We learned that you had to sneak right up on it and shoot it down before it had a chance to maneuver

Friday, February 7th, 2025

Area 51 by Annie JacobsenOne scorching-hot morning in August of 1966, Annie Jacobsen explains (in Area 51), an Iraqi Air Force colonel named Munir Redfa climbed into his MiG-21 fighter jet at an air base in southern Iraq and headed toward Baghdad:

Redfa then made a sudden turn to the west and began racing toward Jordan. Iraqi ground control notified Redfa that he was off course.

“Turn back immediately,” he was told. Instead, Redfa began flying in a zigzag pattern. Recognizing this as an evasive maneuver, an Iraqi air force commander told Colonel Redfa if he didn’t turn back at once he would be shot down. Defying orders, Redfa switched off his radio and began flying low to the ground. To avoid radar lock, in some places he flew as low as seven hundred and fifty feet. Once he was at altitude, Redfa flew over Turkey, then toward the Mediterranean. But his final destination was the enemy state of Israel. There, one million U.S. dollars was waiting for him in a bank account in Tel Aviv.

Six hundred miles to the west, the head of the Israeli air force, Major General Mordechai Hod, waited anxiously for Munir Redfa’s MiG to appear as a blip on his own radar screen. When it finally appeared, General Hod scrambled a group of delta-wing Mirage fighters to escort Redfa to a secret base in the Negev Desert. It was a groundbreaking event. Israel was now the first democratic nation to have in its possession a Russian-made MiG-21, the top gun fighter not just in Russia and its Communist proxies but throughout the Arab world.

[…]

For years, Mossad searched for a possible candidate for defection. Finally, in early 1966, they found a man who fit the profile in Munir Redfa, a Syrian Christian who had previously expressed feelings of persecution as a religious minority in a squadron of Muslims. Mossad dispatched a beautiful female intelligence agent to Baghdad on a mission. The agent worked the romance angle first, luring Redfa to Paris with the promise of sex. There, she told Redfa the truth about what she was after. In return for an Iraqi air force MiG, Redfa would be paid a million dollars and given a new identity and a safe haven for himself and his family. Redfa agreed.

[…]

What Israel learned from Munir Redfa’s MiG ultimately allowed them to overpower the combined air forces of Syria, Egypt, and Jordan during the Six-Day War.

[…]

Israel was playing the weak card in the hope of winning American military support. Helms also said that he’d recently met with a senior Israeli official whose visit he saw as “a clear portent that war might come at any time.” Coupled with Angleton’s assessment, Helms said this meant most likely in a matter of days. When Israel launched an attack three days later, Helms’s status with President Johnson went through the roof. “The subsequent accuracy of this prediction established Helms’s reputation in the Johnson White House,” wrote a CIA historian.

The story of Redfa’s defection made international headlines when it happened, in 1966. But what didn’t make the news was what happened once Israel finished with the MiG: the Soviet-made fighter was shipped to Area 51.

[…]

Munir Redfa’s MiG had been nicknamed the doughnut because the jet fighter’s nose had a round opening in it, like a doughnut’s. It was the first advanced Soviet fighter jet ever to set its wheels down on U.S. soil.

MiG-21 Nose

“We broke the MiG down into each of its individual pieces. Pieces of the cockpit, the gyros, oscillograph, fuel flow meter, radio… everything. Then we put it back together. The MiG didn’t have computers or fancy navigation equipment.”

[…]

“Breaking it down was the first step in understanding the aircraft. But it was by sending the MiG flying that we really figured out how it maneuvered so damn fast,” Barnes says.

[…]

“We learned that you had to sneak right up on it and shoot it down before it had a chance to maneuver. That was the key. Get it on the first chance you get. There were no second chances with a MiG,” Barnes explains.

[…]

“Since no spare parts were available, ground crews had to reverse engineer the components and make new ones from raw materials,” Barnes says. “But when both phases were over, the technical and the tactical ones, we’d unlocked the secrets of the MiG.”

[…]

“The fact that we had a MiG at Area 51 infuriated the Russians,” explains Barnes. “They retaliated by sending more spy satellites overhead at Area 51, sometimes as often as every forty-five minutes.”

[…]

“We were pinned down,” says Barnes. For weeks on end, the Special Projects Group couldn’t turn on a single radar system; the Russians were monitoring the area that intensely. Barnes and his group passed the time by playing mind games with the Soviets. They painted strange shapes on the tarmac, “funny-looking impossible aircraft,” which they then heated up with portable heaters to confuse the Soviets who were shooting infrared satellite pictures of the work going on there. “We got a kick out of imagining what the Russians thought of our new airplanes,” Barnes says.

