Potpourri of stuff from Defense 1 as to : Field testing tech, next Starlink in Ukraine battle, and High-Speed, No-Runway Air launch
The US and NATO defense sector is getting a master class in terms of how to counter act Russian Electronic warfare, and also the invaluable lesson as far as fixing up battlefield tech as to short run way to no run way aircraft
Here is a good tech "opportunity" to test in the Ukraine war
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Earlier in the day, Lt. Gen. Tony D. Bauernfeind, the commander of Air Force Special Operations Command, highlighted the importance of aircraft that don’t require runways or large ground crews for future special air warfare operations. He cited SOCOM’s MC-130J seaplane concept as an example.?
“Runway-independent operations like the MC-130 and high-speed [vertical take-off and landing] create a cost-imposing strategy on our adversaries by forcing them to defend everywhere, by injecting complexity and unpredictability into their decision-making processes,” he said. “Against near-peer or peer adversaries in contested or denied environments, our legacy architectures and technologies fall short.”
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I cannot think of a better place to field test this than in the Ukraine battle field, and also lets not forget Electronic warfare too:
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U.S. defense manufacturers should bring their gear to Ukraine to try it out against an enemy that is more agile than generally perceived, Ukrainian special operators said at a SOF conference.
At least in the electronic spectrum, the war in Ukraine is constantly changing as both sides develop new ideas and countermeasures daily, the operators said, inviting U.S. firms to test their equipment in real battle zones.
This is the “right time,” one Ukrainian military official said, “to find weaknesses and to determine solutions and how to deal with Russian [electronic warfare] systems. Because, in the future, you will have the same problem.”
That’s hardly all that Ukrainians at the Special Air Warfare Symposium here said they’d like to have as their fight against Russian invaders moves into its second year. Beyond the requests for?fighter jets?and?ATACMS missiles?that get the headlines, they want attack helicopters and smaller items such as jam-resistant drones, electronic warfare equipment, and newer night vision goggles.
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Whereas we also have this gold plated nugget as to Starlink'
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Still, drones are deadly effective. “Student,” a 37-year-old soldier who learned to fly drones in the construction industry, said that strikes he had participated in from August to December killed 600 Russian soldiers.?
Blockchain said the Ukrainian kill-chain depends on linking commercial drones to the units they support, often through videochat software like Google Meet or Zoom. Without Starlink, such operations would be impossible, as cell networks in combat zones are often out of operation or unreliable.?
For many models of DJI drones, DJI allows operators to use their own phones or tablets as controllers to operate the drone. If the controller is an Android model, the drone footage can then be easily shared via Google Meet. The Ukrainian artillery team merely has to receive an invite to the “meeting” and instantly has a live feed of where their rounds are landing.?
If there’s any problem, Blockchain said, they just create a new meeting. There aren’t many security vulnerabilities, he believes, given how strong Google security is. “Good luck hacking Google,” he said. “They have way better security than the Pentagon.”?
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FTR again
In a word, the US and NATO defense sector is getting a master class in terms of how to counter act Russian Electronic warfare, and also the invaluable lesson as far as fixing up battlefield tech as to short run way to no run way aircraft requirements in a real battle scene.
Will this justify the blood and carnage ? Nope, but we can go into this with our eyes open
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Come Test Your Gear Against Russian Forces, Ukrainians Urge US Defense Firms
That’s just one request by special operators at a SOF conference in Florida.
SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY EDITOR, DEFENSE ONE
FORT WALTON, Florida–U.S. defense manufacturers should bring their gear to Ukraine to try it out against an enemy that is more agile than generally perceived, Ukrainian special operators said at a SOF conference.
At least in the electronic spectrum, the war in Ukraine is constantly changing as both sides develop new ideas and countermeasures daily, the operators said, inviting U.S. firms to test their equipment in real battle zones.
This is the “right time,” one Ukrainian military official said, “to find weaknesses and to determine solutions and how to deal with Russian [electronic warfare] systems. Because, in the future, you will have the same problem.”
That’s hardly all that Ukrainians at the Special Air Warfare Symposium here said they’d like to have as their fight against Russian invaders moves into its second year. Beyond the requests for?fighter jets?and?ATACMS missiles?that get the headlines, they want attack helicopters and smaller items such as jam-resistant drones, electronic warfare equipment, and newer night vision goggles.
They also urgently want satellite communications options beyond the Starlink terminals produced by Elon Musk’s SpaceX company. Though Starlink continues to provide?invaluable service, the terminals have various tactical limitations. Their connection speeds are very uneven in combat zones, and they can’t be used at all in occupied areas, a second operator said. As well, Russian forces have been aggressively?targeting?the terminals’ signals; as a result, Ukrainian forces rarely use them in combat, they said. Finally, they want satcom gear that doesn’t rely on the?mercurial Musk.
Another ask: drones that can withstand Russian electromagnetic-warfare attacks.?
“We have different types of drones but…but the company cannot make mass production in a short period of time. And because of changing tactics and Russian equipment, you're always a little bit behind. So in order to be competitive with them, it should be faster” one operator said.
