Defence and Freedom: April 2019

2019/04/27

Ship detection by synthetic aperture radar imaging of wakes

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A radar could indirectly 'see' a moving ship by 'seeing' its wake even 36 years ago:

I've seen even more impressive SAR imagery of a moving ship being visible by its wake (SEASAT imagery, 1978), published in the mid-80's already. The principle of detecting a moving ship by sensing its wake should nevertheless be obvious by this available lower quality image.

Radar's ability to find ships by their wakes has multiple important consequences in the naval domain:

radar stealth for surface ships is likely of little use against high altitude or orbital radars which can employ a SAR mode
as a consequence, radar satellites (even civilian ones meant for land imagery) may be of great importance to navies
as another consequence, the supersonic and high-flying anti-ship missiles (and Chinese quasiballistic anti-ship missiles) may have a vastly better capability to discriminate real moving ships from decoys than the typical Western approach of radar-guided seaskimmer missiles
and as yet another consequence, there's an additional realm for camouflage and deception; wakes* (this may also help a bit against wake-homing torpedoes)

I simply meant to point this out in a bit more detail than before because I find this hardly ever mentioned in the context of naval surface warfare and anti-shipping air warfare.

/2018/02/modern-warships-iii-aaw.html, quote from there:

Radar stealth is helpful at long distances, but (...) In theory it's even possible that a missile could climb after being detected and look at the sea surface to spot ship's the wake pattern to tell real ship targets from decoys and boats (...).

S O

defence_and_freedom@gmx.de

*: Hull vanes and certain hull shapes may help.
www.hullvane.com/
www.brighthubengineering.com/naval-architecture/81960-minimizing-wake-by-hull-design/

2019/04/20

Just some old aircraft projects

I don't have much prepared for the Easter days' release, so I'll simply drop a few hints to fascinating old aircraft types that never really made it to production. (This post was in the draft stage since 2013, so this is really a kind of emergency filler for the blog.)

Historic aircraft are an old hobby of mine. People with a similar interest should have a look at the secretprojects.co.uk forum.

Horten Ho X

Here's an artist's impression of a Horten Ho X. This could have been a fighter of the 1947 generation with the second German generation of turbojets (HeS 011 engine, 13 kN). Turbojets coupled with such a large wing area would have yielded a superb performance at high and extremely high altitude (if cabin was properly pressurised), but the fighter would have been quite useless at low altitude and still inefficient at medium altitude (fuel consumption was tripled at low altitude). The project didn't advance much and it's questionable if the small developing company would have been able to stem the development in a few years. Maybe some other company could have taken over the detail development as happened with Ho IX/Gotha P.60.

XB-28

Next, a North American XB-28 Dragon prototype, I rate it as one of the very best bombers of its period. The USAF was pig-headed and insisted on thinking of it as a medium bomber despite having heavy bomber performance. Its high altitude performance was not needed for medium altitude. Cheaper medium bombers of significantly lesser flight performance (B-25 and B-26) were available for bombing at medium altitudes, thus no B-28 quantity production orders were given. The B-28 would have been a most famous WW2 aircraft today if it had been employed as a strategic bomber to replace B-17s in combination with RAZON munitions in '44.

Ju 288V-13, prototype for C version

Junkers Ju 288. It's similar to the XB-28 with pressurised cabin and remotely operated armament, but with greater speed and bombload. Intercepting this bomber would have been difficult, pursuit would have been quite pointless - and this in addition to it having good range, normal armour protection, self-sealing fuel tanks and defensive guns.

It was overall a much better design than the XB-28 (quite a feat!), but Germany didn't get remote control of defensive guns as right throughout WW2 (despite employment in Me 210/410 and some He 177) as did the Americans. This bomber was tied to an exceptional aircraft engine (Jumo 222), and it's never been completely understood why this engine never left development stage. It may have been a mix of political intervention, mission creep and use of scarce metal alloys. The Ju 288 design had mission creep as well, with the B version being a larger redesign of the A version and C version being meant for some vastly inferior engines. The relatively ordinary DB 603 engine had reached enough power (1,900 hp) and reliability to propel the Ju 288A version by 1944, but by then there was no interest in a new piston engine bomber any more.

Hs 127 V-1

Hs 127 three-view line drawing

This is the Henschel Hs 127. It looks like a de Havilland Mosquito, right? It flew in 1937 and was meant to be faster than any fighter at that time (actually as fast as the fastest in-service fighters in 1940). Its bad luck was that it competed against the excellent Junkers Ju 88 while being the more tactically daring and unusual concept. Later in WW2, the Mosquito proved the soundness of the Hs 127's concept in many roles including night fighter. I do not quite understand why the Hs 127 design (which did reach the prototype stage) is never being mentioned when the issue of aircraft types available to Germany as night fighters in 1940-1945 comes up.

S O

2019/04/13

Fair burden-sharing in NATO

The silly idea that NATO members should allocate 2% of their national income to deterrence and defence annoyed me a lot for a long time. It's not only too much given the modest conventional threat, but it also distracts. Total military power is of little interest to our deterrence and defence as long as almost all of it is far from our frontier, and a coup de main-style grab of the Baltics is the least unlikely scenario of aggression against NATO. We shouldn't focus on raw quantity, but on smart allocation.