[…]

The ultrasecret MiG program at Area 51 gave birth to the Top Gun fighter-pilot school, a fact that would remain secret for decades. Officially called the United States Navy Fighter Weapons School, the program was established a year after the first MiG arrived, in March of 1969, and based out of Miramar, California. Instructor pilots who had fought mock air battles over Groom Lake against Munir Redfa’s MiG began training Navy pilots for sorties against Russian MiGs over Vietnam. When these Top Gun–trained Navy pilots resumed flying in Southeast Asia, the results were radically different than the deadly nine-to-one ratio from before. The scales had tipped. Now, American pilots would begin shooting down North Vietnamese pilots at a ratio of thirteen to one. The captured Soviet-made MiG-21 Fishbed proved to be an aerial warfare coup for the United States. And what followed was a quid pro quo. To thank the Israelis for supplying the United States with the most prized and unknowable aircraft in the arsenal of its archnemesis, America began to supply Israel with jet fighters to assist Israel in keeping its rivals at bay.

Posted in Policy, Technology, War, Weapons | 1 Comment »

The Lancet operates in a hunter-killer team

Friday, January 3rd, 2025

Back in November, David Hambling noted that Russian Lancet strikes had fallen off:

The Lancet is a long-range killer, striking at distances of over 25 miles and with a shaped-charge warhead capable of knocking out tanks. It has been notably effective in damaging Ukrainian artillery, as the drone can pursue moving targets. But the number of strikes recorded by Russian OSINT site Lostarmour – which has a semi-official role providing data to Lancet makers ZALA – has been falling, from 180 in August to 81 in September, 100 in October and, with more than half the month gone, just 24 in November so far.

The interceptors are not bringing down many Lancets: instead they are taking out the reconnaissance and communication assets which enable them to find targets.

The Lancet operates in a hunter-killer team with ZALA reconnaissance drones. These with survey an area and identify and locate a target. Once this is confirmed, the Lancet is launched. The reconnaissance drone may also act as a flying radio relay, making the Lancet more resistant to jamming. It will observe the strike, and carry out post-strike damage assessment to determine whether to send a follow-up attack. In many cases the LostArmour videos include multiple strikes against the same target until it is destroyed.

Posted in Technology, War, Weapons | 2 Comments »

How to armor a human body in a rigid substance is an exceedingly solved problem

Saturday, December 14th, 2024

The problem with sci-fi body armor, Bret Devereaux notes, is that how to armor a human body in a rigid substance is an exceedingly solved problem, but most futuristic ‘hardsuits’ utilize little of the design language of those historical efforts:

Whereas fictional armors are often shaped through a kind of evolution whereby costume designers, artists and animators see each other’s costume ideas and iterate on them, armor development responds (within the limits of the physical materials available) not to other armor design, but to the demands of the human body (you need to be able to bend and move and armor needs to be of a weight a human can wear) and to the threats the armor is meant to defeat.

[…]

Armor works largely by converting various kinds of piercing or slashing attacks into blunt trauma distributed over the widest possible part of the body. And that in turn is part of the advantage of using rigid materials in armor construction.

[…]

A rigid material can spread out the energy of a weapon impact over a large surface; because assuming it remains rigid the entire armor component moves from the impact, contacting the body across a much larger area. The power of distributing impact energy in this way is pretty stark. A 50J impact concentrated into a very small, sharp impact zone (like the tip of a spear or an arrowhead) can easily produce lethal wounds. By contrast 200J applied across your entire chest is something you’ll certainly notice, but probably won’t cause any permanent injury. Indeed, as modern body armors show, impacts upwards of two-thousand joules (the energy delivery of many modern rifle rounds) is quite survivable if spread over enough of the body. So rigid elements (be that a breastplate or, as in modern armor, something like rigid plate inserts) can be of tremendous value precisely because they’re rigid and thus spread out the energy of impact.

[…]

Thicker armor means more weight, which adds up fairly rapidly, while more complete protection around joints means reductions in mobility. So an armorer has to think pretty hard about the tradeoffs between mobility, weight and protection. And one of the key questions here is, quite simply, “where is an opposing blow most likely to land or be most dangerous?”

[…]

By contrast, the threat profile of gunpowder warfare is slightly but importantly different. On the one hand it is a lot harder to armor against bullets because they arrive with much more energy. And I want to stress: much more energy. For a sword or spear swung by human arms, the upper limits6 are around 130J, though most blows will be much weaker than this. Arrows, as we’ve noted, top out around the same energy at launch but fall off somewhat in flight. By contrast, musket bullets can arrive with many hundreds of joules of energy and modern rifle rounds can deliver in the neighborhood of 2,000J of energy on impact. So armor that is trying to stop such a round has to be able to absorb a lot more energy and successfully spread it out over more of the defender’s surface.

The other factor is that, whereas melee strikes originate at the shoulders but can be rising strikes (‘uppercuts’) or falling strikes or horizontal strikes, bullets and other direct-fire weapons (this would be, for instance, equally true of directed energy weapons) fly very fast on relatively flat trajectories, which means the threat is mostly to the front of the body.

[…]

Consequently, whereas armor against contact weapons tends to want fairly complete coverage of the torso (including the sides and the tops of the shoulders), armor against bullets (and other missile weapons) is much more concerned with covering the vertical surfaces of the torso and is willing to compromise armor on the shoulders and even leave gaps in protection, if that means achieving a favorable balance of coverage and weight.

