PLA-MKIIUAVs belong to one of two groups, “shooters” or “lookers”.
“Shooters” are there to deliver ordnance and do not necessarily need ultra-sophisticated sensors. The smarts are in the ordnance, whether IR, IIR, MMW, RF homing or GPS-aided autopilot which are capable of hitting within 1m of the target. The munitions can be small with that kind of accuracy. (Hold out your arm and think how bad your day would be if a 2kg warhead detonated at your fingertips). Targeting for shooters can come from soldiers/squad leaders in need of fire support or from “lookers”. A shooter can be very inexpensive since it is a reusable bomb truck. Ideally, it would be just under 3m in length and weigh 100kg loaded with fuel and a dozen small submunitions. Powered by a tiny turbojet, it would not create a signature large enough for an Igla-S to lock on, but could orbit the battlefield for 60-90 minutes. After flying its mission, it would return to a pick-up point, shut off its engine and deploy a parachute. It would be small enough for a couple soldiers to carry back to the re-arm point. After arming, it would be placed on a rail launcher attached to an APC, be refueled, engine started and launched on its next sortie. This kind of shooter could be augmented with GMLRS or GPS-aided artillery rounds such as Excalibur. The key to this kind of fire support is networking at the squad level or individual soldier level.
“Lookers” are the eyes for the shooters for targets that cannot be seen by friendly troops. They require sophisticated sensors such as FOPEN radar, SAR, and multispectral IR/UV imaging. The sensors are powerful enough to be able to recognize footprints in the dirt from many kilometers distance and nothing escapes their gaze. Those sensors are not small and are power hungry. This makes a looker a large, expensive UAV. To keep it safe, it needs to operate at high altitudes (>15km) and beyond the reach of enemy SAMs (behind friendly lines). A looker can be a winged vehicle, aerostat or a blimp and should be capable of 24 hour sortie duration.
This is really insightful, thanks so much for the post. I have two problems in my head:
1. High altitude UAVs, (the lookers) are not very survivable if the enemy has Air power – which brings us to the problem of how they will survive in an environment where you don’t have air superiority. Yet, in any CAS / UAV combination, the “looker” seems to be the ideal complement.
2. The “shooters” sound great IF you know where the enemy is (assuming lookers, where again the air superiority snag comes in). The problem that keeps coming back to haunt an armchair thinker like me is, with all the “lookers” and satellites and even boots on the ground, modern armies (and the modernest army the US) still have very poor situational awareness as exemplified in Iraq and Afghanistan.
I think the problem roots from how we have been attempting to substitute direct “human” situational awareness. We are either flying in jets and watching the countryside go by as a blur or we are travelling in APCs and tanks with our eyes elsewhere than our surroundings. We then fall back to “there being no substitute to boots on the ground” which to me, is the truth but only half of the truth. To me, the critical element is having “eyes” on the ground rather than “boots” – in essence, true “human”, real time, actionable, situational awareness. This is the main problem, once this is solved, we can fly all the UAVs we like.
I personally like your idea about that UAV you have in mind, in some of my other day dreams 😀 I picture the battles as CAS aircraft and UAVs, acting as organic “packs”, some UAVs even being guided by the two seat CAS aircraft.
PLA-MKIIWHY? Nor Israel or Sweden are large nations (6/8 mill inhabitants)… Bangladesh? Don’t know, but training is definitive one of the most important aspects!
It says in the first post Israel is not to be considered. Probably because its the “most talked about” for good or for ill.
PLA-MKIII think it all comes down to the missiles – AMRAAM Vs AMRAAMski Vs AMRAAM-Chan
I personally rank them thus:
AMRAAM: Best overall, highest tech, most compact
AMRAAM-Chan: Longest Range, better aerodynamics than -ski, about equal tech to -ski in terms of seeker
AMRAAM-sk: Airframe has highest drag but best end of flight maneuvrability.
Overall:
1. AMRAAM
2. AMRAAM-Chan
3. AMRAAM-ski
Thus, in a “real” fight (90% bvr), I’d go for:
1. F-15
2. J-10
3. SU-30Ubber
PLA-MKIIInteresting……..maybe we should be debating which type of Sabre was best?
North American F-86E/F
North American FJ-4 Fury
Canadair Mk 5
Commonwealth CA-27
Canadair Mk 5
PLA-MKIII think the UAV’s will make this the actual or similar combat setup in the near future.
Why use a plane with a pilot, or have I misunderstod your aircraft-design PLA?