Furthermore, it's nonsense to ask poor or heavily indebted countries far from the threatened Eastern European region to spend much on the military. They would be better off with Ireland's security policy (~0.4% GDP military spending, member of EU, not part of NATO).*

So I gave it a try and created a table to see if I could come up with a more sensible distribution of burden:

minor inaccuracies regarding GDP and GDP per capita are possible

The rule should be a bit more fluent than the simple '100% GDP public debt' rule above to avoid unintended incentives to keep the public debt above 100% GDP, but I think the table conveys the basic idea on taking into account public debt well.

The U.S. could separately choose to have higher military spending because of the PR China, but that would be unrelated to NATO. Norway and Canada could consider themselves frontier countries because of the Arctic territories (and a rather negligible Norway-Russia border), but I don't.

357 bn USD military spending is plenty. I didn't add the extra effort to convert in USD PPP, but the picture should be clear; this is easily enough to deter and defend against Russia (66.3 bn USD) + Belarus (0.6 bn USD). Any minister of defence or general or admiral who claims otherwise should be fired immediately for gross incompetence.

Readers might associate hollowed-out, ineffective armed services with the hypothetical budget levels in the table. Such symptoms are NOT the consequence of such spending levels, but of intentional cynical dereliction of duty by ministers of defence, generals and admirals who prefer to keep structures nominally powerful and cut the budgets for fuels, spare parts, repairs, upgrades and munitions instead of adapting the force to the appropriate size and make it fit. The hollow force syndrome is not something you should blame fiscal politicians for, but something the top brass and ministers of defence should be fired for.

I excluded legacy costs such as pensions on the bottom of the table, so it should very well be possible to trim the forces to an appropriate size and high fitness for their mission with those budgets.

I suppose my hypothetical framework for fair burden-sharing in deterrence & defence of NATO makes a lot more sense than the crude 2% nonsense rule that was really just a poorly veiled effort to push the Europeans into becoming more useful auxiliaries for stupid American small wars. It was never really founded on any actual threat, as evidenced by the military spending disparity to Russia since the mid-90's.

S O

defence_and_freedom@gmx.de

*: 'My country first' can be applied by all countries.

2019/04/06

Link dump April 2019

Yesterday: Your loudspeaker is a microphone.

Today: Your hard disk drive is a microphone.

theregister.co.uk/2019/03/07/hard_drive_eavesdropping/

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breakingdefense.com/2019/03/us-gets-its-ass-handed-to-it-in-wargames-heres-a-24-billion-fix/
The mentioned weaknesses have been public knowledge for a long time.
We should always keep in mind that such studies are being financed by a bureaucracy that wants more money.

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9gag.com/gag/az9P3qx

As usual, it's clearly visible if you know what to look for.

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People who get all agitated and fearful about imaginary problems like 'Sharia law in the West' deserve ridicule IMO. I would be fine with everyone simply pitying or ignoring them if they weren't so aggressively spreading their fearfulness and pretending to be the opposite of what they are; fearful pussies.

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www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2019/03/24/soldier-charged-going-rogue-computer-game-virtual-battlefield/

He was the only one who snapped in the simulation. That's good-enough reason to believe he'd be among the first to do so in a real warzone. I propose to discharge the jerk.

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www.esquire.com/uk/latest-news/a26617960/donald-trumps-now-reportedly-racked-up-more-than-9000-lies-since-taking-office/

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www.businessinsider.com/finland-develops-horrific-jumping-land-mine-to-deter-russia-invasions-2018-3

This should be very effective against lying/crawling infantry, but not nearly as much against upright infantry. Maybe it's meant to be used in combination with claymore-pattern remotely controlled mines.

Anyway, it reminds me of some German 120 mm mortar bomb (shrapnel-like) development from the 1990's which had a blunt front plate with tungsten pellets or balls, meant to shoot downwards to the ground (IIRC it was meant to be proximity fused and ditched a ballistic cap prior to explosion).

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boingboing.net/2019/03/11/sleep-is-a-brain-repair-mechan.html
"I'm repairing!"
I like that excuse.

This could lead to legal issues in the long term. Soldiers who were sleep-deprived for years might claim brain damage and demand compensation in the 2030's.

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I mentioned this technique (water transfer printing) before. This time I'd like to hint that the ability of water transfer printing to bring camo patterns on fairly complicated shapes could be used to solve a common problem of military camouflage:

All those fancy camouflage patterns mean little if cluttered by webbing, pouches and gear. Camouflage patterns may have a macro pattern to disrupt the shape at distances such as 100 m, but this macro pattern would only become visible on the legs and maybe the arms because the torso is too cluttered with objects on top of the camouflage clothing.

In theory, we could equip a puppet with the full gear, subject it to water transfer printing of a full body camouflage pattern and could (with some imperfections) actually achieve a full body, disruptive macropattern for once.

A reversible Ghillie-like coat would be simpler, though.

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"But the president's remarks Friday morning also raise questions about whether he will abide by the terms of any trade deal he strikes or whether he will continue to insist on more concessions from trading partners after agreements have been reached."

www.politico.com/story/2019/04/05/trump-says-mexico-tariff-threat-supersedes-nafta-3022835
The lying moron's own trade deal isn't even ratified yet, but he's already threatening to violate it.

Why should any European country still consider the United States to be an ally?

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