Russian EW has limited Ukrainian drones to the?L5 frequency band, and “we don’t know when they will create the jamming even for this,” they said.
They also want directional antennas to protect drone operators from being detected by Russian forces. Currently, they use a small device to hide drone operators from Russian signal detectors and often place the antenna far away from the operator. “But you can not completely hide the emission of the antenna,” they said.
They also requested Western attack helicopters and advanced night vision systems for their pilots. “We extremely need attack helicopters,” said one.
They described the difficult job Ukrainian helicopter pilots have evading advanced Russian jets. They said Ukrainian helicopters have difficulty evading Russian jets. “The problem is they can see us from the range of 450 kilometers,” the operator said. The Russians will “let us approach closer and they start shooting from the range 300 kilometers. From 300 kilometers until they hit our helicopters, it's approximately 40 to 45 seconds.”
They said they had developed countermeasures for this, flying in erratic patterns. But better helicopters, such as Black Hawks and Apaches, would better enable that sort of maneuvering.?
Some 31 percent, or $23.5 billion, of the $78.8 billion that the United States?has awarded to Ukraine?has been in the form of weapons and other pieces of military equipment. But most U.S. contractors have been reluctant to send support personnel into the country. Exceptions include IT contractors such as Palantir.?
The operators said U.S. weapons makers have an opportunity to refine products in Ukraine against a real, high-tech adversary.?
“This is the right time to test all equipment in Ukraine because it will be combat-proofed” one said. Compared to previous conflicts such as Iraq and Afghanistan, “This is totally different way of war which we have right now.”
?Sam Skove contributed to this post.?
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Whereas
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How Elon Musk's Starlink is Still Helping Ukraine's Defenders
Portable sat-comm gear feeds drone video to artillery batteries—and more.
STAFF WRITER
NEAR BAKHMUT, Ukraine—In a crowded basement just a staircase away from their sleeping quarters, the men and women of Ukraine’s 93rd Brigade “Seneca” drone unit waited for video feed of targets to appear on a bank of wall-mounted screens near this eastern Ukrainian city half-encircled by Russian forces.?
The scene would hardly look out of place at any U.S. military operations center. The imagery streams, though, weren’t coming from state-of-the-art drones over communications networks?costing?tens of thousands of dollars. They streamed in from commercial drones via what soldiers describe as a key node to their work: Starlink satellite internet devices.?
A Starlink set-up, consisting of a plain white 19-by-11-inch dish, is visually unremarkable. In the right hands, though, it’s the linchpin to a kill-chain that links Ukrainian artillerymen to their Russian targets.?
The Starlink and the technologies it enables are a “black swan” that have helped Ukraine wreak unexpected havoc on invading forces, said a 38-year-old soldier with the callsign of “Blockchain.” Russian forces have taken enormous casualties in their attempts to capture Bakhmut, Ukrainian leaders?say. Soldiers from Seneca saying they’ve seen evidence of Russia appearing to force their soldiers to fight by machine-gunning those who retreated.?
Like many soldiers interviewed for this article, Blockchain requested that he be identified by his call-sign for security reasons.?
The Seneca unit, staffed by an eclectic mix of long-term soldiers and ex-coders, journalists, and construction workers, accomplishes a wide range of tasks for the 93rd Brigade.
Perhaps most prominent is their work dropping jury-rigged bombs from drones. A soldier by the callsign Lebed showed off two mortars used for the work at Seneca’s base, which he said were captured from the Russians. “They’re just a chunk of iron” now, said the 31-year-old former journalist, miming knocking them against the wall. Videos of the drone bombings are?popular?online, garnering hundreds of thousands of views.?
The core of Seneca’s work, though, is surveillance. Working 24/7 from a command center and from positions close to Russian lines, drone operators help identify targets for Ukrainian artillery, and then observe and correct their fire.?
Like any soldier, the drone operators select their weapons based on their tasks. For night observation, Seneca will fly a large DJI Matrice 30T, a $13,000 drone equipped with a thermal camera. For basic observation, they may choose to use a $2,000 DJI Mavic 3 quadcopter drone, typically flying these within a kilometer or two from the Russians. Seneca also uses winged drones like the Valkyrja, a Ukrainian-made drone launched by bungee cord, that can stay airborne longer and fly farther than a typical DJI quadcopter.?
The drones are far from ideal, of course. Poor weather conditions, like snow or rain, can short-circuit them. If drone operators fail to turn off certain settings, a DJI-brand drone can be?forced to reveal?its operator’s location by Russians using software originally designed to enable police departments to hunt criminals.?
Still, drones are deadly effective. “Student,” a 37-year-old soldier who learned to fly drones in the construction industry, said that strikes he had participated in from August to December killed 600 Russian soldiers.?
Blockchain said the Ukrainian kill-chain depends on linking commercial drones to the units they support, often through videochat software like Google Meet or Zoom. Without Starlink, such operations would be impossible, as cell networks in combat zones are often out of operation or unreliable.?
