DRONES PING TERRORISTS’ MOBILES

“Experiments in the Nevada desert are using unmanned air­craft to find the exact loca­tion of enemy elec­tronic emis­sions, such as the mobile phone of a ter­ror­ist in a fast-​​moving auto,” Aviation Week reports.

U.S. Air Force researchers say they’ve been able to locate such tar­gets, as well as mobile mis­sile sys­tems, within tens of meters and often in less than a minute, which makes them vul­ner­a­ble to attack before they can flee sur­veil­lance.
Such tasks, until now, were the exclu­sive purview of clas­si­fied sys­tems on the Pentagon’s small fleets of U-​​2, RC-​​135 Rivet Joint and other manned, intelligence-​​gathering air­craft. With the mis­sion shift­ing to more ver­sa­tile, long-​​endurance UAVs [unmanned aer­ial vehi­cles], new tech­nolo­gies are emerg­ing from the black world to become weapons in the war on ter­ror­ism, say researchers here.
While trans­fer­ring the mis­sion to UAVs is a tech­no­log­i­cal leap in itself, more impor­tantly, it opens doors for the U.S. inva­sion of enemy air defenses and other sys­tems through their inte­grated com­mu­ni­ca­tions links. Once elec­tronic emis­sions are located, pack­ages of algo­rithms ana­lyze them and fig­ure out how to exploit the foe’s sys­tems by min­ing them for infor­ma­tion, deceiv­ing them or tak­ing con­trol of their oper­a­tion.
For exam­ple, U.S. Air Force oper­a­tors can use new, grow­ing fam­i­lies of elec­tronic attack weapons to see, from inside the enemy’s air defense sys­tem, what their radars can detect. They can even, as an option, turn enemy radars away from the areas where U.S. air­craft are pen­e­trat­ing their defenses… or, more intrigu­ingly, they could be attacked at the speed of light with elec­tronic algo­rithms or bursts of high-​​power microwaves.

August 16th, 2004 | Drones | Comments Off Both comments and pings are currently closed.