This And That
The vacation from noise is over as the military has apparently come up with enough of an explanation of the F-35 engine fires to allow them to fly again. It is amazing that they are considered ‘stealth’ when you can hear the things ten miles away.
A US government spokesweasel showed up on the radio telling me that my government was very concerned by the high level of civilian casualties in Gaza and that Israel has been told to take action to reduce them, while also announcing that the IDF has been allowed to remove tank shells from the US supply maintained in Israel.
If we don’t like what they are doing with their bombs and artillery, why are are we giving them more? The IDF took both high explosive rounds and white phosphorus ‘illumination’ rounds.
The Director of the CIA issued an apology to the Senate Intelligence committee for hacking into their computer system after initially denying that there any evidence that supported the claim by Senator Diane Feinstein. More troubling than the hacking was the fact that it was so easily detected. Frankly the CIA is supposed to spy on people, but they aren’t supposed to get caught doing it.
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The question isn’t whether you can hear them ten miles away but, rather whether opposition radars and IR missiles can lock onto them from ten miles away.
You can tweak a sonar guidance system from a torpedo to a SAM system, and a directional microphone system for detection, as was done in World War II.
The Serbs managed to shoot down an F-117, so if they know to look, even an SA-3 site can take out stealth aircraft.
My understanding is that the Serbs got that F-117 because it opened its bomb bay doors to drop its bomb, and the open bomb bay doors showed up like a beacon on the SA-3’s radar. Which was, err, a major functional flaw of the F-117 — WTF use is a stealth bomber that can’t open its bomb bay doors to drop bombs?! Anyhow, once they had lock, they could maintain it because the F-117 was a low-radar-reflectivity plane, not a zero-radar-reflectivity plane. It might have looked like a child’s mylar balloon as far as its reflection went, and been impossible to separate out from random noise if you didn’t know where to look, but it had a reflection. And a fatal flaw that this shoot-down showed. Which is why it was retired shortly afterwards :).
I will have to ask my officemate who designs robots about the feasibility of what you propose. There are of course two fundamental problems here. The F-35 can supercruise so its sound waves will be somewhere behind it, meaning the missile will home in somewhere behind it. The second is the question of whether the missile itself will be able to exceed the speed of sound and still pick up things with a microphone. Submarines and destroyers can do sonar because they’re traveling much lower than the speed of sound. F-35’s and anti-aircraft missiles in a combat zone… not so much. Radar travels at the speed of light, not the speed of sound, which is why that’s what’s used to detect supersonic aircraft. It will be some time before we have fighter jets and missiles that can exceed the speed of light. 😉
Most of the Soviet era SAMs use proximity fusing, but the guidance is supplied by the ground system. If they know where to look, they will see the aircraft. The engine large enough to push the F-35 to supersonic speeds with all of the stealth baffling is the reason it is so loud, and it also generates a lot of IR to track.
The long range search radars won’t automatically pick it the aircraft, but if the target acquisition radar operators know where to look, they will find it. The only current saving grace is the technophobic attitude of most whackoes which obviously limits the skill of those operators.
The Russians can’t build the improvements necessary, but the Chinese and Indians can, so stealth aircraft have a very limited life span. The money would have been better spent on stealthier cruise missiles.
Another thing I remember about the shoot-down of that F-117 is that the SA-3 operators had turned up the gain on their radar attempting to find the stealth bombers that they knew were out there, which filled the screen with lots of noise but when one of those specks of noise suddenly flared bright because of the bomb bay doors opening, they knew that particular speck was the one they were interested in. There is a lot you can do with old equipment if you have some ingenuity and skill.
As for whether the Russians can upgrade their equipment to deal with the F-35, I don’t think they need the Chinese for the design part. While many of Russia’s best and brightest left the country during the Yeltsin regime, there are still enough smart people in Russia to come up with ways to deal with new U.S. weapons. What they need the Chinese for is manufacturing. Russia since the fall of the Soviet Union has had much trouble producing new equipment designs in any significant quantity because too many of the weapons components were manufactured in places like Georgia and Ukraine and reconstituting that capability has been hard, meaning that they’re reduced to reverse-engineering existing components then hand-building them with machine shop equipment rather than building them in mass quantities on an assembly line. It would be natural for Russia and China to move closer together on weapons design and manufacturing, especially given that relations with the West for Russia are at a low that hasn’t been seen since the days of the Soviet Union.
