Misleading title and very long article that boils down to: solo passionate inventor comes up with invention to reduce friendly fire, in one year, after suffering a friendly fire incident, and tries to get the military to adopt it, but the military does not want his particular solution.
The only testimony about why the military is not interested in his solution comes from the inventor himself. The military meanwhile does invest in different solutions, which the inventor claims are inferior.
> “I gotta give ’em credit for trying,” he said. “They spent about a billion dollars, and the thing wouldn’t work with [individual] soldiers.
To me, it seems more likely that the military has identified certain disadvantages to his proposed solution, than that there is some sort of conspiracy theory against solo inventors or this inventor specifically. I find it hard to believe that this person could come up with a solution in one year, that is superior to anything that professionals have been able to come up with after 30 years and billions of dollars of investment, but that the military dismisses his idea out of hand just because he's a solo inventor and not a big contractor.
The fact that the military has and is investing billions of dollars to try and solve friendly fire events shows they're definitely interested in reducing friendly fire, but the article over and over tries to imply the military isn't that keen on it. The title itself implies that too.
Not once in this 6000 word article is there a definitive reasoning for why his solution was rejected. It's all just conjecture and testimony from the inventor himself. Poor.
Anything that can reliably identify you in combat, is a homing beacon for any enemy.
Even if you have to "light yourself up", that can be done with disposable drones, and then strike at the targets.
Thus, you will have to reduce battlefield id systems the more sophisticated a enemies technology becomes.
Doesn’t mention anyway to change the code either. So all the energy has to do is record the good guy IFF and gaffa tape a copy of the device to their guys and they’re good.
And a solution that would require code change isn't nice either, as rekeying equipment and spreading the public keys around is a huge logistics ordeal. These problems are never as easy as "pulse some light with some crypto on top". Hell, the very existence of an active IFF signal is already something that distinguishes you as a military target, so the enemy could just use your IFF as a homing beacon.
From the article I understand that it’s not an active device. The beacon is passive until it is illuminated by the firing party.
Theoretically maybe still a problem if the enemy is waiting for that moment to shoot at you, but to wait for a friendly fire incident seems a bit inefficient.
so the firing party has an active homing beacon, aimed at you, just before they are about to fire? hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm yep no problems with that approach at all
> Can you avoid a hellfire missile if you know it’s coming?
Not really, but if the aircraft launching that Hellfire announces itself like that prior to firing, just to check who you are, it may give you just enough information to fire at it preemptively, or at least know (or let others know) where to look for it.
It's not a problem if the US is fighting a technologically inferior opponent, but apparently (from what I've read on HN the other day), the US military is retooling itself towards competition with China, so they have to consider their technological trickery being used against them.
> at least know (or let others know) where to look for it
I think this only works for the targeted party, which sends a pulse, which you could potentially triangulate on. The firing aircraft sends a very narrow beam of signal, so unless you have a specific setup to detect the direction of the signal, you’ll just know you were hit by an unidentified radio beam.
I’m not a radio expert though, who knows what I’m missing :)
It sounds like the investor doesn't get the SBIR/STTR process and failed to find a Program of Record who could fund a solution, or, having found such funding sources, didn't listen to the customer need.
I agree with what you said as one possible path to "why", but one look at the history of the Bradley Tank shows how meaningless time/money can be in large orgs. Especially political ones.
Couple this with big name/external validation, and the fact that the best and brightest techs don't flock to the military (too dogmatic)...
The F35 is the new Bradley tank, and how much was spent?
Anyhow, you're probably correct, but I take exception to the reasoning being how much the military spent, or how long they worked at it.
(note: In times of war, all the political jockeying ends, disappears, and the military becomes lean and efficient. In times of peace, politics exist, including funding games.)
The difference is that the Bradley was actually a good design - the main source of bad PR about the project is also the person responsible for significant portion of the cost overruns and problems.
The Bradley was such an atrocious design for it's intended purpose (an APC) that it managed to invent a new category of vehicle which turned out to be useful as a modern day cavalry.
Except by the time Bradley design was finalizing towards prototypes, the new category was already defined. It was never supposed to be just another APC, because M113 was already known to be deficient, and the long and tortured process happened because Army didn't know the goal yet - and thus required exploratory work. And then BMP-1 kicked the anthill.
I'm interested in hearing more about this: I greatly enjoyed The Pentagon Wars of course, but I haven't heard a defense of the Bradley's development process yet
Some good material to follow, beyond the publicly accessible history of the project (which is long, since the fact that M113 was deficient was known before the final direction of the replacement was figured out), using somewhat popular formats:
And finally a bit on the background of the Fighter Mafia member who wrote the black PR book that was used as basis for the movie (PhD thesis on the Fighter Mafia/Reformers and their influence in decision making in both USAF and elsewhere):
> The fact that the military has and is investing billions of dollars to try and solve friendly fire events shows...
