keying...hard to jam what you what you can see.
Our old motto: VMAQ-2 IMA: 'They don't Jam until we say they can!'
Semper Fi.
Posted on 04/27/2022 10:49:29 PM PDT by Zhang Fei
WASHINGTON: The US military’s electronic warfare enterprise needs to take a page from SpaceX when it comes to responding to new threats, the Pentagon’s director for electromagnetic warfare said today.
After SpaceX sent Starlink terminals to Ukraine in February in an apparent effort to help Ukraine maintain its internet connection amid war with Russia, SpaceX founder Elon Musk claimed that Russia had jammed Starlink terminals in the country for hours at a time. After a software update, Starlink was operating normally, said Musk, who added on March 25 that the constellation had “resisted all hacking & jamming attempts” in Ukraine.
Assuming Musk — famously something of a showboater in his public comments — is providing an accurate picture, a private firm beating back Russian EW attempts with software updates is the kind of thing that makes Pentagon EW experts pay attention.
“From an EW technologist perspective, that is fantastic. That paradigm and how they did that is kind of eyewatering to me,” said Dave Tremper, director of electronic warfare for the Pentagon’s acquisition office. “The way that Starlink was able to upgrade when a threat showed up, we need to be able to have that ability. We have to be able to change our electromagnetic posture, to be able to change very dynamically what we’re trying to do without losing capability along the way.”
Since Russia’s takeover of the Ukrainian territory of Crimea in 2014, the Russian military has used electronic warfare extensively in Ukraine’s Donbas region — often to great effect, using electromagnetic signals to uncover the positions of Ukrainian forces and disrupt equipment such as drones. However, the current conflict may be exposing the limits of Russia’s EW capability.
Tremper noted that Russia’ ongoing invasion deep into Ukraine is “a very different scenario” to earlier operations that were
(Excerpt) Read more at breakingdefense.com ...
Ukraine ping
After his tenure as President, Eisenhower gave a speech that has been transmogrified by the media and liberal academia into something it wasn’t - a screed against defense spending. Eisenhower spent 10% of the economy on defense every single year of his administration. We are now at 4%. The big point Eisenhower made during that speech was the necessity to never be taken by surprise again by superior enemy armaments, which is why military spending needed to remain higher than the 1% of the economy preceding Pearl Harbor that led to disastrous defeats at the beginning of the war. The need to not expand military spending excessively (i.e. beyond the 10% he spent) was just a footnote.
Our military organization today bears little relation to that known by any of my predecessors in peacetime, or indeed by the fighting men of World War II or Korea.
Until the latest of our world conflicts, the United States had no armaments industry. American makers of plowshares could, with time and as required, make swords as well. But now we can no longer risk emergency improvisation of national defense; we have been compelled to create a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions. Added to this, three and a half million men and women are directly engaged in the defense establishment. We annually spend on military security more than the net income of all United States corporations.
This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence — economic, political, even spiritual — is felt in every city, every State house, every office of the Federal government. We recognize the imperative need for this development. Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. Our toil, resources and livelihood are all involved; so is the very structure of our society.
In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the militaryindustrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.
We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.
Akin to, and largely responsible for the sweeping changes in our industrial-military posture, has been the technological revolution during recent decades.
In this revolution, research has become central; it also becomes more formalized, complex, and costly. A steadily increasing share is conducted for, by, or at the direction of, the Federal government.
Today, the solitary inventor, tinkering in his shop, has been overshadowed by task forces of scientists in laboratories and testing fields. In the same fashion, the free university, historically the fountainhead of free ideas and scientific discovery, has experienced a revolution in the conduct of research. Partly because of the huge costs involved, a government contract becomes virtually a substitute for intellectual curiosity. For every old blackboard there are now hundreds of new electronic computers. ]
Problem is that defense industries have become one or 2 in order to minimize stragic growth at the need to maximize profits as can be seen in the air force!
