively using a weapon in real war, it probably will fail when you try.
Kind of like the Russian ground forces in Ukraine. They hadn't fought real ground wars in a while.
Not sure what this says about humanity. But it certainly raises questions about how to maintain a defensive force. The answer, unfortunately, might be to have a series of small wars just to keep in practice. Even then, the knowledge gained might not translate well to a large war.
Before school programs exist. Daycare exists. School does not need to start early enough for parents to get children off to school first. Folks working retail, in factories, and in health care deal with this all the time.
OpenAI's need for these types of "closed" deals is driven by the fact their technology is fundamentally dependent on data & compute infrastructure that only a few organizations in the world can afford. It doesn't matter how many white papers they publish making AI "open" if it costs $100Ms to train & deploy.
You could do more to make AI "Open" by working on semiconductors to bring design, test, and fab costs down by orders of magnitude or working on modeling which drastically reduces training & data requirements.
> "low-income, ethnic minority neighbourhoods have historically been over-policed so the data shows them as crime hotspots, leading to the deployment of more police to those areas."
This is wrong. They've been under-policed. And the unwillingness to not lie about that, let alone understand why that is, is why "predictive policing" is disliked. It's also why the rhetorical trick of "systemic racism" is necessary to elide the fact that racism is rare today and justify why politicians are attacking & dismantling functioning institutions rather than fix the underlying issue.
Does anyone seriously claim that suburbs like Beachwood, OH and Palo Alto, CA and Everett, WA would discover a bunch of undetected rapes, gun violence, robberies, and murders if they were "over-policed" like low-income black neighborhoods? No, they don't. Because that would be too silly of a claim to make directly to anyone who has lived in such a place.
There's a humane chain of logic we must follow here. Do we think slavery, red-lining, drugs & drug-enforcement, and the collapse of rising working class wages have hurt African-American well-being? Yes. Does poverty correlate with crime? Yes. Does poverty correlate with African-American neighborhoods? Yes. Ok, so we can admit that African Americans account for a hugely disproportionate amount of violent crime in the United States without disrespecting how black communities got to this point or worrying that this simple, obvious conclusion is driven by racism.
This is trivially produced from well-done statistical research. If you control for either poverty rates or crime rates, you recover the same rate of police use of lethal force for both whites and blacks.
"Oh, well, the data sets from the past may be biased with racism"
13% of the population accounts for between 40-50% of the homicides, year over year. Alright - How large do you think purely unfounded biases account for that? Half? Even then, you have both 1) A LE agencies either falsifying or mishandling data on a massive scale, a monumental scandal in itself and 2)a population accounting for 2x rather than 3-4x their expected homicide rate. Not a huge improvement. I don't feel like the claims of "warped data" deserve this much respect because the people who make them never give the same thought to the much more obvious conclusion - The data is true, but I do.
ML is disliked here because it doesn't lie. Politicians cannot torture or cajole logistic regression to lie because it doesn't have a career, it doesn't need a promotion, it just graphs the truth. But more than this, they dislike it because it indicts them for not doing more, and more meaningful and honest things, to actually improve the lot of African-Americans in this country. The first step to doing that is being honest.
Just for the record, the journalist who broke the story on Clearview noted that Clearview AI has specifically demonstrated it isn't fooled by thispersondoesnotexist.com:
They might have already scraped all of the faces on that site. They aren't generated on demand so you conceivably scrape the entire database of fake people and tell the algorithm to ignore anything matches them. Then, the algorithm would just treat any photos of a person that doesn't exist that it finds in the wild as it would if you have no profile pic. It might fool a person or an AI not trained on those pictures. Another option is to generate your own people that do not exist and use those images. This could work as long as Clearview isn't doing some sort of image analysis to look for telltale signs of AI-generated faces. You could start photoshopping fake faces onto your real pictures in an effort to blur the line between AI generated pictures and real pictures.
He thought giving them a fake face would gum up their search quality and ability to resolve him. I'm saying it would basically be a null-photo to Clearview.
It's the fact that it returned no matches, that indicates it isn't fooled. If it were fooled, it would have associated those faces with the accounts that use them (assuming anyone is using the, which they probably are).