Hey Andy, I don’t think UAV’s can be optimal in this respect – imagine the whole loop of having visual coverage for a backend which in turn has to be linked into the comm loop, how many personnel it would take as the backend of a UAV, also how poor the situational awareness of the UAV would be. I do however see the point of not taking casualties, which, in an increasingly SAM sensitive 😀 environment would surely have its attractiveness. But then again, tanks are also increasingly vulnerable and so are soldiers – so in the end, we have to decide if we want to have an army of “terminators” or actual people to fight our wars, both from an efficiency perspective, an economic perspective and a moral perspective. I personally believe there will always be enough poor in any country to feed as fodder for any future wars, its one way that the rich can keep them occupied – but thats another discussion for another forum and occasion 🙂
On the other hand you could just link the various parts of an army to an Xbox and get free robot army operators to kill each other over. Better yet, convert all wars into a Xbox war where the rulers of opposing states take a go at each other without getting poor kids who couldn’t afford college, dead. 😀
PLA-MKIIAt least one military aviation psychologist I’ve met would disagree. It doesn’t mean that he holds the whole truth, though.
Lets put it this way then – I’d like a girl sitting with me when I’m flying combat missions 😀
PLA-MKIIAt least one military aviation psychologist I’ve met would disagree. It doesn’t mean that he holds the whole truth, though.
Lets put it this way then – I’d like a girl sitting with me when I’m flying combat missions 😀
PLA-MKIIWhat is most interesting to me is the Eritrean connection – here is another pro-western christian controlled state, hosting an Israeli submarine base, not only backing Somalia but according to some reports, has some 2000 soldiers fighting in Somalia. 😉 Christians fighting for Jihad? 😮
I’d actually like to see some nice aircombat footage from the conflict. As Arthur says, the Frogfoot would be great for the conflict. In one report I read it says that after they bombed the airport some senior UIC officials made a landing on the same. Makes you wonder what aircraft they are flying in and why they’d take a risk flying in them, without any AD.
PLA-MKIIEthiopia can do something about that on the battlefield. You don’t fight terrorists on the battlefield, you fight them through intel and police work. For some reason, that rather logical bit of info seem to be incredibly obscure amongst political leaders.
Its never obscure, the reasoning, to me is pretty clear; you don’t want an Islamic state, good, bad or ugly, and neither does Washington. Not really complex 🙂
nd are you sure about the large Muslem population in Ethiopia?
I calll 33% large..
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethiopia
Not so sure if it’s really a US proxy war, but no doubt a few wannabe-crusaders in Washington like this sideshow…
I can say with reasonable certainty that its a US proxy war..
“A U.S.-backed Security Council resolution passed on December 6 strengthens the link between Washington and Addis Ababa..”
http://www.cfr.org/publication/12225/proxy_war_in_africas_horn.html
Yep. The more generations Somalians grow up learning nothing but handling AKs and listening to wahhabist agitprop instead of actually getting an education, the more people you get who aren’t even capable of doing anything except fighting for whatever jihadi cause they’ve been fed.
A lot of people (including in the US) have a gun culture, it doesn’t mean that they are terrorists or wahabists. Let me give you an example: A friend of mine visited a friend in Pakistan’s NWFP, where everyone carries a gun. He the friend he visits has a grand father 😮 who, other than collecting guns also has a huge library of pornography 😀 Somalis carry (or carried) guns because that was their source of safety, nothing to do with being a jihadi or fighting for a jihadi cause.
Maybe coporate America reopens the Invader production lines and you finally got a point.
The US doesn’t need to hand in their own weapons to be knee deep in the conflict – recall Afghanistan where 99% of the weapons supplied were soviet weapons bought by the CIA from Eastern Europe and India.
PLA-MKIICan’t help but see a similarity between the Somalia of 2006, and Afghanistan a decade earlier. Two countries in total anarchy with scores of warlords fighting each other, narcotics (qat and opium) being the economic pillar on which it all thrives. And both got dragged out of their total anarchy by a successfull yet awfully rigid and dogmatic religious pact: the Taliban and the UIC respectively.
It would appear that a total desintegration of a society (no more government, no more education, no more infrastructure) creates the conditions where such a fundamentalist religious group can take over power. Probably because the religion is the only common value amongst the various fighting clans/warlords, and with a population as good as un-educated, the simplistic, strict but oh so easy to understand dogmas would appear attractive. At least some guidance the poor uneducated sobs are capable of understanding, with quite a bit of (religious) magnitute not found previous with that petty warlord.
Unfortunately, as the Taliban has shown, i don’t think the UIC will be able to do anything more for Somalia except putting an end to the anarchy. While the war seems more like a proxy-conflict between Eritrea and Ethiopia, i would say that Ethiopia would better have waited for the UIC to stabilise Somalia somewhat. It’s not that a ‘unified’ UIC-led Somalia would have suddenly posed an invincible enemy to Ethiopia…
I totally agree, only a very specific set of circumstances can bring about what has happened. Its like the proverbial last straw. And yet what the West is doing is creating more and more situations like that. Iraq, Lebanon, you’re creating your own worst enemy. And you’re dragging moderates (like yours truly) into this quagmire along with it; how do you think it feels to the 1.5 billion of which 99% are moderates, to see the double standards every day and not feel angry about it?
