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 Grey Templar wrote:
Why is it even news that they managed to establish a wireless link between an airplane and a ship? My Mom can do that between her phone and her car's sound system.

This is actually a huge step, and its going to change warfare. While you can debate the ability of the F-35 to dogfight or perform missions it wasn't really designed to do, the tech that is going into that plane is revolutionary and is going be in every fighter the US builds in the near future. The data link is one of them.

Think of it this way, in the past, a fighter on patrol might see an enemy ship, and radio back "We've spotted a X-class ship (and they even get that wrong sometimes) heading X." Then this information gets passed around the fleet and they plot it and maybe pass it on to nearby ships. I doubt this information would have even made it to a regional command center quickly. There would have to be a number of manual steps to get that information into the hands of decision makers (which too gets lost sometimes) on what to do next, and you are also talking about a drag in time.

In the future, the F-35 sensors will spot the ship, identify what it is from its software, automatically transmit that information to nearby US warships, who in turn will pass that information real time through satellites to regional command centers and all the way to the Pentagon. There won't be "our fleet is here, and the enemy ship is about here." There will be a very detailed map on where every allied unit is and where every enemy unit is, and resources will be quickly assigned based on that information. The speed at which these decisions will be made will be much faster than most can imagine. And while the enemy is waiting for reports to come in on enemy movement, our bombs will already be on the way. Actually, munitions might even be launched from ships guided by the F-35.

Information is going to be the key to winning future wars, and that is why I keep talking about the 'system'. You can't judge any component of the US military on its own and judge the outcome of a battle based on that. Everything in the US military will be linked, passing information real time, and acting accordingly, while most opponents will be guessing.

Now I imagine there are ways to jam the transmissions and even try to hack that information, but I am sure the US military gave thought to that a long time ago.

The next evolution for this is to embed it into your infantrymen. So while the F-35 is doing this for a fleet, imagine a single infantryman passing information at the company level, or brigade, on what and where is nearby. Imagine a SEAL team with that technology. Based on what my neighbor told me, the peeps who make the HUD for the F-35 helmet are working on a similar display for infantry. Now, how you power that I have no idea. I imagine batteries will be an issue. We're probably a ways away from that though, but its coming. But tanks will have it, everything will have it.

But again, we’ve had wireless connections for decades. Over great distances, and they’ve only now managed one with a fighter? That smacks of gross incompetence.


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 A Town Called Malus wrote:

 AlmightyWalrus wrote:
Why is it even news that they landed someone on the Moon? Mankind's been flying places for over 40 years!

There's a tad bigger difference in distance between an aircraft moving at high velocities and an aircraft carrier than between your mum's phone and her car's sound system, and the phone is presumably also stationary in relation to the sound system.

And is also sending a lot less information. And isn't encrypting that information.

We can send pictures and entire programs worth of data wirelessly fairly trivially. That stuff takes a lot of data space. This really should have been something the military did decades ago.

This is really just smart phone level tech plus incryption, which wouldn’t add much in the way of data as to be a huge obstacle.

Yeah, this isn't particularly cutting-edge technology. But yet the F-35 is the first aircraft with this kind of capability. The reason why we see this introduced only now is probably because of security. Wireless connections are incredibly vulnerable to hacking, jamming and other kinds of interference. So while a wireless connection is nothing revolutionary, one that is secure enough for military use is.

It's not just about the F-35. It's about the training the pilot receives, how often they fly, and the tactics they practice. It's the integrated battle environment they will be flying in. The F-35 is not the first aircraft to use data links. It's been going on since the 1970's. Ever heard of AWACS? Airborne Warning and Control System? They have a radar that can see 250 miles (unclassified). The best a fighter can do is about 250 miles (F-22, F-35, maybe a couple other next gen Russian fighters, Euro Fighter?). The best target acquisition radars are good to only about 25 miles. Past that is "Beyond Visual Range (BVR)". One of the best AAM is the US AIM 120 with about an effective range of 50 miles. There are BVR missiles out there, but no one besides the US and a handful of other countries even have them, and none of them have the technology or training to employ them effectively like the US Air Force.

As a further plug for AWACS, they are way, way more than a flying radar plane. They are an Airspace Battle Management platform that can form data links with any aircraft in the US inventory, satellites, ground stations, Drones, and other intelligence platforms to form a picture of the battle space. They can communicate with all the air/ground assets in theater. Then the 20+ Airspace Battle Managers/Specialists onboard the aircraft manage and direct airspace assets to prosecute the Air Order of Battle. No other country in the world right now can fight in the air like the US.

As to how secure those data links are? Well, now we are talking about Electronic Warfare, and that stuff is a pretty highly guarded secret and classified. You can guess though, that if it was a problem, then not every aircraft in the US inventory would be retrofitted or built to enable data links.

You know what blew me away back in 2003? At Red Flag (think Top Gun for the Air Force), a F-22 was acting as a command/control platform. It has an "enemy" aircraft on it's mission data screen (note how it's not a radar screen...), that an F-15C couldn't see. The F-22 was able to look at the real time inventory on board the F-15C, see the most effective AAM the F-15 had, and send the F-15 a target request with target acquisition telemetry. The F-15 pilot sees the message, acknowledges the request, and pickles off a missile that uses the F-22's data to direct itself to the target. The F-15 pilot never even saw the target on his radar! That was in 2003. What do you think they have now?

 Grey Templar wrote:
But again, we’ve had wireless connections for decades. Over great distances, and they’ve only now managed one with a fighter? That smacks of gross incompetence.

The military can't just buy civilian tech off the shelf, they have military standards and compatibility to think about. Apple might not give two hoots about whether the newest i-gimmick works with older i-stuff, the military kind of has to. If you move to something entirely new you've got a whole fleet of machines that will need extensive refits in order to get the benefits, and that costs money. Tanks, aircraft, ships etc do get "upgrade packages" but they can't do that every year.

 Grey Templar wrote:
But again, we’ve had wireless connections for decades. Over great distances, and they’ve only now managed one with a fighter? That smacks of gross incompetence.

It's not just the wireless signal, it's the data processing and automation that is important. Sending lots of data wirelessly doesn't help much if you don't have a good way to integrate all of it into a coherent picture and ensure that the relevant information (and only the relevant information) gets to the people who need it. Connecting your phone to your car's speaker is more equivalent to speaking over the radio with another person, something we've been doing for what, 80+ years?

 Tamwulf wrote:

You know what blew me away back in 2003? At Red Flag (think Top Gun for the Air Force), a F-22 was acting as a command/control platform. It has an "enemy" aircraft on it's mission data screen (note how it's not a radar screen...), that an F-15C couldn't see. The F-22 was able to look at the real time inventory on board the F-15C, see the most effective AAM the F-15 had, and send the F-15 a target request with target acquisition telemetry. The F-15 pilot sees the message, acknowledges the request, and pickles off a missile that uses the F-22's data to direct itself to the target. The F-15 pilot never even saw the target on his radar! That was in 2003. What do you think they have now?

Well, military tech development doesn't move very fast usually (due to the prohibitive costs involved in implementing new developments), so I guess it is exactly the same technology just now with a whole aircraft carrier group linked up instead of a couple of aircraft. So now an F-35 could use the more powerful radars of a ship to acquire target locks, which is pretty cool. Or, a scouting F-35 could achieve target locks for an entire fleet of warships, which is downright terrifying...

it's happening with ground combat as well https://www.popularmechanics.com/military/aviation/a23652997/f-35-ground-rocket-launcher-team-up-to-destroy-target-with-pinpoint-accuracy/


The ability for our fighter aircraft to act as long distance realtime spotters is incredibly invaluable.