High Tech Battlefield

In today’s world of gee-whiz wonder weapons and ammo, you have to be prepared to deal with all kinds of existential threats our fathers never imagined. One such battleground is in Ukraine, where the war keeps dragging on but which is dragging new weapons into public exposure, along with the counter-weapons used to fight them. Like scissors.

Scissors?

Yep, along with knives. Even bare hands.

If history will remember the Ukraine conflict for anything, it will be for “The Rise of the Small Drone’. Previous drones have been like cruise missiles – pretty large, sophisticated aerial platforms like the Predator. high tech,and high priced. For active guidance, remote controlled. The big problem with that feature, though, is that jamming their linkage signals creates problems.  A lot of smaller combat drones are now fiber-optic controlled. Might limit their range but the cables are impossible to jam at a distance… but are easily cut with – yep, small personal cutting tools. Cut the cable, cut the guidance.

Ukrainian soldiers are out cutting and snapping any fiber-optic drone cables they come across, regardless of which side they belong to. They use scissors, knives, even their bare hands.

Troops say it doesn’t matter if a drone is Ukrainian or Russian. If they’re not sure, they just assume it’s hostile.

Dimko Zhluktenko, an analyst with Ukraine’s Unmanned Systems Forces, said that he always carries scissors so that he can “cut each and every optic fiber that we see.”

He said that his unit “actually stopped considering them friendly or foe. We think that all of them are kind of the enemy drones.”

Look at that pic up top…that’s a LOT of fiber optic cables.

Same thing in the air – so many drones flying around that no one knows whose are whose. Answer? Shoot ’em all down. “Kill ’em all, let God sort ’em out” has a whole different meaning.

Soldiers in charge of electronic warfare systems sometimes panic and jam everything in the air when they can’t tell drones apart, Zhluktenko previously told Business Insider.

If the cable is intact on an active and operational drone, the only other way to stop it is to physically shoot it (troops say a shotgun works best); that requires a mix of skill and luck, though.Business Insider

Seems to me the biggest problem with using a shotgun is that you have to be close – like well inside 75 yards at best – which is getting up close and personal to something which may be equipped to shoot back.

Scissors…

On the other end of high-tech, the Netherlands defense minister has raised the interesting possibility of “jail-breaking” their American-supplied F-35s.

For example, there have been rumors that the U.S. might have embedded a kill switch on one of the most advanced fighter jets across the world, but officials deny its existence. After all, giving another nation the ability to remotely disable your weapons is unthinkable for any government.

However, the F-35 is such an advanced piece of technology that it needs a complete working supply chain to maintain its combat effectiveness. The jets require thousands of parts and services, mostly acquired from the U.S., to ensure that they remain safe to fly. More than that, they rely on Lockheed’s cloud infrastructure for software updates, logistics, and even the “Mission Data Files” that give it its threat-recognition abilities. So, even without a kill switch, the U.S. could effectively ground any nation’s F-35 fleet if it’s excluded from this network. Tom’s Hardware

I think eight million encrypted lines of software is not going to be as easy to crack as he may think. At the same time, our track record of standing by our allies is not looking too solid lately, either. The Iranians have managed to keep several of their relatively ancient F-14s flying despite a US ban on parts and service, but that is ’60s and early ’70s technology. I suspect the Dutch might find the F-35 a bit more challenging – and since that is the only fighter they have, taking a chance on altering it may be a foolish idea.

Category: Russia, Science and Technology, Ukraine