By returning no accounts, it demonstrates their AI isn't using those faces for identification.
In that case, how about the opposite strategy? Take your own picture and a GAN with a latent space feature (i.e. a thispersondoesnotexist that lets you decide age, gender, etc.). Then set the parameters so that you get a picture of yourself. Upload this picture to social media and watch Clearview ignore it, while you still look like you to humans.
I was thinking something similar. Maybe with some randomization to it, so different profiles across (social) media wouldn't link together through Clearview et al. but still all look like you to humans.
You may be surprised to learn that your face is your least identifying trait online. You network of friends/followers/likes identifies you far more readily—even if you use a random username.[1]
Managing your privacy is a lot like CPU side channel attacks. It forces you to re-evaluate your fundamental assumptions about what information can be exploited.
These problems are not due to an "administration". The rot of American institutions is deep. The competence and coherence of the entire American civil service and civil life has fallen precipitously in the last 20 years, and, in part because of their irrational fixation on this administration, people still cannot wrap theirs head around the fact that problem is in personnel and structure.
The CDC botched the development & rollout of a pretty simple PCR assay. The CDC happily participated in the 'don't test, don't tell' cover-up of the real # of stateside cases. The CDC and FDA were in territorial pissing matches with one another around test regulation. The FDA has hindered the effective deployment of tests and therapies at every turn. The entire journalistic chattering class was lecturing the American public no more than 2 weeks ago about how over-reacting to the virus or calling it the wrong name was more dangerous than the virus itself. The American economy spent the last 3 decades moving every single manufacturing facility and shred of know-how that could make PPE, ventilators, and pharmaceutical precursors overseas to save a few pennies, and wasn't stopped by the government. And we've now learned Congress was given an accurate assessment of the pandemic threat months ago and chose to... sell their private stocks.
This crisis is not going to result in happy little vision-less "to-do list" for future bureaucrats to improve upon, it is deepening the American people's awareness that the entire bureaucracy & elite class have been shown wanting and must be replaced in their entirety by massive reform of the federal civil service.
People want a simple, tidy villain and hero story. As though everything would suddenly be solved if only their hero of choice vanquished the villain. Unfortunately, as you point out, the real problem is institutional decay.
A recent article summed this up pretty well:
"Such a mobilization failure is never an individual's fault. Rather, it reveals a hollow state. In the alphabet soup of federal agencies, there is no one with the information and authority to act on the consequences of an exponential curve...
In the middle of the 20th century, a cadre of credentialed experts was created to replace citizens. This was a mistake. The selection mechanism for entry into this cadre selects against bravery and original thinking. Experts should be consulted, but what use is an expert unwilling to consult on a grand vision? The American system of the 2020s through the city, county, state, and up to the federal level has been staffed with people who know how to speak and make themselves appear blameless, but not how to act."
There may be structural problems, but the current administration contributed significantly the poor response to this epidemic. Had they kept existing infrastructure and people in place, things could have gone significantly better.
There's a lot to be said about WH-level leaders with the authority to corral and force action down the chain. It's bad enough that the CDC and FDA screwed up, but there was no urgency from the top-down that solutions had to be rolled out in a timely matter or alternatives had to be explored even in parallel. You see the difference now, when there's a sense of urgency, and we are willing to break rules, engage lots of different groups to work on efforts in parallel, etc. None of that happens without urgency from the top.
Yeah, for me the inflection point was NOAA and hurricane Dorian. Only so many people can put their careers on the line before something breaks in an organization.
Rather, the previous administration was just more successful bringing the full weight of the media machine on turning down news of the previous H1N1 pandemic which had 2 orders of magnitudes more cases and deaths so far. https://www.businessinsider.com/coronavirus-compared-to-sars...
This current pandemic just happened to have happened outside the US so it couldn't keep the lid on the news.
> The coronavirus outbreak is more severe than the 2009 outbreak of H1N1, or swine flu. That illness infected between 700 million and 1.4 billion people worldwide but only had a mortality rate of 0.02%.
