Nicholas Weaver is a researcher at the International Computer Science Institute in California. This is the first in an occasional series for Defense Tech.
In the past, military technology might have consistently outpaced civilian gear. Not any more.
Civilian electronics, manufacturing, and development cycles have radically shortened and improved. The computer which runs the F-22 is an absolute design marvel for its time, for example: 700 MIPS (Millions of Instructions per Second), approximately 300 Megabytes of memory, and some 20 billion DSP [digital signal processing] style operations.
Yet its time was the late 80s and early 90s, when much of the hardware was finalized. Today, a Playstation 3 meets or exceeds this performance, for $600 instead of perhaps $30,000,000. (Of course, the F22’s avionics are considerably more robust and presumably more reliable.)
So the question becomes, what happens if America’s opponents start massively adopting commercial technology and commercial design styles? In Iraq, insurgents are already using commercial gear to build and trigger bombs. But it’s not hard to imagine absorption on a much broader scale. After all, the weapon business is a business, there are brilliant engineers around the world, and the basic building blocks continue to grow more sophisticated.
This occasional series of speculations will attempt to predict that future, by technological “red-teaming,” sketching out what an opponent could do. This first article attempts to postulate what the future of air defense radar will be, and how it will force radical changes in US military operations.
The United States enjoys pure air superiority. No other nation can hope to match the USAF, and no other country will likely try. But an opponent doesn’t have to match our fighters, they only need ground based air defenses, which starts with radars.
Today, they don’t have much of a hope. Between stealth aircraft and anti-radar missiles, an opponent’s air defenses will be destroyed within minutes of a conflict. , or simply remains offline in an attempt to preserve some capabilities. {Which is what the Serbs did in the 90s keeping their radars off, mostly, and using ballistic firing.)
But there is a technology which might change this balance. And it’s got its roots in the commercial world. Multipath radar would provide a defender with a robust radar system, able to detect and track many stealth aircraft, counter anti-radar missiles, and enable the defender to track all radio emitters within the country.
In a conventional radar, a radio signal is broadcast. When a plane or other object is in the path of this beam, it may be reflected back towards the radar station. By using timing, direction, and the size and intensity of the reflected signal, the radar site can track and identify objects. Yet it is this very radar signal which anti-radar missiles target, making the stations vulnerable to attack.
Stealth aircraft avoid radar by being made of materials that are either transparent to, or absorbing of, the radar’s signal. Or, the planes scatter the radio signal so that it bounces away from the radar station. That’s why stealth aircraft have such unusual shapes.
But there is another way to build a radar. If you scatter a bunch of radio sources around the countryside, each of which are broadcasting, the signals will scatter off any aircraft in the area. With a group of distributed receivers, these scattered signals can be received and analyzed. This is called “multipath radar”, as the signals traverse multiple paths to receivers.
There are a few prerequisites for multipath radar. The broadcasters, although simple, need to transmit an identifier as part of their signals, and be at known locations. The receivers, on the other hand, need to be very sophisticated. This requires sophisticated radio antennas and, more importantly, “serious DSP magic,” which, when networked together, can compute a cohesive picture of the defender’s airspace.
Yet the hardware to perform such DSP operations is becoming commonplace and commercially prevalent. GNU radar and other designs can receive the signals, and conventional computers and DSPs can then process the results, extract the features, and create an overall picture. There have been prototypes built in the United Kingdom, able to track commercial aircraft by observing the reflected signals from cell-phone towers.
Why do I believe multipath radar will be a case where civilian technology may have a huge military impact? Simply because the “serious DSP Magic”, the signal processing components and programming skills needed to make everything work, are the same principles behind spread-spectrum cellular basestations, software radios, and even MIMO antennas for 802.11N basestations.
If multipath radar is deployed by adversaries or potential adversaries, it could greatly affect US operations. Stealth aircraft based on scattering the signal are simply not stealthy to multipath radar. Worse, the transmitters are no longer co-located with the receivers and electronics. Thus anti-SAM and anti-radar tactics will need to be restructured, as simply blowing up the transmitters destroys valueless targets and an adversary could simply build more $500 transmitters than the US has anti-radiation missiles.
Finally, the same DSP processing and antenna infrastructure which forms a multipath radar also enables the defender to track radio sources, by detecting unique sources and using timing to triangulate their locations. Simple traffic analysis, knowing where your opponents are, can be invaluable for military strategists. Radio silence protocols would need to be strictly enforced and enhanced, which could also affect proposed “system of systems” technologies.
A new technology can change the world. Multipath radar might change how the US military needs to operate, both in the air and on the ground. And the building blocks are in catalogs, now.
– Nicholas Weaver
Interesting article, although I think concerns over technical prowess of our potential enemies ought to be tempered with the knowledge that not everybody will attempt high-tech solutions when there are suitable low-tech substitutions. I thought I remembered reading somewhere that an F-117 was brought down during the Bosnian conflict by ground spotters staring at the sky and radioing AAA batteries that a plane was inbound. Similarly, there was the much-written-about Millenium Challenge 02, where American invasion forces were stymied by motorcycle messengers to defeat electronic eavesdropping and suicide bombers in speedboats.
Of course, this all comes back to the challenge of which enemy you’re preparing to fight. A war with China or even North Korea looks very different from operations in most sub-Sarahan African missions or even ops in Iraq or Afghanistan. China may well have the knowledge, capability, and inclination to do the sorts of radar tricks you mention.