What will happen in Somalia is that now the Jihadists will get the chance to go in and turn Somalia into another Iraq. Without any real military strength and a large Muslim population (both civilian and in the army), Ethiopia will find itself bogged down in Somalia. Another US proxy war gone wrong. Result: Al Qaeda will grow stronger, with another new source of recruits, and some really good recruits because these Somalis can fight. I can tell you because a close friend that I once had was from Somalia, and the little I learnt from him about his country was that every kid from the age of 8 knows more about weapons than your average GI.
PLA-MKIIPLA-MKII
Somali politics is extremely complicated to discuss here. The UIC is a UNION of various Somali INDEPENDENT local courts that did a good job of stabilizing their local areas from feuding warlords. They are also structured along sub-clan lines which is the basis of the problem in Somalia. They are also exclusively from the Hawiye clan which cover the central and south Somalia, including Mogadishu. Most of those that make up the UIC only concern is to stabilize and bring normalcy to their region. However, the former Alittihad leaders have succesfully hijacked the courts to pursue their “cause”. Furthermore, there are now MANY including the security/military head of UIC who was a former warlord.
What the Yemeni operative told is very much well known. Many dead bodies of arab fighters and those captured were shown by Ethiopia in 1996.
The evidence you claim from your geocities.com link is highly unsubstatiated. Nobody has hijacked the UIC cause, your claim that the UIC declared war on Ethiopia BEFORE ethiopia moved its troop in is also highly unsubstantiated.
here is a link of the timeline of events:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/6159735.stm
your earlier claim does not seem to stand up to scrutiny. About Ethiopia giving “evidence” of foreign fighters – one needs to scrutinize very carefully what an avowed enemy state of Somalia has to say about the UIC. Its a lot worse than the “evidence” the US gave that Iraq was “without doubt” having nuclear weapons. If you can’t see a greater agenda than “fighting against terrorists” then I don’t know how else I can convince you.
Going back to Arthur’s pic – that shows that someone outthere is backing the UIC – if they are getting their supplies from Kazakhstan. Russian involvement perhaps? They’d need to cross a whole lot of countries to get to Somalia, and refuel in between as well.
PLA-MKIIThe UIC did declare ‘jihad’ against Ethiopia.
http://www.iht.com/articles/ap/2006/10/09/africa/AF_GEN_Somalia.php
Also, the same individuals that are in key positions of the UIC were leaders of Al-Ittihad Al-Islamia, an radical islamic organization that received substancial support from Al-qaeda. The group was completely destroyed by an Ethiopian offensive in 1996. Recently a “former” Al-qaeda operative from Yemen told his story of his Somali involvement.
http://www.geocities.com/~dagmawi/Zebenya/07/BBC_focus_al-qaeda_somalia_pg1.jpg
http://www.geocities.com/~dagmawi/Zebenya/07/BBC_focus_al-qaeda_somalia_pg2.jpg
http://www.geocities.com/~dagmawi/Zebenya/07/BBC_focus_al-qaeda_somalia_pg3.jpg
Hello Nadew, the article you quote is dated October, 2006, after the Ethiopians were already inside Somali territory – as observed by various third parties.
The second point about al-qaeda operative – you can get a whole host of people who’ll claim to be a “former” this or that and tell you the most fantastic stories. To me, it remains that the UIC hadn’t used suicide bombings to take Mogadishu and the surrounding areas, they brought peace to the city and trade has been flourishing. If you see their origin, they are merely a collection of local courts that had organically formed because of the lawlessness of the land.
There is little denying Al Qaeda is operating there – Al Qaeda today is operating in virtually every single middleast country out there – but to blame a collection of local courts that have been administering justice for them does not make sense unless you count the fact that they are pushing Islamic law. They cannot control Al Qaeda’s activities any more than any other country (including the US) has been able to do. In theory, it would be a lot easier for Al Qaeda to have operated in the anarchy that was Somalia than after the UIC took over.
For me, its just the Western fear of anything to do with having an Islamic state. If you read what Clinton wrote about Bosnia and how the West was complicit in what happened, you’d perhaps make some sense of what and why. Intolerence is a double edged weapon, when you don’t allow other people to live as they want to then those people one day come and make your lives miserable.
PLA-MKIIInteresting to see that the majority of posters prefer the larger wing..
PLA-MKIIYes, please.
Homo sapien femalus
PLA-MKIIYes, please.
Homo sapien femalus
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