I should have been more specific about what I meant by ‘build’. They can definitely design the improvements, but Russian manufacturing just can’t deal with the precision required. They were frozen at the 82086-level for more than a decade, and still haven’t advanced much beyond it.
They probably have a ‘research vessel’ or two in the Gulf of Mexico right now seeing what they can see. That’s assuming that they have some that haven’t rusted away. We always watched them on Shemya to see if they had sunk yet, as they weren’t very well disguised fishing trawlers and they were well off any maintenance schedule.
They certainly have the people, but they don’t have the tools.
The Serbs were pretty good with tools and technology. A lot of them worked in Germany in the 1970s and were trained on good equipment, so they had abilities that even the Russians didn’t have.
Russia uses COTS components, mostly sourced from Taiwan and South Korea, for their new electronic gear, they don’t try to manufacture electronic components at all. The electronics aren’t the real problem. Their real problem is mass production of mechanical components. They don’t have the manufacturing infrastructure anymore, it got scattered to the four winds with the collapse of the Soviet Union and they haven’t reconstituted enough of it to do mass production of weapons systems anymore. They’ve had some success marketing Su-27 derivatives to India and China, but actual delivery of the aircraft has been slow and erratic due to the huge holes in their weapons manufacturing infrastructure that are being filled via hand-making parts on lathes. Just one example of their problem with manufacturing weapons today.
Because of their woeful transportation infrastructure, manufacturing was sited close to their sources of raw materials, which was fine until the raw materials and manufacturing ended up in other countries.
They have the money to fix these problems, just not the will or coordination to pull it off. They are stuffing cash in their mattresses instead of investing to make even more cash.
It wasn’t just because of their woeful transportation infrastructure, it was also because the Communist system had terrible issues with matching supply and demand. For example, the Ural motorcycle plant had its own bearing factory, steel foundry, tubing extrusion plant, casting plant, etc. because they couldn’t rely on obtaining bearings, castings, etc. from other manufacturers. They even blew their own light bulbs on site because they couldn’t buy light bulbs from other manufacturers. As a result it took the Soviets several times the resources to build a motorcycle as it took the Japanese, who bought things like light bulbs and bearings and steel tubing on the open market. The wonder was that they could do it at all, nevermind inefficiency.
But they WERE good at building mass quantities of military goods in this manner. Were. All gone now, of course…
Putin started reversing the decline in Russia’s infrastructure when he took office, but appears of late to have bought in to his own cult of personality and forgotten about such things. I think he has managed to place himself into a bubble that too many dictator types end up placing themselves in, where their view of reality is so mediated by the lackeys and cronies they surround themselves with that governance takes a dive.
I heard a Russian who has come West to be a professional Kremlin watcher describe the current government created by Putin to nearly identical to a multinational corporation with Putin as the CEO and his advisors as the board of directors. The advisors are limited to three groups – former KGB/security officers, military officers, and oligarchs. Imagine a nation run by Jamie Diamond or Carly Fiorina – pretty scary concept. Lots of decisions for short-term gains and long-term disasters, with no real concern for the viability of the corporation/country.
The endgame of this sort of isolation from reality is like Hitler in his bunker issuing orders to units that had ceased to exist, or Gorbachev after being rescued from the coup rattling around the Kremlin in his bathrobe issuing orders that everybody ignored until the day he officially announced that the Soviet Union was over, done, dissolved — months after everybody else had already made that a fait accompli. It’s not healthy for Russia, and it’s unclear how long Putin is going to manage to keep this cult of personality going that keeps him in power.
It looks like it may devolve into a warlord-type of culture ruled by the former KGB crime gangs and the private armies of the oligarchs. Putin could have a ‘stroke’ at any time and there is no obvious successor.
A “stroke”. Yes, that was the problem with Gorbachev, the coup leaders were too incompetent for such a feat. I am sure there will be caretaker governments similar to Boris Yeltsin’s once Putin leaves this mortal coil, but I’m also sure things will devolve back to where they were during the final years of Yeltsin’s rule, where the former KGB crime gangs and the oligarchs ran everything that ran (which wasn’t much) and Yeltsin just drank.
That’s ops normal for Russia whenever there isn’t a Stalin or Putin to control things. In the Empire it was the Army and the aristocracy, but the same concept with a powerless Duma to act as the nominal government.