[…]

The first solution to the problem of how to use a rigid material to armor the body is of course to simply armor the parts of the body that don’t bend and then use some other material to protect the parts that do. Archaic Greek ‘bell’ cuirasses and later Greek and Roman muscle cuirasses take this approach, with the cuirass terminating at the hips and hanging leather strips, called pteryges, hanging down to cover the rest of the hips, groin and upper legs. But this is not exactly an ideal solution, as it sacrifices a lot of coverage.

[…]

The earliest of these articulation solutions is scale armor, by which we mean an armor composed of a lot of small rigid scales (metal or hardened leather, typically) which are fixed to backing material (textile or leather), so that they hang down. The scales overlap, which presents a solid metal face to the enemy, but since they move independently, little mobility is lost, allowing a scale coat to extend down past the waist and even cover the legs. The weakness of the approach, however, is that the scales are only anchored to the backing material at the top; there’s not much to stop a blade or spear-tip from sliding up one scale and beneath another, thus penetrating the armor. That’s less of a concern for something like an arrow-strike (which is going to be descending at least somewhat when it arrives) but against an opponent with a sword or dagger in close combat, that is a very real weakness.

A way to solve that weakness is to connect the scales to each other rather than to the backing, so that an opponent cannot slide a weapon underneath them or flip up a scale to render the opponent vulnerable. That solution — small metal plates connected to each other, rather than a backing — we call lamellar armor and it was very common in a wide range of cultures, but it has very little purchase in modern fantasy or science fiction armor designs, I think primarily because it was not included in the Dungeons and Dragons armor system. Nevertheless, lamellar armor was quite common in a wide range of cultures: we see it in the Near East, in Europe, in China and in Japan. The rigidity of the overall armor for lamellar varies based on how the plates are connected together (which you can see quite clearly in Japanese armor, in which a single set of armor often includes both rigid surfaces and articulation both using lamellar, connected more or less rigidly). In Europe, we see a variation on this concept, the brigandine (also underused in fantasy settings) where the metal plates are riveted through each other and a textile or leather backing.

But of course the solution we’re most interested in is plate armor, where a set of armor (a ‘harness’) is composed of a set of articulating plates which both provide a rigid protection to the wearer but also articulate where the wearer needs them to bend. Now going through all of the different methods late medieval plate armor uses to allow the armor to articulate would run beyond the scope of this post, but the relevant part here is the way that plate armor articulates over the torso, broadly speaking. The key components here are the cuirass, composed of a breastplate and a backplate, which covers the upper-half of the torso; this component is generally entirely rigid over that surface because the human body doesn’t bend there much either (on account of the rib-cage).

Below the cuirass, often directly attached to it, is a component called faulds. This consists of a set of articulating ‘lames’ (horizontal strips of armor) connected via leather straps or sometimes sliding rivets so that the lames can telescope into each other to enable the user to bend at the waist or raise their legs or even sit down. Faulds usually extend over the hips (sometimes only on the front) and a bit of the upper legs but occasionally run down as far as the knees. Then in many armors, an additional pair of metal plates hang down from the faulds to cover the upper legs called tassets.

Above the cuirass, we have pauldrons or spaulders (we needn’t here get into the differences), which protect the shoulders and upper arms. These are structured with a shoulder ‘cop’ — a dome-shaped metal piece — covering the shoulders, to which were attached a series of descending lames (articulated the same way the faulds would be) to apply coverage to the upper arms. Crucially, these pieces generally attach to the cuirass (though spaulders often also attach to the upper-arm armor called the rerebrace) rather than just to the upper arms, because as you will recall protecting the top of the shoulder is really quite important. Indeed, even a casual look through ancient and medieval armor will quickly reveal that this armor tends to be the thickest on the shoulder: Early mail armor often featured a second layer of mail to cover the shoulders, for instance; for some medieval armor, a mail coif or aventail also provided a layer of protection over the mail covering the shoulder.

The key advantage of this setup is that by terminating the solid form of the cuirass at the ‘natural waist’ (where the body is thinnest) the cuirass allows the wearer to bend and rotate at the waist, while the faulds, with their telescoping design, allow the wearer to bend down at the waist, raise their legs or sit. Likewise, the segmented, articulated construction of the pauldron both protects the shoulder, but also allows the arms to be raised.

Posted in Media, War, Weapons | 2 Comments »

In the majority of cases, not only was the FPV not downed, but even when it was damaged, the system kept flying as the shot was too weak

Thursday, December 12th, 2024

The Ukrainian Special Forces Command recently recommended placing a dedicated shooter at the back of every military vehicle near the frontline as a desperate defense against small drones:

According to Bradley, hobbyist quadcopter drones, like those made by Chinese maker DJI, tend to have a body made out of thin plastic as well as rigid but flimsy propellers in order to keep their weight down. That makes them “very easy” to damage with widely available 12g sporting rounds, he added.

In contrast, first-person view drones are generally built with thick carbon fiber frames and softer plastic propellers more resistant to impact, reflecting their heritage as machines designed for high-speed racing. Sporting ammunition typically cannot damage FPV sufficiently at almost any range, according to Bradley.

