XBradTC

Think back to the good old days of dial up AOL. And now look at just how much bandwidth your home or office internet has. Can you imagine trying to stream Netflix over dial up? I mean, it took a minute to download a medium sized .jpg image.

That same explosion in bandwidth has also occurred for military datalinks, which, in effect, are a form of wireless internet, just over really long distances. It stands to reason that the increase in capability there has also opened new possibilities and capabilities.

Yesterday came news of a demonstration of the Navy Integrated Fire Control-Counter Air architecture.  For the first time, NIFC-CA held a live-fire demonstration. An F-35B, operating over White Sands Missile Range, cued and targeted a drone for interception by a land based Aegis launcher. The SM-6 Standard Missile was successfully used to destroy the target.

Fire control quality data linking has been entering the fleet recently, with the adoption of Cooperative Engagement Capability, provided by the advanced E-2D Hawkeye. But NIFC-CA takes that to a whole new level, in which every platform becomes a node in the fire control network.

We hear a lot in the news about how big and bad the Russian S-300 and S-400 SAMs are. But what you don’t often hear is just how big and bad the SM-6 is.  The biggest current shortcoming in the SM-6 is that it has a range that outstrips the SPY-1 radar of the Aegis system. NIFC-CA now means that it can be fired to its fullest range (which, there’s a lot of speculation as to the real maximum range, but I’ve heard anything from 150 to 300 nautical miles).

The other thing about NIFC-CA is its jam resistance.  Most datalinks are fairly jam resistant, through the usual protocols of frequency hopping and other well known electronic counter-countermeasures. The other thing about NIFC-CA is that the wide number and widely dispersed nature of having virtually every platform serving as a sensor node is that you can’t jam every sensor. Indeed, attempting to jam them simply means you have plenty of sensors that can then triangulate your jammer’s location.

This article and this article make it seem that the big news is the offboard targeting. Which, that is kinda big news. But the real news is that we’re just beginning to see how such a networked system can be exploited to provide a clearer picture of the enemy, and enable the fleet to destroy an air threat.