...that they're willing to spend billions of dollars and account for them as "investment in prevention of FF". Whether that means they actually want to prevent friendly fire or not is a different matter altogether, because of the way the money-distributing and -spending decisions are made.
You’re probably right, but military procurement is a slow moving, change and risk adverse nightmare too: that’s probably just as much the reason why he had little success, even if we do take him at his word.
Simply, he’s not Raytheon et al. It’s a rare piece of tech that any large military adopts from individual inventors.
So he invented a home beacon which can identify each american vehicle/aircraft by strapping a wristwatch-size device to it which emits a signal on 13.5GHz (claimed to be a "low frequency" in the article).
I can think of lots of ways this could go wrong. LOTS of ways really...
Doing this right is by far not a task as simple as described in this long article.
Yeah, this part threw me off:
> The system would work on a low frequency, 13.5 gigahertz, enabling it to penetrate dust, smoke, rain, bushes, trees, and even walls.
This relatively high freq would be a poor penetrator of anything wouldn't it? And with high power usage to boot. Unless I'm missing something here
I think they mean “relatively” low frequency. Militaries stick to higher frequency bands to ostensibly make it harder for non-state actors and non-peer foes to use or modify COTS equipment or build their own to intercept it.
But yeah, even 13.5ghz would be subject to interference. Though the 35+ ghz the other companies are looking at sound even worse. They must know something we don’t, I think
Perhaps those freqs allow more compact beamforming? Putting aside that I'm not privy to those companies' research I would bet on LoRa (or another sub-GHz low power modulation technique) coupled with crypto coprocessors. Super low-cost (crypto chip being the majority of the BOM), very long range (over 10km in open ares), highly secure. One downside would be low bitrate (.3 ~ 30kbits/s). With a worst case of maximum range and spread factor, even 37 bytes should be enough to trade unique signatures
The U.S. Military has apparently solved the problem by pretending that it does not exist--i.e. does not track stats on friendly fire causalities. I wonder how many other competent soldiers have been discharged due to friendly fire incidents? Each incident is a double-loss for the military, both the killed and the killer are gone.
Don't be so sure. I witnessed a friendly fire incident while at camp anaconda in Iraq way back in 2004.
A staff sergeant was accidentally shot in the leg by a female soldier on the roof who was improperly loading an m240b machine gun behind our position. There were all sorts of things wrong with this picture.
First, we generally never loaded that thing until after people were back inside the wire after the first patrol. Secondly, it wasn't her job to load it. She'd never been trained on it but decided to "take the initiative". Thirdly, the m240b has a real shitty design in that it fires from an "open bolt" position. This means if you for example - smack it hard enough - it can start firing even if you didn't pull the trigger. This is called a bolt override and it's why we don't load the thing when there are people in front of it.
Anyway the Sergeants leg was fucked. He had to be shipped off to Germany and we never saw him again. But that female soldier? They sent her right back out to the line. The whole unit was pissed, but the brass just covered the whole thing up. That was the moment I decided I was done with the military.
If you are curious why I keep mentioning the gender of the soldier, it's not because I have any problem with women in the military or women in combat positions. What I did have a huge problem with at the time was untrained women in combat positions. The military was in the middle of a big diversity push at the time and just started pushing non-combat women into combat roles without any training. We'd just suddenly get a new person on our squad and be expected to trust them. And then when that person fucked up due to a complete lack of training, and shot one of us, we were expected to just treat them as if it never happened and keep working with them - for optics. Dumbest idea ever.
So, this incident clearly deserves a discharge, or at a minimum, shipment home for retraining. The soldier in question is a risk to do something similar in the future, it's shitty for morale, etc.
The incident described in the article (as least as the perpetrator describes it) sounds like a mistake made by multiple parties--the ground commander, the wingman, and the shooter himself compounded by bad weather, instrumentation glitches, and lack of sleep. The incident deserves a thorough review but seems quite a waste to discharge the shooter, a Lt Col, if it indeed went down as he described.
Anyone hit by 'friendly fire' deserves it, they shouldn't be out there killing people anyway. For the US military in particular, we should celebrate every untimely death of their employees as a win against the tyrannical warmongers of the world.
29 comments
[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 74.8 ms ] threadThe only testimony about why the military is not interested in his solution comes from the inventor himself. The military meanwhile does invest in different solutions, which the inventor claims are inferior.
> “I gotta give ’em credit for trying,” he said. “They spent about a billion dollars, and the thing wouldn’t work with [individual] soldiers.
To me, it seems more likely that the military has identified certain disadvantages to his proposed solution, than that there is some sort of conspiracy theory against solo inventors or this inventor specifically. I find it hard to believe that this person could come up with a solution in one year, that is superior to anything that professionals have been able to come up with after 30 years and billions of dollars of investment, but that the military dismisses his idea out of hand just because he's a solo inventor and not a big contractor.