“Drones require more energy on target when they are in the air,” he explained. “When they are hit they simply move as they have very little inertia — the movement robs the pellets of kinetic energy, rather like punching something in zero gravity, less energy is transferred to target as it is used up moving it backward.”

The Ukrainian Third Assault Brigade demonstrated these challenges as part of an experimental shooting conducted earlier this month, simulating an FPV drone attack to test which kind of bullet is most effective. Soldiers compared shooting standard cartridges and specific anti-drone ammunition using different types of guns, including shotguns.

In the majority of cases, not only was the FPV not downed, but even when it was damaged, the system kept flying as the shot was too weak. In the one instance where the target was hit with an anti-drone charge, it crashed and caught fire near the shooter, barely missing him.

Sweden’s Norma has developed a specialized 12-gauge shotgun cartridge, the AD-LER (Anti-Drone Long Effective Range), to combat FPV drones:

The creators ultimately selected #6 shot with a 2.75 mm diameter, which provided an optimal balance between shot dispersion and kinetic impact.

[…]

Developed as a result, the AD-LER cartridge contains 350 tungsten pellets, weighing a total of 34 grams, and can deliver effective fire up to 60 meters. For testing, they chose the Benelli M4 Drone Guardian shotgun with a special barrel choke.

Of course, tungsten #6 birdshot is already on the market. Tungsten has the density of lead, without being toxic, which is why it’s now used to hunt waterfowl — and it’s harder than steel, which is why it’s now used to hunt drones, too.

Posted in War, Weapons | 11 Comments »

Long Range Maneuvering Projectile

Monday, December 9th, 2024

General Atomics’ Long Range Maneuvering Projectile is a 155-mm artillery round with wings — that the company claims can hit a moving target 120 kilometers away, in a GPS-denied environment:

To strike targets at ranges over double, and in some cases triple, of existing base bleed and rocket-assisted projectiles, LRMP will deploy wings. According to Forney, using existing propulsion methods would “make it too complex,” so the design examined General Atomics’ prior work designing the MQ-9 Reaper and MQ-1C Grey Eagle drones. LRMP’s sensors and electronics were also derived from the company’s hypersonics and railgun programs.

“Where we ended up was, let’s develop a projectile that will launch out of a barrel, a standard 155 mm, No separate gunpowder, whatever bag of gunpowder there is, we’ll use that as an explosive to launch the system,” said Forney. General Atomics’ experiences in designing electronics to withstand the forces sustained by hypersonics and railgun projectiles.

Long Range Maneuvering Projectile

Encased within a discarding sabot to protect LRMP’s wings and internals during firing, the round will reach its apogee of around 40,000 to 45,000 feet and deploy its wings. From there, the round will glide, and maneuver, to its target. From a 2023 interview, Naval News understands that this maneuvering capability could be used to conduct “endgame maneuvers” in its terminal engagement phase.

Regarding the unusual shape of LRMP, the company claimed that the design enhances the round’s precision and range. “Our projectile is not round. As you can see, it’s what’s called a rouleaux triangle, very close to a rule of triangle. So those triangular edges allow us to have more controllability and more lift to help us achieve that 120-kilometer range,” said Forney.

With recent lessons from the Russian Invasion of Ukraine in mind, Forney highlighted that LRMP does not rely on Global Positioning System guidance. Instead, the company is currently developing an “alternate guidance system” that relies on machine learning and camera systems within the projectile. The model of LRMP displayed at AUSA contains two lenses, one on the nose and another oriented downward. “We have multiple seekers, camera systems on the projectile so that we can see ahead, we can see down, and we’ll get to target,” said Forney. He also claimed that the seeker would draw on lessons from the company’s work on the Vintage Racer program, which supposedly looked to deploy a loitering system from a hypersonic missile over a target area.

Posted in Technology, War, Weapons | 2 Comments »

It was risky to break cover to fire the weapon when it might take five or even 10 shots to get the burst

Thursday, December 5th, 2024

Logan Nye was an Army journalist and paratrooper in the 82nd Airborne Division, where he got to see the experimental XM-25 grenade-launcher in action:

I was a young public affairs sergeant assigned to an airborne brigade combat team, and we had one Stryker battalion attached to us that got the XM25 Counter Defilade Target Engagement (CDTE) System, commonly known as the “Punisher.” It was similar to the SSRS, but it carried a smaller round at 25mm or .98-caliber, closer to the Bolter. When it worked, it really worked: Shooters used a laser to gauge distance to a target, told the weapon how much farther the target was behind the cover, then fired. The round flew past the cover, detonated at the specified distance and generally ruined people’s days.

But it was expensive; each round cost $1,000 and was expected to drop to $35 or so in full production. And the system frequently failed. I photographed a sergeant major firing it in a “familiarization shoot” and something like eight rounds failed in a row. A military police soldier and I slowly counted the shots as I took photos, marking each time that another two weeks of our pay had gone downrange and failed to explode.

It was worse on patrols, where troops couldn’t count on the weapon in tough fights. It was risky to break cover to fire the weapon when it might take five or even 10 shots to get the burst. They obviously tried, but the troops in contact reports would come across the brigade chat system, saying that they’d expended 10 or 20 rounds for zero enemy casualties. It’s no wonder the Army eventually abandoned the CDTE effort in 2018.