OverviewLyricsListenVideos
You got me in a corner
You got me against the wall
I got nowhere to go
I got nowhere to fall
Take back your insurance
Baby nothin’ is guaranteed
And take back your acid rain
Baby let your TV bleed
You’re jammin’ me, you’re jammin’ me, quit jammin’ me
Baby you can keep me painted in a corner
You can look away, but it’s not over
Take back your angry slander
Take back your pension plan
Take back your ups and downs
Of your life in raisin-land
Take back Vanessa Redgrave
Take back Joe Piscopo
Take back Eddie Murphy
Giv’em all some place to go
You’re jammin’ me, you’re jammin’ me, quit jammin’ me
Baby you can keep me painted in a corner
You can walk away but it’s not over
Take back your Iranian torture
And the apple in young Steve’s eye
Yeah take back your losing streak
Check your front wheel drive
You’re jammin’ me, you’re jammin’ me, quit jammin’ me
Take back Pasadena
Take back El Salvador
Take back that country club
They’re tryin’ to build outside my door
You’re jammin’ me, you’re jammin’ me, quit jammin’ me
Baby you can keep me painted in a corner
You can walk away but it’s not over
You’re jammin’ me, you’re jammin’ me
You’re jammin’ me, quit jammin’ me
Quit jammin’ me, yeah you’re jammin’ me
You’re jammin’ me
We recognize the imperative need for this development. Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. Our toil, resources and livelihood are all involved; so is the very structure of our society.
In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the militaryindustrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.
kind of a mind-blowing statement when you think about it:
“Brig. Gen. Tad Clark, the Air Force’s director of electromagnetic spectrum superiority, prefaced his statements by acknowledging that he couldn’t detail specifics about what the United States is gleaning about the Russian electronic warfare threat based on its activities in Ukraine.
However, he noted that those activities do more than simply provide information about Russia’s technological capabilities — they also paint a picture about whether Russia has the capital necessary to execute that mission.
“We’re learning a lot what Russia has been investing their money in, the sophistication and the reliability of their equipment, and.. their ability to execute that mission in a synchronized fashion,” he said. “It gives us some insight of where certain countries are, where we are, where we need to be, and where we want to be.””
Problem is that defense industries have become one or 2 in order to minimize stragic growth at the need to maximize profits as can be seen in the air force!
—
As can be seen by the USAF wanting to cancel further orders for the F-15EX, limiting it to only 90 examples.
“After a software update, Starlink was operating normally, said Musk...”
Musk will fix Twitter about that quick.
Honey:
WHEN YOU ARE THE RICHEST MAN IN THE WORLD-—with a long stretch to 2nd place—you can ‘showboat’ to your heart’s content, IMO.
Any guess on how Starlink overcame Russian jamming?
Change of frequency? Use of a frequency hopper?
Good info. Thanks for posting.
When you have Musk’s accomplishments, simply talking about what you
are up to sounds like showboating. No, it’s simply explaining what’s been
accomplished and what’s on deck. The public should know.
They should be able to utilize what he has come up with.
I see Musk as a national treasure.
I’m hoping Musk is able to demonstrate the extent Twitter and the other Socials, along with the eneMedia coordinate to impact elections. I would be totally cool with confiscating the property of every principal and Board member of each of those coordinating companies.
They overcame the jamming because the antennas are phased arrays with tight beams and low sidelobes. They updated the software to put a beam null point everywhere a jamming signals showed up thus rendering it null. That was at the satellites in the uplink side the down links are already fast moving tight beams and the ground terminals only track a tiny spot in the sky where the satellite is expected to be. To jam a ground terminal you have to position your jammer along that beam line then keep up with it’s movement across the sky at 7+ miles per second nearly impossible. The secret sauce is in the beam forming at the phased arrays of those birds once you have active null control they become very difficult to jam. I would expect the up and down links to also be frequency agile to some extent as well since spacex was given a block of bandwidth.
Thanks Zhang Fei.
Sounds reasonable, thanks
Generating a beam null point whenever it detects a jam in real-time sounds like a lot for a SW update to do
I’ll bet he sacrificed some funtionality, capacity and/or efficiency to harden the system.
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