This html article is produced from an uncorrected text file through optical character recognition. Prior to 1940 articles all text has been corrected, but from 1940 to the present most still remain uncorrected. Artifacts of the scans are misspellings, out-of-context footnotes and sidebars, and other inconsistencies. Adjacent to each text file is a PDF of the article, which accurately and fully conveys the content as it appeared in the issue. The uncorrected text files have been included to enhance the searchability of our content, on our site and in search engines, for our membership, the research community and media organizations. We are working now to provide clean text files for the entire collection.
By Norman Friedman, author, The Naval Institute Guide to World Naval Weapons Systems
I
Radar-equipped AH-64 Flies
The L.S. Army's AH-64D Longbow, equipped with a mast-mounted radar, made its first flight 14 May. The Army plans to convert 227 existing AH-64s to AH-64 Ds.
New World, New Data Links
This spring the Hungarian government announced it would replace its old Soviet-supplied air force identification friend-or- foe (IFF) system with one supplied from the West. The governments of the old Warsaw Pact had already announced that the Pact was quite dead, and the Soviet troops had gone home, but the Pact survived in its command and control hardware, symbolized most clearly by the standard IFF devices.
The prospective Hungarian purchase should not be misinterpreted. It does not mean that Hungary has somehow bought into NATO. An IFF set made in the West hardly guarantees that the user is identified as friendly, and it is probably incompatible with the old Soviet equipment. Thus, a Hungarian airplane carrying the new equipment could no longer safely work with forces that use Soviet IFF equipment; that is hardly likely to upset the Hungarian government.
Hungary has a special reason to change its IFF. The present government recalls a time before 1914 when all paths through Europe ran through Budapest. It hopes to revive that situation. To do so, it is replacing its entire Soviet-oriented air traffic control system with one manufactured by Thomson-CSF. Although air traffic control (ATC) is generally a civilian function, it has an important military implication. Airliners use a form of IFF to communicate with ATC centers. Military aircraft use civilian facilities, i.e., they communicate with the ATC centers, which is why NATO IFF has an alternate ATC mode. ATC systems are quite expensive, and the Hungarians did not decide lightly to replace their system; it was obsolete, it was breaking down, and it lacked capacity—but it also lacked the ability to integrate with Western European systems.
In a larger sense, IFF is one of several kinds of electronics that bind together the countries of the two Cold War alliances. The other main one is command- and-control, in the form of data-link transmitters and receivers. In the case of the Warsaw Pact, the post-communist governments were surprised to discover that their national command centers were not connected to their forces. Instead, individual divisions were connected to their parent Soviet armies; they were intended to round out those armies in wartime. Presumably this system had been adopted specifically to preclude any rerun of the 1956 Hungarian uprising, in which the Hungarian Army itself was able to function as a unit against the Soviets, commanded by its own legitimate officers.
This type of command system, reflected in hardware such as secure telephone lines, was the military counterpart of the satellite political system. It precluded large-scale independent action by any of the satellite countries, against either the Soviets of each other. Of course, all of their armies could revert to an older and less efficient mode of operation, using the national telephone system, but they lacked modem means of rapidly collecting, collating, and using information about what was happening along their own borders. They probably lacked any means of monitoring their borders with other Warsaw Pact countries and indeed with the Soviets. The nature of its command and control, far more than any explicit political choice, probably suffices to explain why the Czechoslovakian Army did not fight in 1968- It could not have fought anything more than isolated small ac
tions, and the Czechs knew it.
Modernization for efficient border defense might seerh s trivial consideration in a Europe essentially at peace, with threat of the sort of big central war for which everyone ^ preparing. The disintegration of Yugoslavia, however, right o11 the border, shows that this sort of Europe has serious secufw problems of its own. Hungary supported Croatia in its success!11 bid for independence, renewing its traditional interest in ^
108
Proceedings / July
&
area. Its government must have wondered whether, had the rebellion collapsed, a more successful Serbian army would not have pursued rebels seeking refuge across the Hungarian border. (The Hungarian Air Force reportedly shot down some Serbian-controlled aircraft engaged on such missions.)
Yugoslavia was not part of the Warsaw Pact, but it used Soviet equipment and, presumably, Warsaw Pact IFF. It would not have had Hungarian IFF codes, but generally the number of alternative codes is not too large, and a bit of careful analysis will uncover some of them. Changing the system completely makes such compromises moot. In that sense, the Hungarian decision reflects unhappy experience. Not only is the Pact totally dead, but some of the minor Pact members may come into conflict with each other.
Of course, having different IFF standards does not guarantee against intrusions. It is a long time since someone realized that 11 paid to duplicate other countries’ IFF systems. False interrogators could trigger transponders, thus revealing aircraft positions without risking effective retaliation (and, incidentally, identifying entirely non-cooperative enemy aircraft in the Process). False transponders could buy essential security while flying over an enemy country. Even the threat of using spoof interrogators could discourage enemy pilots from using their own *bF transponders, and so increase the chance that they would au victim to their own antiaircraft measures.