The new SSRS looks less complicated:

Key to the Barrett SSRS’s design is its user-friendly, assault-rifle-based structure. The weapon features a butt stock at the rear, an [sic] five rounds ammunition magazine in the center, and a barrel length of 305mm. The grenade launcher is compact and versatile with an overall length of 861mm and weighing just 6.3kg. It can fire various ammunition, including airburst rounds, giving soldiers a crucial advantage on the battlefield.

Barrett SSRS

A big, heavy, unreliable weapon has multiple strikes against it, but a small, light, reliable version might hit the sweet spot, where its small projectile can be launched at high enough velocity for accurate more-or-less direct fire, but the payload is big enough to kill nearby gunmen with a not-quite-direct hit.

Posted in War, Weapons | 2 Comments »

I feel like Geoffrey Boothroyd, compelled to write to Ian Fleming about Bond’s choice in firearms

Wednesday, November 20th, 2024

Fourth Protocol Audiobook by Frederick ForsythWhen I recently listened to the audiobook of Frederick Forsyth’s The Fourth Protocol — primarily out of curiosity about the fictitious Manifesto for the British Revolution — I couldn’t help but notice that the Soviet operator in Britain, when finally cornered, reached for his Sako target pistol, which was set up to use the largest of the three calibers it could chamber.

What calibers were those? Certainly .22 Long Rifle has been the standard for international competition for a long, long time, so what other calibers would it be built for?

Between 1976 and 1988, Sako produced an autoloading match pistol, the “.22-32″, then “.22-32 New Model”, then “Triace”, three versions of the same handgun, slightly modified. It was chambered for .22 Short, .22 Long Rifle and .32 Smith & Wesson Wadcutter, with conversions (barrels, slides and magazines) for each caliber. It is suitable for ISSF (then “UIT”) sport pistol events (Rapid Fire Pistol, Standard Pistol, 25m Pistol, and Centerfire Pistol events).

The .32 is popular in Centerfire Pistol competition, which is not an Olympic event.

.22 Short is the original metallic cartridge, and it has its uses:

The .22 Short was popularly used in shooting galleries at fairs and arcades; several rifle makers produced “gallery” models for .22 Short exclusively. Due to its low recoil and good inherent accuracy, the .22 Short was used for the Olympic 25 meter rapid fire pistol event until 2004, and they were allowed in the shooting part of modern pentathlon competitions before they switched to air pistols.

So the bad guy relied on a huge, hard-to-conceal, crazy-looking, .32-caliber, low-capacity pistol?

I feel like Geoffrey Boothroyd, compelled to write to Ian Fleming about Bond’s choice in firearms.

Posted in Media, Weapons | No Comments »

The next Pearl Harbor attack will most likely involve long-range precision fires

Thursday, October 24th, 2024

Next War by John AntalJohn Antal opens Next War with a look at the failure of imagination that left America vulnerable to Imperial Japan’s surprise attack and the imaginative planning that went into it — as well as some imaginative planning that did not:

With his usual thoroughness, Genda reported the highest dive-bombing hit rates in the past seven months of practice, by the Japanese Navy’s best carrier pilots, is only 40 percent.

[…]

“There is more than one path to get to the top of the mountain,” Yamamoto replies.

[…]

“The only reason a warrior is alive is to fight, and the only reason a warrior fights is to win. Here, the path of life and death, victory and defeat, is clear.”

[…]

“It will take only six days to adjust the aircraft and we can do this while we are underway. With this new means, we will destroy the four American aircraft carriers, eight battleships, two heavy cruisers and the six light cruisers in the first wave. Conventional attacks will focus on attacking enemy airfields and destroying American planes on the ground. The second wave will target the dockyards and oil facilities. The third wave will involve conventional bombing and will hit any remaining targets.”

[…]

“We will lose 80 of our 353 aircraft through direct strikes,” Genda replies. “Ten percent more if the enemy antiaircraft and their pursuit planes are alert … but I believe we will achieve surprise, so I estimate our losses at 107 aircraft.”

[…]

“Yes, it is the only way to annihilate our enemy with one swift blow. It is a hard choice, I know, but these strikes will be like a Divine Wind that will blow the Americans from the Pacific.”

[…]

“Put your new plan into motion. We will hit the Americans and destroy their power in the Pacific with one strike of the sword. We will use your 80 kamikaze aircraft to change the face of war.”

[…]

The Japanese would only resort to kamikaze attacks in 1944, when their strategic military situation was dire, as they grasped for any means to strike back and delay the inevitable tide of defeat.

[…]

But what if Yamamoto’s forces had conducted the kamikaze strike strategy at Pearl Harbor in 1941, when the US Navy was much smaller and unprepared for such a ferocious assault? What if the Japanese had realized they had to play their one roll of the dice differently?

[…]

The next Pearl Harbor attack will most likely involve long-range precision fires: missiles, unmanned combat aerial vehicles, and loitering munitions.