For many models of DJI drones, DJI allows operators to use their own phones or tablets as controllers to operate the drone. If the controller is an Android model, the drone footage can then be easily shared via Google Meet. The Ukrainian artillery team merely has to receive an invite to the “meeting” and instantly has a live feed of where their rounds are landing.?
If there’s any problem, Blockchain said, they just create a new meeting. There aren’t many security vulnerabilities, he believes, given how strong Google security is. “Good luck hacking Google,” he said. “They have way better security than the Pentagon.”?
Certain drones, like the DJI Matrice 30T, don’t allow users to swap in Android-based controllers, meaning that operators have to jury-rig solutions with Zoom, a less-than-ideal solution, Blockchain added.?
Starlink, of course, has its issues.?
Run by billionaire Elon Musk, the company?stated?on Feb. 9 that it would limit the Ukrainian military’s use of Starlinks for offensive operations. On Feb. 14, soldiers in Seneca reported having had problems for two days previously but said those had been resolved.?
Jamming is also theoretically a problem, said Todd Humphreys of the University for Texas at Austin. Each Starlink terminal uses an internal GPS receiver to help choose which satellites to transmit its signals, so Russian efforts to jam GPS signals can interrupt Starlink operations. In March, Starlink engineers quickly fixed a Russian electronic warfare attack through a code update, U.S. officials?said?in April.
Other problems are more prosaic. Before setting out for the front lines on the morning of Feb. 14, the unit had to find a Starlink device whose account was fully funded. Accounts?cost?$75 a month, and are sometimes paid out of pocket by volunteers?supporting?the Ukrainian military.
The soldiers of the Seneca unit, of course, don’t have time to sit back and pick their technologies at leisure. Amid 24/7 combat operations, every minute is given over to operations, analysis, and training, said Gray, a 24-year-old soldier who manages the video feeds.?
“We have no problem with motivation,” said Lebed, a former journalist who went from covering Ukraine’s war in eastern Ukraine to fighting in it. “But it’d be good to sleep.”?
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Whereas we have this too:Same Link
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An artist's concept for the DARPA Speed and Runway Independent Technologies or SPRINT program?DARPA ARTIST'S CONCEPT
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DARPA To Launch High-Speed, No-Runway Aircraft Program
Will it be a helicopter? A seaplane? Or a whole new thing?
SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY EDITOR, DEFENSE ONE
FORT WALTON BEACH, Florida–A high-speed aircraft that doesn’t need a runway is next on DARPA's drawing board, the research agency's director said Wednesday.?
What will that look like? It could be a new form of helicopter, or perhaps a vertical-takeoff-and-landing aircraft that might fly even faster. But in her announcement, DARPA Director Stefanie Tompkins deliberately avoided calling the program a vertical-lift effort, and an accompanying?slide?displayed two artist’s concepts that were decidedly unhelicopter-like.
An artist’s rendering depicting two Speed and Runway Independent Technologies, or SPRINT, concepts from DARPA
DARPA is working with U.S. Special Operations Command on the new Speed and Runway Independent Technologies, or SPRINT, program, which will aim to build an air platform that shows a “combination of sort of runway independence and a sufficient level of speed and mobility,” Tompkins said. Those two concepts, she said, “have independently been explored by different communities and have different kinds of platforms, but not combined into a single space.”?
She described some potential missions as emergency medical evacuation or helping troops infiltrate very-hard-to-reach areas. DARPA is “thinking very much about the people space,” in terms of scale, she said.?
A new broad agency announcement on the program should come out within weeks.?
The need for runway-independent aircraft for combat is growing as publicly available satellite imagery and open-source intelligence communities make it nearly impossible for militaries to hide runways or aircraft. Many analysts consider runways and airbases a particular vulnerability when it comes to a potential Chinese attack on Taiwan.?
In a RAND memo from December 2021, Senior International Defense Researcher?David A. Ochmanek?described how a Chinese?attack on Taiwan?“might barrage Taiwan's airfields and air defenses, ports, big ships, lines of communication, and command/control systems with missile and air attacks before then loading up amphibious vessels for an assault on the island. With Taiwan's air defenses suppressed, the amphibious assault could be followed up with an airborne invasion by paratroopers and transport helicopters. China might well also strike American forces and bases in the western Pacific, to include aircraft carrier battle groups, aiming to cripple any U.S. effort to defend Taiwan.”
Earlier in the day, Lt. Gen. Tony D. Bauernfeind, the commander of Air Force Special Operations Command, highlighted the importance of aircraft that don’t require runways or large ground crews for future special air warfare operations. He cited SOCOM’s MC-130J seaplane concept as an example.?
“Runway-independent operations like the MC-130 and high-speed [vertical take-off and landing] create a cost-imposing strategy on our adversaries by forcing them to defend everywhere, by injecting complexity and unpredictability into their decision-making processes,” he said. “Against near-peer or peer adversaries in contested or denied environments, our legacy architectures and technologies fall short.”
Thompkins and Bauernfeind made their remarks at the?Gobal SOF Foundation Air Warfare Symposium.??
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Andrew Beckwith, PhD