There is one new twist. In the past, all electronic equipment has had a large element of fixed behavior: channels fixed by tystal, frequencies by magnetron, etc., and IFF systems have same limitation. The structures of their codes—pulse widths,
the
for
m concert. There are already export versions of Link
Simd,lntentt°naHy incompatible with NATO standards, ni ar questions apply to air forces, which generally use links
example—are fixed. Now, however, more and more equipment synthesizes waveforms under computer software control, hat is already well known in radar; it is why the U.S. Navy’s A-18 APG-65 radar can switch between air-to-air and air-to- ground modes.
For IFF, full software control has some interesting implications. As long as the set can operate in the same frequency band as the target IFF system, it can be programmed to spoof it. On ® other hand, the programmable system can also change not n y its codes but its entire code system very quickly. Thus a country using a modern fully programmable system ought to hhjoy significant advantages over one using a hard-wired sys- m. The advantage would disappear as soon as both converted 0 Programmable systems.
or Western navies, probably the single most prominent sym- 1° Chance coordination is Link 11, the coded digital data tical °Ver which ships working together pass their common tac- to ■ fl'Cture' Link 11 makes it possible for a force commander assign targets, and for ships to avoid shooting down friendly in th ^ Was a vital element linking the forces that operated Th6 ^ers'an Gull during the war with Iraq, co e.lnteresting question for the future is whether navies of will*1 neS unwill‘ng t0 remain firmly within the alliance structure oth Want t0 continue depending on a data link available to all the frie^rll 'anCe rneir|l,ers' F°r example, just as Hungary is less than cn y with neighboring Rumania, Greece and Turkey have extee C.*ose t0 blows. Both the latter two nations use Link 11 quite sensive|y- Both would want to do so in the event hostilities WoulH near' some point, both would realize that to do so each nSk cornProrn's'ng their own tactical data (even though new C°Uld encrypt ’ts Link 11 differently). Is the solution a that ®enerafl°n °f more flexible digital links? The same navies 0per^ant t0 operate independently will also sometimes have to
that 6lr
that are incompatible with the naval Link 4 and Link 11, and even to armies. The main NATO armies already use elaborate reporting and call-back systems analogous to Western naval tactical data systems, though they are quite different in layout. The U.S. version, for example, is the maneuver control system (MCS). Such a system presents a ground commander with a synthesized map of his own forces plus an estimate of enemy forces, based on the mass of reconnaissance systems and local position-reports, such as the position, location, and reporting system (PLRS). The system is hardly perfect, but it helps reduce both the chance of surprise and the risk of the sort of friendly-fire attacks seen in the Gulf War.
Friendly fire is always a problem in war. The solutions in the Gulf—at least for weapons delivered visually—involved special markings on Coalition vehicles. These often worked, but there were problems at night and in poor visibility—especially when the pilots were launching fire-and-forget, infrared-guided weapons. Solutions are now said to be in progress. If naval experience is any guide, they will involve some enhanced sort of combat data-direction system capable of tracking large numbers of ground units.
Unfortunately, the ground forces systems have grown up virtually in isolation. Air forces still like to control their aircraft centrally, using data supplied not by forward unit commanders but by the central ground headquarters. That makes for lags and for errors, which in the Gulf War were sometimes fatal. The U.S. Marines in the Gulf, for example, complained bitterly that they could not communicate with the air forces on a real-time basis. That was one reason they were so glad to have their own air assets, which they have thought of for years as their long- range artillery.
What is the future likely to hold? It may be very much like the Gulf and the Falklands: forces that normally operate out of each other’s hair will find themselves very close up. Their command systems will not mesh, yet they will depend heavily on just those systems. Much will depend, too, on service culture—on the collision of a highly-centralized Air Force and Army with a relatively decentralized Navy. Such cultures are reflected in the configuration of the command systems.
The current generation of command systems, including mission planners like the one that produced the Gulf War’s air tasking order (ATO), presents both opportunities and potential disasters. The opportunity is quick and efficient operation, e.g., quick reactions to the overall thrust of an enemy’s action. Another opportunity is much more efficient use of existing resources. Yet another is sufficiently good bookkeeping that a commander is not swamped by detail.
The other side of the ledger is that the systems encourage more rigid central control, since only the central headquarters sees the exquisitely detailed tactical picture. Another, absolutely deadly, temptation is to seek more and more optimized or elegant solutions to tactical problems, at the expense of quick action. The wartime air tasking order typified the problem. In order to optimize strikes (mainly to avoid warning the targets), the ATO had to be very elaborately calculated; this typically took about 48 hours. It seems not to have occurred to those responsible that the ATO could not deal with target systems changing any more rapidly, such as aircraft moved around the streets of Iraqi cities. They could not be attacked, not because of any horror of hitting civilians, but simply because the ATO could not change quickly enough.
Given one service addicted to decentralized control, the Navy, and two that really like centralization, the Army and the Air Force, contemplating the future path of jointness is just a bit depressing for any student of the military.
109
0c<*dings/ July 1992