1.4 billion worldwide, not just in the United States.
The mortality rate is much worse for coronavirus and it hasn't been around since 2009 so we've yet to see how many cases and deaths occur.
Just an FYI: the mortality rate of swine flu is based on estimate of total people infected (around 60 million cdc estimate) while the mortality rate of covid is from confirmed cases as we don't have estimates of total infection with some speculating that it's 10x of confirmed cases
We know from the cruise ships that mortality is in the 0.1% - 1% ballpark. With a broken down healthcare system it may go a bit beyond 1%, but not a lot. Data from Italy shows many people who get a ventilator die anyway, so running out of them wont make the figure jump.
This so much. The system is absolutely corrupt and broken to the core. Poor leadership exacerbates the problem but it is not the fault of poor leadership. We've merely been coping with the horrible brokenness of our system for decades.
I see this logic a lot and I don’t understand it. The current administration dismantled the departments we needed, left whole organizations leaderless, and prompted the brain drain of nearly 1500 scientists from the federal government.
... yet your argument is that they are blameless in the poor performance that followed because of historical factors?
> yet your argument is that they are blameless in the poor performance that followed because of historical factors?
No, they're not blameless, they did all of those things. What is more worrying is a structure wherein actions as sweeping and dangerous as these are possible.
I see posts like this quite a bit, seemingly as a defense of the administration which is known for pushing deep cuts in various institutions, bungling messaging and/or outright lying about the state of affairs, among a litany of other issues which are exceedingly well documented.
If we were to treat the US as a business (as the President would want, apparently), poor leadership is the reason why we're going bankrupt both economically and socially. His actions are akin to cutting the QA department across your various software teams because 'their duties are redundant and can just be done by the developers instead', then encountering a crippling bug that could've been fixed by having QA at inception.
this is a ridiculous statement, you constantly refer to "him", i can only persume you are referring to our current president. You do know that the U.S. has been increasing debt since way before his tenure, right?
It largely the fault of the current leadership as well as the political party in power. In last 20 years they have destroyed institutions when in power and stopped the other political party to revive them when they were not in power. All the government lockdowns and blocks when Obama/Democratic party wanted to spend money on healthcare are there to see. Though Democrats are not blameless nor is the American public for allowing this to happen.
Spending money on healthcare wouldn't have helped. You could treble the capacity of the healthcare system and it wouldn't make that much of a difference. No system is ready for 1-3% of the population suddenly requiring weeks of time in a hospital bed.
The countries that are coping with this aren't doing so by putting everyone in great, well funded hospitals. They are avoiding people getting sick through combination of border control, cheap & quick medical testing and infectious disease specialists in key positions.
Spending money on healthcare would have helped. Actually would help now currently in the us doctors and nurses are complaining about lack of protective wear. In reality it is available but hospitals are not buying and providing them to it staff as they are expensive. Had US been investing on healthcare hospitals would not be worried about running out of funds and not protectings its doctors and nurses.
Of the two US political parties, one has an explicitly stated mission to defund, neuter, and shrink public institutions[1]. I don’t think it’s a stretch to blame an institutional crisis on those who want to take credit for the “savings” they’ve achieved by crippling those same institutions.
You are being kind. From my perspective, the ineptitude and mismanagement easily goes back 50 years, not 20.
It's sad to see so many people blinded by the hatred aimed at Trump to be completely blind to how it is we got here. A simple example from data that came out today: Governor Cuomo refused to buy 16,000 ventilators in 2015, when he was told they would be needed for an event such as what we are experiencing. Remember this is when Bill Gates was already on TED talking about the next pandemic. And so, today, Cuomo tries to blame their lack of preparedness on the federal government.
The other item you mentioned that is also right on point, is the brutal erosion of our ability to manufacture almost anything at scale. And then you have people, reporters and politicians yelling and screaming about the Trump administration not materializing masks, bed, ventilators and entire hospitals instantly out of thin air.
I mean, we barely make our own molds for plastic injection molding in the US and we are indignant because we can't spin-up industrial scale manufacturing capacity in days? It takes MONTHS, no, YEARS, to integrate some of these supply chains and produce quality product at scale.