The fact that the military has and is investing billions of dollars to try and solve friendly fire events shows they're definitely interested in reducing friendly fire, but the article over and over tries to imply the military isn't that keen on it. The title itself implies that too.
Not once in this 6000 word article is there a definitive reasoning for why his solution was rejected. It's all just conjecture and testimony from the inventor himself. Poor.
Theoretically maybe still a problem if the enemy is waiting for that moment to shoot at you, but to wait for a friendly fire incident seems a bit inefficient.
Those things use active radar themselves, or alternatively, follow a laser (presumably generally from the firing vehicle).
I’m not sure if the temporary radar pulse is going to make much difference.
Not really, but if the aircraft launching that Hellfire announces itself like that prior to firing, just to check who you are, it may give you just enough information to fire at it preemptively, or at least know (or let others know) where to look for it.
It's not a problem if the US is fighting a technologically inferior opponent, but apparently (from what I've read on HN the other day), the US military is retooling itself towards competition with China, so they have to consider their technological trickery being used against them.
I think this only works for the targeted party, which sends a pulse, which you could potentially triangulate on. The firing aircraft sends a very narrow beam of signal, so unless you have a specific setup to detect the direction of the signal, you’ll just know you were hit by an unidentified radio beam.
I’m not a radio expert though, who knows what I’m missing :)
It's a hard problem.
Couple this with big name/external validation, and the fact that the best and brightest techs don't flock to the military (too dogmatic)...
The F35 is the new Bradley tank, and how much was spent?
Anyhow, you're probably correct, but I take exception to the reasoning being how much the military spent, or how long they worked at it.
(note: In times of war, all the political jockeying ends, disappears, and the military becomes lean and efficient. In times of peace, politics exist, including funding games.)
https://old.reddit.com/r/WarCollege/comments/erpmjm/having_j...
https://www.secretprojects.co.uk/threads/truth-to-the-pentag...
And finally a bit on the background of the Fighter Mafia member who wrote the black PR book that was used as basis for the movie (PhD thesis on the Fighter Mafia/Reformers and their influence in decision making in both USAF and elsewhere):
https://krex.k-state.edu/dspace/bitstream/handle/2097/38768/...
...that they're willing to spend billions of dollars and account for them as "investment in prevention of FF". Whether that means they actually want to prevent friendly fire or not is a different matter altogether, because of the way the money-distributing and -spending decisions are made.
Simply, he’s not Raytheon et al. It’s a rare piece of tech that any large military adopts from individual inventors.
A214-021 Open
Multi-Spectrum Combat Identification Target Silhouette (MCITS)
04/14/2021
blob:https://www.dodsbirsttr.mil/100fb9f6-d6e7-4a2d-8ad2-f2c08808...
I can think of lots of ways this could go wrong. LOTS of ways really... Doing this right is by far not a task as simple as described in this long article.
This relatively high freq would be a poor penetrator of anything wouldn't it? And with high power usage to boot. Unless I'm missing something here
But yeah, even 13.5ghz would be subject to interference. Though the 35+ ghz the other companies are looking at sound even worse. They must know something we don’t, I think
A staff sergeant was accidentally shot in the leg by a female soldier on the roof who was improperly loading an m240b machine gun behind our position. There were all sorts of things wrong with this picture.
First, we generally never loaded that thing until after people were back inside the wire after the first patrol. Secondly, it wasn't her job to load it. She'd never been trained on it but decided to "take the initiative". Thirdly, the m240b has a real shitty design in that it fires from an "open bolt" position. This means if you for example - smack it hard enough - it can start firing even if you didn't pull the trigger. This is called a bolt override and it's why we don't load the thing when there are people in front of it.
Anyway the Sergeants leg was fucked. He had to be shipped off to Germany and we never saw him again. But that female soldier? They sent her right back out to the line. The whole unit was pissed, but the brass just covered the whole thing up. That was the moment I decided I was done with the military.
If you are curious why I keep mentioning the gender of the soldier, it's not because I have any problem with women in the military or women in combat positions. What I did have a huge problem with at the time was untrained women in combat positions. The military was in the middle of a big diversity push at the time and just started pushing non-combat women into combat roles without any training. We'd just suddenly get a new person on our squad and be expected to trust them. And then when that person fucked up due to a complete lack of training, and shot one of us, we were expected to just treat them as if it never happened and keep working with them - for optics. Dumbest idea ever.
The incident described in the article (as least as the perpetrator describes it) sounds like a mistake made by multiple parties--the ground commander, the wingman, and the shooter himself compounded by bad weather, instrumentation glitches, and lack of sleep. The incident deserves a thorough review but seems quite a waste to discharge the shooter, a Lt Col, if it indeed went down as he described.
- can't the enemy home in on radio signals?
- what prevents the enemy from cloning the signals
- what happens when the enemy captures emitters?
- a lot more scary: what happens when the enemy captures detectors?