Running Interference On Interference
December 9, 2009: The U.S. Army, which operates thousands of UAVs (over 90 percent of them the five pound Raven, which gives each company commander his own recon aircraft), has found more and more of them suffering from electronic interference. This problem is expected to get worse, especially as the army introduces dozens of Sky Warriors (a cousin to the air force Predator) over the next year or so. The larger UAVs have a lot more going on inside them, and a lot more electronic commands coming to the aircraft. The air force has noted an increase in electronic interference in its growing fleet of Predators and Reapers. Some air force officers believe the enemy is trying to electronically jam the command signals, or electronics on board the UAVs. But electronics experts believe it's just the greater number electronic signals in the air, even in rural Afghanistan. Nevertheless, better encryption is being used for the control signals going to and from U.S. UAVs.
Phi Beta Iota: Tip of the hat to Strategy Page. Over 30 years ago it was known that Soviet emission standards were ten times tougher than ours. Today we not only do not have emission standards to speak of, but we use open commercial communicaitons satellites and we do not worry about having all our Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) systems online. The U.S. Government appears to be completely oblivious to basic realities.
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