Segments of our society, "leadership" and media are acting as if a combination of Superman and Captain Picard are going to swing into action, instantly materialize millions of products we don't have the industrial base to produce and fly around the planet at ludicrous speed in reverse to turn back time.
Well, that's not reality. Reality is we can't make shit in the US any more and it takes a tremendous amount of time to spin up production lines from nothing, particularly if we are talking about life saving devices.
Everyone needs to calm down, stop pointing fingers and find ways to contribute. As the saying goes, "United we Stand". Time to show what that really means or face failure, as the rest of that phrase predicts.
Most of my life I've been told that government is horrible, and that the most terrifying thing to hear is "I'm from the government, and I'm here to help." When an entire generation hears the demonization of civil service (though not military service), then it's no wonder that we end up with a government that can't serve us.
This will likely get downvoted, but it seems to be the most accurate explanation.
American culture is not able to understand the common good anymore. And it cannot understand the brutality of politics, nor the need to participate in it. This is the age of children of cages, forgotten in a week for the official opposition to complain about civility on Twitter. Meanwhile other Western countries burn tires and flip over cars for a thousand times less. In non Western countries, people stand up to bullets in order to complain about the government. But this country made mean people on Twitter the main issue in the election cycle, above Healthcare, War and Concentration camps.
The American public has grown soft, largely by design.
I'm going to give a very cynical response to this, but I believe all of these factors are relevant. I'm also going to be going against the grain of the political leaning of this forum. I hope that we can discuss the points where we agree and avoid getting stuck at the first point of disagreement.
Factors:
1. Typically, people who wish to be in power are not the people who really want to use power for some greater good. Police make great examples because their abuses of power are often made visible, but this issue goes all the way up to the top. To give an example from right this moment, that I'm sure withstands bipartisan scrutiny, just look at how much political posturing and hot air has stalled the Covid-19 stimulus that is currently being negotiated. [1]The last proposal from the dems included identity politics and various climate provisions. Whether you agree with the policies or not doesn't really matter in this case, what sense does it make to fight for these policies right now in this bill?
2. Our political system centralizes all decision-making power into two parties. Each party has massive influence and control, even to the point of 'rigging' their own internal election processes. As such, the average American has substantially less ability to influencer outcomes at the upper tiers of government as they often think they do. This is the reason there was such distrust of parties by the founding fathers. The solution to this is to either have unlimited parties (requires a different voting system, of which there are several viable options) or to have no parties at all. Then there is a need to institute concepts like a public veto/vote for when things go haywire (think Brexit, but ideally without the intentional political incompetence).
3. Removing those in power is a scary affair. If your government decides to do heinous (or criminally stupid) things and there's no 'political will' at the top to change course, the people must intervene. How much peaceful recourse is there? There are finite 'legal' moves to be made, and they all take time. Once you run out of those options or time, the only remaining choices are 'illegal' and thus risky to individuals - and therefore require large groups of people to organize.
This is a problem understood by our founders, evident in their writings. It's also been commonly addressed since the 1800s in sayings like: [2]"There are four boxes to be used in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order."
4. Both parties in the United States, despite their protestations to the contrary, have proven to have corruption up to their highest levels. [3]Both Democrats and Republicans dumped stock running up to the current crisis - after they were briefed about the risks. There's also intense 'fighting' over entirely manufactured issues. [4]One example I use often is "assault weapons," which are used to commit murder less than half as often as people's fists. It's hard to even imagine how much progress could be made if the same political energy were expended on more impactful social issues. (Targeting poverty which leads to desperation and organized crime might be a good start).
I would argue Congress’ power is weak compared to the career civil servants who decide whether policy should actually be implemented or not. Popular politics serves as a complete distraction while unelected bureaucrats make most of the decisions behind the scenes.
> I'm also going to be going against the grain of the political leaning of this forum. I hope that we can discuss the points where we agree and avoid getting stuck at the first point of disagreement.
I agree 100% with the points you made. These are important points to understand, each with its own set of tentacles and consequences. It is also true that HN (and other fora frequented by a younger generation) tends to lean heavily towards an ideological framework that, from my perspective, tends to be the result of the intense indoctrination our educational institutions have been shoveling for decades.
