Obfuscating long range recon

totoro

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This is NOT a ukraine war threat but a hypothetical discussion one. Granted, the idea came from the actual situation where NATO is using its recon assets over international waters to look from a great distance onto adversary territory. So various optical, radar and ELINT sensors are being used on planes overflying the Black Sea.

Now, I do not want to discuss Russia and the actual situation. Russia may or may not lack the numbers, tech and what not to do the obfuscating properly. But let us imagine a country with equipment like the US. Such a country wants to prevent a country like US/NATO to use those sensors on those planes effectively.
So what could be done?

Here's a few wild ideas and you can tell me if some would work or not, or if they'd not be cost effective.

Against radar sensors - fly a plane of your own very close to the adversary awacs/joint stars/P8/whatever, and I mean very close - like 100 m away, and continuously try to match the flight profile so your plane is physically obstructing the view for the enemy radar, as much as possible. Which might still not be enough, so your plane is also a electronic signal emitter. Basically a massive, powerful jammer. Would the proximity and sheer power of emission still cause issue for the enemy radar, even if the jammer can't always track the signal and adjust to it quickly enough?

Against ELINT sensors - very similar - fly a plane super close and keep bombarding nearby airspace at as many possible frequencies as possible with powerfully emitted junk signals? Would the enemy ELINT plane still manage to pick up useful data coming from afar in such close by noise environment?

Against optical sensors -
1) fly a plane very close which then uses a very low power and wide beam laser (Wide because of ease of hitting the sensor), continuously at the optical sensors of the enemy plane. The idea would be that the power of the laser is low enough that it can't hurt anyone, can't even damage the sensor permanenetly so the enemy can't say they're under attack, but still powerful enough to degrade performance of the sensor at the moment of its use. Even lowering the resolution by a few times might be enough.

or 2) fly a plane very close, but very slightly forward. And have a pole extend underneath the plane. the pole would have a bunch of tiny strips of foil or whatever attached, so they form a physical obstacle to the enemy sensor.

I guess both ideas for optical sensor obstruction are hard to pull off, as it's hard to really tell where exactly is the camera looking. Especially the foil idea might be unfeasible, as it might require the plane to fly prohibitively close to the enemy.
 
I don't you can fly airplanes into hostile neutral state territory for a lot of this. Now it is possible to disrupt ISR by third parties out over international waters via various methods, however:

If the opposing state have any air combat capability, the "harassed" 3rd party neutral forces can just to setup an ambush for a shoot down. (especially when 3rd parties can just supply the opposing party with fighter aircraft)

There is also risks of escalation from close air encounters in general, like the case of Chinese jet ramming a P-3.

Finally, it also take your own airframes to accomplish the mission. For a weak power that can not remotely match USAF in sortie generation and shut it down, starting another front in the air war is a very bad idea. Even without shoot downs, the fuel and maintenance requirements do not go away it it just force cuts from more useful air missions.

Now that is not saying disrupting 3rd party ISR is never a useful tactic, but it would be extremely situational.
 
The easiest way to avoid detection is to not look like a target. Depending on the sphere of battle this manifests differently.

This is increasingly difficult for ground armies when sensors get better and even five or six guys with a couple machine guns between them look tempting for a long range artillery attack. Shells are cheap. Soldiers aren't. Armies are, glacially, evolving into hit squads and civilian-dressed special forces teams al a Delta Force and CIA SAD. Eventually, something as powerful as a single tank will be detected from orbit and destroyed almost immediately, much less a platoon or company of them, so there won't be a reason for the superpowers to have them, at least for their own-wars.

Genocidal Organ, despite the major plot conceit being based on Chomskian linguistics (which, honestly, is not that bad), is actually a pretty decent portrayal of what future soldiers might look like, barring some of the more loopy animesque bits ("so how about it, you ready to kill some children?" lmfao); then again, a soldier's moral injury leading to the sabotage of a national war effort are hardly new irl. The part of that sabotage being successful is the animesque bit I guess, but a universal grammar would really be the ultimate weapon etc. I digress...

For warships, submarines are the obvious conclusion. Surface ships will have their purpose for small wars, like Russia vs. Ukraine, but against other big countries the surface ship is not very useful from the start as it is too easily destroyed. Whether they will be useful at all or completely useless (i.e. do they go in after the destruction of airbases by cruise missile attack or do they get their home ports nuked and have nowhere to return to) is for the future to reveal. Much like how armies may retain token ground forces for purposes of parades (a couple hundred or dozen tanks is more than adequate to subdue a third world country like Afghanistan), navies may be primarily measured by their submarine forces but retain token surface fleets for more common but not particularly useful (at the upper end of the escalation ladder that is) jobs like showing the flag or participating in confidence exercises.

For aircraft, and spacecraft, the already decided on future is VLO stealth and subsonic attack aircraft. Going very slowly will all but eliminate the thermal signature, which can be detected from orbit by last generation space-based IR sensors, and perhaps something like piezoelectric skin can be used to further mask the thermal signature by resembling the Earth below the plane using a multi-band DAS as a source IR image. That would make aircraft broadly immune to passive detection from above, and when combined with radar stealth, will make them tough to sus out before they hit their targets.