Posted in Technology, War, Weapons | 5 Comments »

Is a $20,000 FPV a viable weapon?

Wednesday, October 23rd, 2024

The Bolt-M from Anduril is, David Hambling explains, a high-end American take on the hordes of FPV kamikaze drones deployed by Ukraine and Russia:

In Ukraine, such drones are often assembled at kitchen tables from commercial components from China. Though unsophisticated, they are efficient engines of destruction, and at around $500 apiece are destroying tanks, artillery, trucks and foxholes at a high rate.

[…]

While FPV operators need sharp reflexes and weeks of training and practice, Bolt-M removes the need for a skilled operator with a point-and-click interface to select the target. An AI pilot does all the work. (You could argue whether it even counts as FPV). Once locked on, Bolt-M will continue automatically to the target even if communications are lost, giving it a high degree of immunity to electronic warfare.

[…]

An Anduril spokesman told Breaking Defense that “In round numbers, typical Bolt configurations are in the low tens of thousands of dollars,” depending on the exact payload and configuration.

Is a $20,000 FPV a viable weapon?

[…]

Ukrainian journal Defence Express was quick to criticize the Bolt-M, stating that, like other American designs, it fails to incorporate the key lesson of FPV warfare “they are, first of all, cheap and produced at scale.” Instead they suggest the design might be adapted into a reusable, AI-enabled light bomber for conditions of intense jamming.

Posted in Technology, War, Weapons | 4 Comments »

These controllers are inherently familiar to the next generation of potential warfighters before they ever even sign up to serve

Wednesday, October 9th, 2024

American troops will direct future war machines with familiar controllers:

Over the past several years, the US Defense Department has been gradually integrating what appear to be variants of the Freedom of Movement Control Unit (FMCU) handsets as the primary control units for a variety of advanced weapons systems, according to publicly available imagery published to the department’s Defense Visual Information Distribution System media hub.

Freedom of Movement Control Unit (FMCU)

Produced since 2008 by Measurement Systems Inc. (MSI), a subsidiary of British defense contractor Ultra that specializes in human-machine interfaces, the FMCU offers a similar form factor to the standard Xbox or PlayStation controller but with a ruggedized design intended to safeguard its sensitive electronics against whatever hostile environs American service members may find themselves in. A longtime developer of joysticks used on various US naval systems and aircraft, MSI has served as a subcontractor to major defense “primes” like General Atomics, Boeing, Lockheed Martin, and BAE Systems to provide the handheld control units for “various aircraft and vehicle programs,” according to information compiled by federal contracting software GovTribe.

[…]

The endlessly customizable FMCU isn’t totally new technology: According to Ultra, the system has been in use since at least 2010 to operate the now-sundowned Navy’s MQ-8 Fire Scout unmanned autonomous helicopter and the Ground Based Operational Surveillance System (GBOSS) that the Army and Marine Corps have both employed throughout the global war on terror. But the recent proliferation of the handset across sophisticated new weapon platforms reflects a growing trend in the US military towards controls that aren’t just uniquely tactile or ergonomic in their operation, but inherently familiar to the next generation of potential warfighters before they ever even sign up to serve.

Posted in Technology, War, Weapons | 4 Comments »

The combat UGV might be the modern equivalent of the war elephant in classical armies

Friday, September 20th, 2024

The combat UGV might be the modern equivalent of the war elephant in classical armies, David Hambling notes, a strange, terrifying presence which causes enemies to flee even though it has limited military effectiveness:

A fighting robot is inherently scary. Robot dogs with weapons will be even worse, even if they are clumsier and less capable than human footsoldiers. An opponent that feels no pain or fear, and who is immune to gunfire, is not like one made of flesh and blood.

But the UGV may be much more than an effective psychological weapon. Unlike aerial drones, the UGV can threaten an enemy position. Driving up and parking a remote-controlled machinegun turret next to them means the enemy have to either destroy the UGV or retreat. This makes it something quite new, an uncrewed weapon able to take ground, and potentially to hold that ground.

At a cost of around $16,000 per unit — as much as six artillery rounds, or a tenth of a Javelin missile — the Ukrainian Lyut UGV is, he explains, entirely expendable.

Posted in Technology, War, Weapons | No Comments »

Our existing arsenals of precision-guided munitions would be exhausted in a matter of days in a high-end fight

Thursday, September 12th, 2024

Anduril has unveiled its Barracuda family of cruise missiles — or “air-breathing, software-defined expendable Autonomous Air Vehicles (AAVs)” — that are optimized for “affordable, hyper-scale production”:

The United States and our allies and partners do not have enough missiles to credibly deter conflict with a near-peer adversary. Our existing arsenals of precision-guided munitions would be exhausted in a matter of days in a high-end fight. The problem extends beyond inventory alone, however: existing cruise missiles are defined by limited production capacity, nonexistent on-call surge capacity, and minimal upgradeability when technology and mission needs inevitably change. That is because existing missile designs are highly complex, require thousands of unique tools to produce, demand highly-specialized labor and materials, and are built on the backs of tenuous, brittle, and defense-specific supply chains. We need an order of magnitude more weapons, and we need them to be more producible, intelligent, upgradeable, and flexible.