> 1. Typically, people who wish to be in power are not the people who really want to use power for some greater good.
This is universally true anywhere in the world. Politics is not a profession where altruism reigns. Even with Trump, this is only my opinion, I believe he decided to run because Obama put him down and diminished him in a very public way during that famous WH dinner. Once in the race, and particularly once he won, he clearly decided to do a good job. He has a record for being the only politician who has, so far, delivered on everything he promised during the campaign. Is he altruistic? Well, no, I don't think so. He is as self serving as anyone else, but at least he is (was?) getting important things done.
> does it make to fight for these policies right now in this bill?
I was absolutely baffled by the strategic blunder. Is Pelosi so powerful that nobody dared go against her? What they did is nothing more than sheer madness, not to mention the disgusting stench of using a national emergency of this magnitude to strong-arm the other side into adding irrelevant items to an economic rescue plan.
> 2. Our political system centralizes all decision-making power into two parties.
I've been saying for a long time that our system of government is obsolete. It had a good run, but this makes no sense. A simple example pulled out of the current environment is the gate-keeping of medical decisions by a bunch of 70 year old lawyers in the Senate and a hodge-podge of people in the House. To me it would make sense to decentralize this power and, effectively, have "Vice Presidents" and teams who are not political parties to manage important areas of our country. In other words, you would have a VP of Health and an executive team under him/her. The fact that someone like Trump or Pelosi have power over medical/healthcare policy and actions is a failure of the system.
> soap, ballot, jury, and ammo
The second option should be the most powerful one. However, as we have seen both in the US and elsewhere, the masses are easily manipulated, which can lead to bad decisions. My canonical example of this is the whole Bernie business. In a rational society he would have been laughed out of the political stage decades ago. Yet, here he is. I am not sure how to counter irrationality other than to somehow push hard to change our system of education for greater balance and critical thinking, a task that would not deliver results for a decade or two.
This is an odd conclusion to draw. You're saying that people call the government incompetent, and now they're demonstrating incompetence, and you're convinced that the causality flows from the former to the latter?
As an external observer, I think it's not so much about whether the current US government is incompetent or not, although of course that does play some role. The key point is that a large fraction of USians have a purely ideological belief that government cannot ever be good.
As a consequence, too large a fraction of the population and of political leadership don't even try to make government institutions better, and are instead actively standing in the way of people who do try. Instead, they end up dismantling institutions or making them worse when they fail to dismantle them. (Note that this is the semi-official policy of one of your major parties. They call it "starve the beast".)
And yes, this is genuinely different from other countries. Over here, while trust in institutions is often lower than it would ideally be, the vast majority consensus at least of political and media leadership is that government can and should be good. As a consequence there's a significant number of people over here genuinely trying to make better government happen, to at least some success.
It's really no surprise that US government is so dysfunctional, and it's entirely self-inflicted by bad culture.
> As an external observer, I think it's not so much about whether the current US government is incompetent or not, although of course that does play some role. The key point is that a large fraction of USians have a purely ideological belief that government cannot ever be good.
I'd be wary of outgroup homogeneity bias here. I'm a fairly big-government guy; there are plenty of things the market is sorely ill-equipped to handle where active, competent govt can do tons of good.
But unlike most people on the big-govt side of the discussion, I don't think that it's blasphemy to question why the US govt is so especially incompetent in certain areas (infra construction is a glaring example, etc). Waving it away as "they don't have enough funding to do good things" is undetermined, the kind of answer that people reach for because it seems obvious, not because it's correct (or rather, complete).
While I've decided that big govt is, in many cases, worth the inefficiency, it's still worth asking _why_ it's inefficient and whether we can improve this. I also don't begrudge some very smart friends of mine who've decided that its inefficiency means that decentralizing power is a better path forward. I can guarantee you that all the people I've talked to who feel that way have given it far more thought than the simple-minded stereotypes the GP comment engages in.