The greatest future threat to attack aircraft, after all, isn't other aircraft, but rather orbital detection networks of LEO-based AMTI radars and thermal-infrared detection networks al a SBIRS-LO. Spacecraft will have immunity to attack based on either altitude (above LEO) or sheer number (cubesat swarms) and likely be fired routinely into orbit both to replenish stocks of swarms (cubesats decay quickly) and battlefield losses from kamikaze cubes. Radar/laser jammers and stuff will not be particularly important since they will be extremely visible (there's a giant emitter *right there*) so you'd just kill them with AARGMs or something.

At this point, this future includes only the PRC and America, as these are the only countries which can domestically support major development of new generation aerospace forces and space industrial development. I don't see any European country, including Russia, getting there in the coming decades. Europeans will certainly reduce the size of their armies but neither UK/France/Germany troika nor Russia are economically developed enough to have their own domestic orbital electric eyes, although of the two it is Russia that is best positioned to support their patron state. They will still leech off the US and PRC respectively as they are the imperial peripheries to their colonial clients.

Naturally the problem is finding the labor and workforce to actually accomplish the construction of new submarines, new generations of warplanes, and training new special forces commandos to attack enemy national leaders, in the demographically declining West. Perhaps the fit, young males of the obsolete land armies of the world can be recycled from being soldiers to being welders and factory laborers though. The PRC has plenty of these, simply by nature of being undeveloped, while the West has few and getting less, so it's likely the West is going to continue falling behind the PRC in gross output.

Africa, the only place that is still demographically growing, is shaping up to be a pretty good proxy force for competing colonial hegemonies. Stuff like Syria, Ukraine, and Libya, where Western troops never touched the ground outside of special operations forces, are the portent of the future. Mali is the exception here, and even that is more using Westerners as shock troops and advisors than anything (being comparable to pre-2022 Ukraine war), and it's likely that mass occupations like the latter half of Afghanistan and all of Iraq will never be performed again (by the West, that is) simply because there won't be enough young men to fill out the ranks. Instead of a million European and American troops (ODS), or even a quarter million (OIF), it will be an invasion spearheaded by the Saudi and UAE armies, with advisors from the US and France, and one US or French battalion for every dozen or two dozen Arab battalions. Maybe two thousand Westerner ground troops total, and a quarter million Arabs? That would be a decent peg for a very major ground war of the future.

In other words, not being detected is impossible in the future. People will know something is there. They will aggressively be searching for it, too. They might miss it if it falls outside their area of expectation (machine learning is especailly vulnerable to this, which is why I don't think it will be helpful in sussing out insurgents or anything), so being targeted is another thing entirely. Everything from ballistic missile RVs to infantrymen are simply going to have to resemble things that aren't targets to neutralize the threat of airpower and allow the offense to take primacy again. There have been shades of this in Kosovo, Serbia, Iraq, where "anti-simulation" (for lack of a better term, I'm borrowing this one from ABM) decoys successfully tied down UN airpower but was not sufficient to bring victory. That's simply because Milosevic feared his own death more than he feared capitulation. Most recently in Afghanistan, "not resembling a target" was a successful tactic used against the international occupation forces though, so it apparently requires a force which is both unyielding and has an unmolested enclave of friendly territory, ideally supported by a third party that plays both sides.

It will require throwing out a lot of norms of war at the end of the day, but most norms were established when Europe was ascendant as a global hegemony and not a imperial periphery between globally competing American and Asian civilizations, so it follows that with a change of civilizations there comes a change of international norms. Things like perfidy and not wearing uniforms will become SOP, although they already are for Western special operations troops, in order to avoid stuff like automatic machine guns or Gorgon Stare-type WFOV sensors, etc. Camp Bastion inflicted on the Chinese by an American merchant marine crew of disguised Navy SEALs could be effective, especially if it destroys a large crop of advanced aircraft or trained pilots, for instance.

Most of this boils down to the US and PRC civilizations being close to demographic collapse (something which Europe writ large, as well as Korea and Japan, are already in the throes of) and inevitable economic excesses that brings though. I suspect this is less a facet of technology itself and more a facet of the societies we live in, which encourage things like consumerist consumption over raising families, by making TVs cheap and children expensive, for reasons of supporting individualism over collectivism. It's not a particularly desirable place to be since the only way forward after this is eventually these tiny hit squads of commandos, and their super expensive airplanes, will be so expensive they will be defeated when four of maybe a dozen fighter pilots in the nation will get into a car accident, and a more youthful and virile enemy just overruns the nation literally without firing a shot.