The Barracuda family of AAVs is designed to rebuild America’s arsenal of air-breathing precision-guided munitions and air vehicles. Barracuda features advanced autonomous behaviors and other software-defined capabilities, and it is available in configurations offering 500+ nautical miles of range, 100+ pounds of payload capacity, 5 Gs of maneuverability, and more than 120 minutes of loitering time. The vehicle’s fast speeds, high maneuverability, and extended ranges are made possible by Barracuda’s turbojets, air-breathing engines that take in air to combust their fuel. The result is a highly intelligent, low-cost weapon system that is capable of direct, stand-in, or stand-off strike missions in line with existing requirements but rapidly adaptable to future mission needs due to its high degree of modularity and upgradeability.

Barracuda-100M, Barracuda-250M, and Barracuda-500M are the most producible cruise missiles on the market today. A single Barracuda takes 50 percent less time to produce, requires 95 percent fewer tools, and 50 percent fewer parts than competing solutions on the market today. As a result, the Barracuda family of AAVs is 30 percent cheaper on average than other solutions, enabling affordable mass and cost-effective, large-scale employment.

[…]

Barracuda can be produced by the broad commercial automotive and consumer electronics workforce, rather than relying exclusively on the much smaller, over-stretched, highly-specialized, defense-specific manufacturing labor pool required to produce existing solutions.

Every Barracuda variant is made up of a handful of common subsystems to ensure that the missiles can be rapidly optimized based on changing mission needs. New subsystems can be rapidly swapped into live production lines when threats evolve and new technologies emerge, providing warfighters with the agility required to adapt at mission speed. And unlike existing solutions that leverage brittle, defense-specific supply chains, Barracuda’s subsystems are made up of commercially derived and widely-available components that provide supply chain resiliency, redundancy, and surge capacity.

Posted in Technology, War, Weapons | 3 Comments »

Combat vehicles don’t survive long in battle, so why build them to last?

Wednesday, September 4th, 2024

How to Make War by James Dunnigan In How to Make War, Jim Dunnigan notes that the Soviets cleverly economized in a way that had unexpected consequences:

Tank crews using Russian training methods are at a considerable disadvantage because they typically use their vehicles very little in training. Russian vehicles are built inexpensively and wear out quickly. The Russians have observed that combat vehicles don’t survive long in battle, so why build them to last? In peacetime, the crews train with crude simulators and spend less time in their vehicles than Western crews. In addition, Western armies have more effective crew simulators and training equipment. As the performance of U.S. tank crews in the Gulf War demonstrated, these differences in training levels were very evident on the battlefield.

He goes on to make another related point:

Tanks cannot move long distances without running into serious maintenance problems. Long movements require careful planning. If you run tanks too hard, most of them will break down. There have been many tank campaigns since 1939 where most of the losses have come from mechanical failure, not enemy action. Such losses can be reduced considerably by checking the route you plan to send tanks over and making provisions for regular maintenance. Tanks are simply not built to move more than a few hundred kilometers without stopping for maintenance. Weighing 40 to 70 tons and moving on tracks, they are designed for speeds of up to 60 kilometers an hour but not for long periods. Russian tanks break down, on average, every 250 kilometers. Western vehicles last about 300 kilometers.

Posted in War, Weapons | 4 Comments »

FPV drones generally require a radio link to the operator

Tuesday, August 20th, 2024

Russia is striking back against the Kursk offensive with new drones guided by fiber optics which are immune to radio jamming:

FPV drones generally require a radio link to the operator. This transmits a video signal from the drone, and command signals to the drone on another channel. Loss of either signal usually means an instant crash.

This is why we have seen a profusion of trench jammers, suitcase jammers and vehicle -mounted jammers on the front lines, blasting out radio noise on selected frequencies. If effective they create a bubble of protection reaching out fifty or a hundred yards. This will generally keep FPVs away, although skilled FPV operators approach at a steep angle so their drone gets through on sheer momentum.

Drones keep changing their operating frequencies and jammers keep being updated to stop them in an unending cat-and-mouse game. This is why it takes a blitz like the one in Kursk, with a prolonged period of preparation to identify all the frequencies in use and the concentration enough jammers to block everything in a given area to strop all drones for a time.

Drones can also lose their link for other reasons. The radio link essentially requires over line of sight. This is fine when the drone is well above ground, but as soon as it dips low, communication starts to break up. Flying relays help, but FPVs have to dive low during the final attack, and there is almost always interference in the video signal in the last second which impair the view at the critical moment.

If you’ve watched a few FPV drone videos, you’ve seen the static right before impact. (They’re analog feeds, typically.)

When I first learned about TOW missiles — “Tube-launched, Optically tracked, Wire-guided” — I was incredulous that a missile spooled out a wire along the way, a three kilometer-long wire. The design goes back a ways:

Late in World War II, the German Army began experimenting with modified versions of the Ruhrstahl X-4 wire-guided missile. Originally developed for the Luftwaffe as an anti-bomber weapon, by changing the warhead to one using a high-explosive anti-tank (HEAT) design, the new X-7 version made an effective anti-armor weapon with a range of hundreds of metres. This would greatly improve the effectiveness of infantry anti-tank operations, which at that time were generally based on smaller weapons like the Panzerfaust and Panzerschreck, limited in the best case to ranges on the order of 150 metres (490 ft). X-7 was never fully developed before the war ended.