The role of the federal government is to be our insurer and to eat risk. Unlike state governments, there is no balanced budget requirement. Blaming Cuomo -- ie all 50 individual states, with not only currently varying populations, but populations and incomes and risks that vary over time -- for not independently staffing up and buying equipment to be prepared against all eventualities is silly.
Second, Trump diddled for 8-12 weeks to start manufacturing things. People are screaming because the Chinese government confirmed by Dec 31 that they had cases of the virus. That means the NSA had almost certainly been hearing about it for a couple weeks. Given the worlds' experience with SARS and MERS, that was the time to get serious.
What was possible with this warning? Taiwan, for example, used this time to create 32 new production lines [1] for masks.
Later, there were classified briefings that Republicans like Senator Burr were privately warning businesses about. While lying to the public and using the warning period not to get serious about dealing with the pandemic but to save money.
We had 8-12 weeks of warning, and Trump either took no serious action or deliberately delayed decisive action to start figuring out supply lines of respirators or ventilators. We had, to use your phrase, "MONTHS" -- actually a quarter of a year -- and Trump squandered them.
He invoked the Defense Production Act YESTERDAY for god's sake. The time to do that was when it became clear containment had failed. Ie sometime around mid-January.
ps -- we make plenty of stuff in the US. in reality, the US is the second largest manufacturer in the world after China. That's not to say that manufacturing isn't declining in the united states, but to pretend the enormous set of US manufacturers doesn't exist is not grounded in facts.
See also BLS 51-4111 -- 72k employed in the US in tool & die manufacturing.
All correct. Also, Snowflakes think the country can run all shut down, but not if you want food on your table. We have to get back going, take our hits, and survive. The alternative is worse.
Yes, it's not just the current heel in the top job, but there were a lot of unforced errors owing to his team's problems.
Trump's a germaphobe, & a deregulator, & big on border security.
But he left the pandemic office in the White House go unfilled, & his CDC eliminated an in-China monitoring position, & he proposed additional cuts.
After initially considering people like FDA critic & aggressive deregulator Balaji Srinivasan as FDA Chair, that was ignored as a priority – & FDA delays in approving alternate, distributed diagnostics added weeks or months of delay to testing capabilities. Even now FDA inspection delays have medical supplies from reliable, longtime suppliers held from delivery. The steps the FDA has finally taken are waivers they could have granted by administrative fiat months ago. And key discoveries of community-spread in the US required researchers to disregard CDC guidance. (The agency designed to sound the alarm had instead removed the batteries from the smoke detector!)
And while countries with a sense of seriousness about foreign disease threats have closely monitored visitors by origin-of-travel, recent countries visited, and fever-monitoring from early-on, even when Italy was in full outbreak there were no health-screenings or fever-monitoring on US arrivals from there. Trump responded late, with crude bans by entire country-of-origin, even when those countries have no greater prevalence-of-community-spread than the US itself.
So yes, the rot is deep and crosses multiple administrations. But the current Administration is also especially inept, even in areas like disease, deregulation, and borders where they've touted their vigilance.
More to the point, detecting a stealth aircraft is very different from shooting at a stealth aircraft.
This radar would likely not have the location accuracy of where exactly the B-2 was to accurately engage it with a missile. Your accuracy would be limited by the rate of RF pings the B-2 is putting off, and then the margin-of-error of these RF waves and receiver.
This is one difference between the B-2 and stealth fighters like the F-22 & F-35: The latter are not necessarily designed to be invisible, only impossible to reliably hit. Their shapes and radar-absorbent paint deflect, diffuse, or absorb the high-frequency bands used in the terminal guidance of missiles. So they are hard to target. But they can be picked up at range by long-distance, long-wavelength VHF and UHF radars. These frequencies, used in early-warning radars, have too low-optical resolution* however to be any good at aiming guns or missiles. The B-2's "flying wing" shape is able to not-interfere with these wavelengths though, and hence hides from them. In that sense, this is somewhat interesting, if neutered for the reasons you mention.
*You can only localize the detection to a few sq hundred meters, even kms.
Not to sound skeptical, but I've seen some stuff Ratheon was putting out at least 10-15 years ago and I think it had some pretty impressive optical sensors. Are we including the various infrared frequencies?