Small armies aren't a particularly nice place to be, and I suppose if you had sufficiently big armies, you could easily absorb the losses from these mega satellite networks and smart bombs by simply charging ahead. Unfortunately, no one is producing 50-100,000 units of a main battle tank like the T-55 or M4 Sherman anymore. If they did, they would hardly be able to find enough men to crew a tenth of that number. Perhaps someone will eventually, and I suppose those people will inherit the Earth, but it won't be the technologically advanced societies which consider production runs of 100-200 tanks to be "large" lol.

tl;dr Long range detection can only be "obfuscated" by not drawing attention to yourself, at least until they can be destroyed. In the majority of cases, these detection methods cannot be destroyed, and we're getting to the point where two competing superpowers will be in control of indestructible reconnaissance platforms. Jamming attacks draw attention to yourself, so are pretty much right out. If you can make a jammer that draws attention to itself and is either cheap enough to be expendable or robust enough to survive counter attack, then you might have a utility for it, though. It would be so that actual troops can move while the enemy's electric fovea is focused on a single target.

The only means of evading destruction at that point is to not look like a target. Either hide under something constantly like a submarine does, resemble something you aren't like an airplane's thermoelectric skin copying the thermal background of the Earth or clouds below it, or don't gaggle together in a big group that draws attention like not having a motor rifle company assembly area where everyone just vibes waiting to be struck by a fire strike. The best methods of doing this are to build more submarines (with stealth shaping like the Astute and Astute replacement, to evade strategic SURTASS LFA, of course) and fewer aircraft carriers; build active thermal-infrared stealth alongside radar stealth into the designs of new generation stealth aircraft that will succeed F-22/F-35; and exist as a small group of lightly loaded soldiers used to foraging and existing in situ with indigenous people like the U.S. Special Forces.

All the pieces are there it's just a matter of putting them together. Given the latest generation of aircraft in the world have had a gestation period of about 40 years once traced back to ASTOVL of the 1980's, it's still very far in the future, though.
 
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Dear Kat Tsun,
Your lengthy post brought to mind another concept: spoofing.
What if a technologically advanced military-industrial complex can manufacture hundreds of low-cost "spoofers" that emit thermal and electronic "noise" that resembles a tank troop?
Bonus if they can also transmit 3D holograms realistic enough to fool optical sensors.
These "spoofers" convince invaders to expend all their expensive guided missiles on "spoof" targets during the first week or three of a war.
 
Long range sensing and fires is still limited even if it is constantly improving. There is still a significant gap on what can be defeated via long range bombardment and what needs to be cleared at close ranges.

The counter measure to long range sensing and fires can be categorized as follows:
1. Passive Counter Sensor (stealth, counter identification)
2. Active Counter Sensor (kill the sensor, disrupt the sensor)
3. Counter firepower (armor, mass, interception)

1. As long range sensors can still not penetrate solid material effectively, tunnels and urban areas remains highly effective hiding areas that negates long range precision fires. The art of field fortification can also include greater emphasis on top cover with changes in organization, training, supply and equipment. The historically improvised top cover can instead become a standard supply item with mechanized equipment support, enabling rapid establishment of defensive positions.

For mobile forces, the growth of long range, low cost aerial observation have make historical platforms easy to detect. Smaller, lower signature vehicles is one countermeasure like the usage of motorcycles for insurgent forces, and UGVs and robotics opens up new options. The other thing is to deny identification of high value targets: with motor vehicles being very abundant it is easy to hide high value mission systems and manpower in a "sea" of cheap, civilian grade motor vehicles. Long range weapons on vehicle is also helpful in increasing amount of time under good cover relative to being exposed under movement.

The range and mobility constrains on very small land vehicles relative to aerial vehicles also suggests that air mobile, land to hide platforms (eg. perching drones) would become a effective model for land warfare. Micro-Air deployed minefield is a no brainer for territory denial.

2. Active counter to sensors is problematic due to lightly bounded scaling curve: which is to say very wealthy forces can afford well protected very long range sensors while poor forces can not.

In true peer conflict both sides would be destroying and defeating opponent sensors effectively. However true peer conflict is insane and ought not happen except by mistake, and most conflict is between the strong and weak. In the asymmetric scenario, passive counter sensor will have to do.

3. The final option in defeating long range fires is to survive the firepower. This is primarily a problem for attacking forces as attacking forces can benefit least from static concealment, cover and supplies that the defender have at low costs. As effective combat range is defined by the range where offensive firepower outmatches defensive capability, attacker need multiple advantages to succeed as defensive capability alone is never economical.

The necessity of close combat by the attacker ties back to point one: passive means of reducing long range strikes works and it takes either close combat or extreme (nuclear) levels of firepower to defeat the most hardened parts of an opponent.

The ratio of relative resource and rate of advance is the thing to look for.
At 1:1 force ratio, there is only very bad odds for advance.
At 100:1 force ratio, defeating fires is often possible and rapid offenses are possible.

Force ratio is local, so in a large conflict between peers there is still a place for anti-firepower offensive forces for when situations occurs. It can takes months and years of long range warfare shaping the battlefield before close combat attacks become viable however.

Maneuver forces like armored formations have always relied on local superiority of forces to attack. Improvement in long range fires enabling greater defensive concentration of firepower means a change in optimal force capability mix and required force ratio for offensive. The utility to more quickly defeat the opponent when given an significant tactical advantage remains.
 
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