Posted on 05/29/2024 7:52:32 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
War drives innovation. Weapons systems that were cutting edge at the beginning of a great power war often are obsolete by the end because the enemy learns how to counter them. A little-appreciated challenge of the Ukraine war is that it is making many of the United States’ best weapons systems obsolete. As a result, the next president and Congress need to do a major push in defense weapons innovation.
For example, according to a confidential Ukrainian weapons assessment that was leaked to the Washington Post and summarized by Yahoo news:
The assessment said that Ukraine stopped using the Excalibur shells last year after the weapon ‘lost its potential’ and effectiveness fell to just 10 per cent.
The Himars system, hailed early in the war for its ability to destroy targets with a single shot, has now become ‘completely ineffective,’ according to one Ukrainian military source.
The problem is that the Excalibur artillery shells, developed by a U.S. Army research committee, and the Himars system, developed by Lockheed Martin, both depend upon satellite GPS which the Russians have figured out how to disrupt on the battlefield.
The war has also revealed technical problems with the Javelyn missile, developed by Raytheon, which has also been abandoned for battlefield use by the Ukrainians according to Blackwater founder Erik Prince in an interview with Tucker Carlson (03:06 mark):
The Javelyn missile which Raytheon sells to the taxpayers for $200,000 a shot, with a $300,000 command launch unit, the Ukrainians can only use that for the first shot in an ambush because their IR detector – if they shoot the first tank, the tank is very hot, it’s burning.
(Excerpt) Read more at americanthinker.com ...
Owen, GPS does come from above but it is a very weak signal compared to the jamming systems. The jammers totally screw up the frequencies used by the GPS.
btt
I had a guaranteed military sale with ED 209 - renovation program, spare parts for twenty-five years... Who cares if it worked or not?
- Richard Jones, Senior VP Omni Consumer Products
It's even that way fishing for tuna. I had to install voice scramblers to cover conversations between boat, base station and other boats. The conversation was obscured, so the next step was homing in on the RF. Many boats had radio direction finders. Many had scanners. The problem was identifying what frequency to set the RDF to point at the origin of the VHF transmission. I resolved that by integrating a Taiyo RDF with a Regency scanner. I tapped the goniometer output and routed into the Regency scanner front end. I tapped the 10.7 MHz IF of the scanner and routed it back inside of the RDF ahead of the detector circuits. Voila! The scanner stopped on an active frequency and the RDF pointed at the origin. My employer sold the conversion to every boat in the harbor. $10 in parts and 30 minutes of labor.
It was a perpetual technical counter measure effort even when just fishing for tuna. The stakes are much higher on the battlefield and it pays better.
GPS is very easy to jam. I’m an airline pilot and I see it quite a bit.
Reminds me of a quote about WWIII, that no matter who ‘wins’, the war after that will be fought with sticks and stones.
I have some ideas, if the right people are interested.
All your assumptions about GPS are dead wrong.
Probably best I not waste time on explaining the difficulty of jamming or spoofing GPS.
Learn what decibel loss can be expected if a signal source is below the hemispheric receive pattern.
Learn about spread spectrum.
Learn about Kalman filter weighting in a navigation solution with multiple sensors.
Learn about C/A, P, and Y code, and why it largely won’t matter since the Russians have their Glonass, the Chinese their own Beisomething, the EU its own, India, Japan . . . all have navigation satellite constellations.
In a general sense, if artillery guidance is failing, it is not GPS obfuscation that is doing it. It is standard practice for KFs to unweight GPS in a nav solution.
The Russians have another technology doing this. Far superior to ours, as usual.
WW2 level tech would not be affected by emp. Tube gear is not affected. Pls point/coil cars not affected. Wars would still go on. As always.
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