These newer FPV drones spool out fiber-optic cable, which carries a high-resolution video signal:

On August 12th videos on social media showed what were claimed to be attacks Ukrainian BTR-4 reconnaissance vehicles in Giri with fiber-optic FPV drones. While this is impossible to confirm, the video show an unusual lack of interference.

[…]

The company Skywalker Technology is now offering fiber-optic drone controllers on the open market. The company website gives a contact address in Singapore, although ClashReport describe them as Chinese.

Skywalker sell a number of drones with military applications including one armed with rockets and another kamikaze type, plus devices to convert consumer quadcopters into bombers. Their latest offering is a fiber-optic guidance set to replace radio control. As with previous designs, it comes with a considerable weight penalty; a 5 km/ 3 miles cable reel weighs about two and a half pounds. Maximum range is six miles, HIGHCAT offers twice that.

As with other FPV components which are commonly sourced from Far Eastern suppliers, this opens up an instant supply of new technology to both parties in the Ukraine conflict. Whereas previously military technology went through a process of evaluation, specification, testing, approval and acquisition taking years, independent drone makers can now buy off the shelf and ship drones to the front in weeks.

The most commonly raised objections – snagging on obstacles, the cable breaking, leaving a trail back to the operator – do not appear to be real issues, but fiber-optic control does have downsides as previously discussed and is unlikely replace radio control entirely. This type will be effective in situations of intense jamming though and might be used in the first wave of an attack.

Posted in Technology, War, Weapons | 1 Comment »

Only to reemerge from his defrocking by Big Tech as a vengeance-seeking icon of counterelite Americana

Wednesday, August 14th, 2024

Palmer Luckey sounds like a fictional character:

Luckey is the owner of the world’s largest video game collection, which he keeps buried 200 feet underground in a decommissioned U.S. Air Force nuclear missile base — which is the kind of thing a man can afford to buy when he single-handedly turns virtual reality from the laughingstock of the technology industry into a multi-billion-dollar enterprise by inventing the Oculus Rift in a camper trailer parked in the driveway of his parents’ duplex in Long Beach, California, where at 19 years old he lived alone and survived on frozen burritos and Mucho Mango AriZona tea.

[…]

After selling Oculus to Facebook for $2.7 billion and then getting fired by Mark Zuckerberg for making a $10,000 donation to a pro-Trump troll group dedicated to “shitposting in real life,” Luckey tried his hand at building a nonprofit private prison chain that only gets paid when ex-prisoners stay out of prison. After he decided that would require too much lobbying work, he attempted to solve the obesity epidemic by making food out of petroleum products centrifuged out of the sewer system — a perfectly delicious and low-calorie idea, he maintains, which he only ditched because of the “marketing nightmare” of persuading people to eat remanufactured sewage. In the end, he decided instead to found Anduril Industries, a defense technology startup that makes lethal autonomous weapons systems. It is now valued at $14 billion.

[…]

In his spare time, when he is not providing U.S. Customs and Border Patrol with AI-powered long-range sensors, or Volodymyr Zelenskyy with drones to attack high-value Russian targets, or winning first place in the Texas Renaissance Festival’s costume contest with historically meticulous renderings of Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn sewn and stitched by his wife, Nicole—who’s been at his side for 16 of his 31 years on earth — Luckey recently built a bypass for his peripheral nervous system to experiment with giving himself superhuman reflexes; vestibular implants to pipe sounds into his skull so that instead of having to call him and wait for him to pick up, Anduril employees could just pick up a designated Palmer Phone and talk straight into his head; and a virtual reality headset that — by tying three explosive charges to a narrow-band photosensor that can detect when the screen flashes red at a specific frequency (i.e., GAME OVER) — kills you in real life when you die in a video game.

[…]

Before the recent preference cascade enabling high-profile tech moguls to violate the taboo against supporting Donald Trump, there was first the lonely figure of Palmer Luckey, the homeschooled, Jules Verne-obsessed, amateur scientist with no money, whose faith in the power of technology was so strong that he worked jobs sweeping ship yards, scrubbing decks, fixing engines, repairing phones, and training to sing as a gondolier for tourists, all in order to spend his nights in a gutted 19-foot camper trailer trying to manufacture dream worlds out of breadboards and lens equipment and accelerometers and magnetometers and a soldering iron — which he did, bringing virtual reality to the masses, burning a hole in his retina with a laser, and losing it all to Zuckerberg over a meme, only to reemerge from his defrocking by Big Tech as a vengeance-seeking icon of counterelite Americana, the aspiring rebuilder of the arsenal of democracy, the black mullet-, chin beard-, Hawaiian shirt-, cargo short-, sandal-clad possible savior of America.

Posted in Business, Technology, War, Weapons | 3 Comments »

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