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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.
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 d…
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, bu…
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 d…
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.
It's a hard problem.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
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.
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.
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.
- 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?
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.
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