Optical and infrared sensors have improved a lot and can be a useful supplement but due to limited field of view and interference from weather you generally can't count on them for primary search. Unless the target is really time sensitive, B-2 mission planners try to fly at night in bad weather when those sensors are seriously degraded.
I doubt it. If people are able to photograph dark birds at night, I see no reason why a missile with much bigger optics and more efficient (wider band and monochrome) sensors wouldn't be able to find a plane.
A lot of Russian planes have Electro Optical systems for targeting. Usually they are IR based locking onto hot engines and such like a typical Fox 2 (Heat seeking missile) Range of IR tracking is pretty small for head on planes and more importantly your missile needs to know where to look in the first place to acquire the target. Also stealth aircraft have reduced heat signatures making it harder to pick them out against the background. Also you have problems with determining contrast against the background due to diffraction.
Essentially the passive array in this article is in the class of "Early Warning Radar" which is used to alert Combat Air Patrol aircraft and SAM sites where to start looking for the contact.
If you wanted to use this with a networked radar guided missile you would have problems with terminal guidance. If the missile could acquire the target as it came into radar range for the radar cross section of a stealth aircraft, there is very little chance it would have the energy to track the target. It would essentially need to make a right turn midair to track on the target. All the while the missile's radar will be making the plane's RWR light up like a Christmas tree.
Recently in DC they detected a plane that did not respond to warnings. The optical system then also detected the plane and panic ensued. Problem was the radar system was showing a phantom and the optical system saw a nearby plane and thought it was confirming the phantom.
Hopefully the US has learned something in the past 32 years since that incident. It seems that even our allegedly sophisticated adversaries haven’t in the present time.
At least the Russian team was merely operating a Buk in a clandestine op in the middle of a field in Ukraine (and the US ship was technically in Iranian territorial waters in 1988 during an actual war), I’m curious what Iran’s excuse was shooting it down in their own property?... maybe we’ll learn more about it eventually. Bellingcat was able to provide the actual team member names and wiretaps of the Russian soldiers.
All the stealth craft also included some IR avoidance as a matter of course, IR seeking missiles existed at the time these were designed. It's unclear if a more modern missile would still be sensitive enough to lock on and avoid chasing flares.
The techniques they used to decrease the IR visibility are pretty neat. The engine nozzles are over the wings and there are a lot of airflow tricks used to cool it down faster so from below there might not be enough plume to track from a surface launched missile coming, from below at least.
Conventional IR countermeasures (spatial, spectral etc.) really are becoming a thing of the past.
When you’re talking about terminal IR guidance on any modern missile, generally the IRCCM will be so good that the probability of defeat with a flare cocktail is below an acceptable risk threshold. DIRCM is the current answer to this problem and—to tie this in with the parent comment—renders terminal IR guidance much less effective than MMW or other RF guidance.
And also, searching the top speed of a B-2 at 628mph, if detected at 150 miles out only gives them 14 minutes. Which is both a lot, or a little. Depending on how prepared for action someone is.
Well since there are so few B2 and they are essentially irreplaceable, I imagine standard wartime doctrine for the adversary would be to ignore target protection as a concern and go straight for the plane even at the risk of losing several of yours by flying over territory you don't control.
In reality, what would make a difference is coordinating communications and decision making.
Honestly, it's just a subtle misunderstanding due to how Anduril's product path blurs the lines between the products they sell now, and the structure of their company & goals long-term.
Long-term, Anduril wants to be a defense co. that bids for and wins contracts with the Department of Defense and challenges the monopolies of Lockheed Martin et al. To do this, they had to find an MVP that let them develop technology & make money in a way that could be leveraged toward that goal in the future.
Border security works well for this, because a lot of the software & hardware they will build here is dual-use for defense and border security. Furthermore, selling technology to the border patrol is probably the closest sales problem in the world to selling to the U.S. military - Same regulatory framework, sales cycle, Congressional lobbying landscape, even product review. It's a stepping stone to selling full-blown defense tech, hence the mish-mash of terms.