Of course, two can play this game. I suspect that for the multipath radar solution to work, one must also have a reliable, robust communications network. Such a network is fairly easy to disrupt, which in turn would seriously degrade the value of the multipath radar. Another technique might involve using EMP (or some allied technique) to produce soft-kills against the small-cheap transmitting nodes and/or the fusion centers making use of modern high-speed DSPs. This doesn’t suggest that SEAD attacks will not have to be revised, but once we know that the problem exists, it seems that the solutions (I mention only two…many others exist) can be rather easily implemented.
As a side point, the author never really bothers to ask WHY the military doesn’t use the more modern technology. Part of it is, of course, typical procurement rigidity, but part of it is also that the military components are not precisely the same as the corresponding civilian parts. Most (not all, I concede) of the military components are radiation and EMP-hardened, and as the author correctly points out, the avionics are substantially more robust. This leads to additional problems for the user of civilian components in a potential battlefield situation.
None of this should be taken to suggest that the idea presented by the author isn’t worth considerable investigation, but a silver bullet, it ain’t
A Bistatic/Multistatic radars again… These keep getting trotted out as examples of where simple technology coupled with good DSP will amaze! Also a bit of ‘sexy defeat stealth’ in there too.
I produced a prototype similar to this for my Masters thesis making use of the new terrestrial digital tv tranmitters we had in the UK, and whilst not real time it was able to pic up aircraft and helicopters using just a simple setup.
I posted something related to this on google groups back then [ http://groups.google.co.uk/group/ sci.engr.radar+sonar/ browse_thread/thread/ ca13d1f4e0aeb92d/6b85dd544d0d702e? lnk=st&q=bistatic+radar&rnum=1&hl=en#6b85dd544d0d702e ] and got some considered replys that I think are quite pertinent — especially with the reference to not get carried away in technical glamour.
(Rule 1: With rare exception and with all else equal, standard radar
performance measures show progressive degradation as geometry departs
from a monostatic alignment. This is strictly a matter of physical law
and is unrelated to the state of any technological art.
Rule 2: Generally bistatic systems involve more complex system
elements and consequently incur greater cost than comparably
performing monostatic systems.
Finally, I cannot deny that bistatic/multistatic technology has the
potential to serve certain narrow application niches. As such, its
relative merits always deserve fresh examination in light of any newly
emergent enabling technology. However, projects run a risk of engaging
in fruitless technological pursuits when reasons for considering
bistatics are vague and seemingly driven more to appease a sense of
technological glamour rather than to fulfill a genuine need with a
rational engineering solution.
Away from Bistatics I do concur with the authors view that commercial approaches can lead the way for example mobile phones vs battlefield radios.
A related concern is that once one person has a DSP system for multipath radar, it is a valuable asset which is easy to proliferate.
DSP software on a CD shipped in a jewel box for the latest disney movie could be sent by mail anonymously to almost any country in the world without detection by even the most powerful NSA technology.
The computer itself could probably be puchased from Dell and delivered by a tourist almost as easily and entirely legally. The computer purchase also wouldn’t have to be coordinated with the software and parts instructions buy.
The parts needed for signal transmission could be built locally for easily available parts with legitimate civilian uses. So could the receivers. Design schematics and how to instructions could be included on the CD with the software.
There would have to be some technical expertise to supervise the implementation (but not design) of the system and construction of the broadcastor and receiver units, but this is well within the expertise of just about any BA electrical engineer, a skill set present in almost every military in the world, and in a great many insurgent forces.
A multi-path radar system CD would be a bargain to a national military or insurgent force at say, $10,000,000. And, this would be a budget quite sufficient to encourage unemployed scientists or engineers in some first world country to develop it. Linux was designed for less.
The “Journal of Electronic Defense” published a comprehensive article crediting the destruction of the USAF F-117 by a Serbian SA-3 SAM battery during the 1999 Kosovo crisis to the battery’s commander. The Serbian officer in question had carried out certain field modifications to the battery’s mobile search and fire control radars that enabled the detection of the F-117 aircraft at close range. The same officer credited the survival of his battery from NATO SEAD missions to frequent and rapid position changes. If the stealth technology of the F-117 is so “invincible,” why was there so much “huffing and puffing” about the alleged illegal export of passive radar equipment from a country in Eastern Europe to the now defunct regime of Saddam Hussein just before the Coalition military operations in Iraq in March 2003?
I read with interest your piece about how the PS3 is more powerful than America’s next generation fighter aircraft!! I really hope the US’s enemies don’t find a way to use this against them… one can easily envision a setup where a single Cell Broadband Engine (the PS3’s processor) powers a master-slave arrangement of UAVs, with the main processing on the Master (controller) UAV, taking care of targeting and higher logic, while each Slave (attack) UAV is controlled by one of the 7 PPEs on the chip, while being fed data from the main processor. What a chilling prospect…
Where is the PS3 Built? China. Xbox 360? China. 80% of the components that go into a Dell computer? China.
If you don’t get my point, here it is. China will be at the forefront of civilian to military technology. If China decided to switch it’s factories over to purely military production, we would have a hard time keeping up, since China makes everything, from boots to bombs. And they can do it overnight. This scenario is not far fetched since most factories are government owned. What’s really sad is the west is happily enabling China to modernize, simply because we want cheap goods.
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