generates false danger signals to deplete enemy defenses
Deception is a classic of nature and of life itself. It is about making things appear to be what they are not.. War knows a lot about that. The term military deception exists and is taught in the academies. From the Battle of Hastings to Operation Himmler, military history is full of masking tactics. The latest chapter is being written by China.
The Asian giant is developing a tactic of phantom attack from space. Basically, it is launching false attack signals to overwhelm and deplete the enemy’s defenses.. So far, the computer simulation has been a success. It is the latest bid by Beijing – which has far fewer nuclear weapons than either the US or Russia – for cyber and information warfare.
A team of Chinese military engineers from Unit 63891 have been defining this technology for some time and have now made it public, reports the South China Morning Post. The system is capable of overflowing missile defenses. Creating a swarm of false target signals from space.
It is the latest military gamble by a country that has far fewer nuclear weapons than the U.S.
They have made a computer simulation as a proof of concept. The results were positiveso the project will move on to the next phase to address the engineering challenges, according to the engineering team itself in an article published this month in the journal Journal of Electronics and Information Technology.
Let an unarmed missile look like a big threat.
The Unit 63891 is a Chinese Army agency with nearly 3,000 employees based in Luoyang, in the central Chinese province of Henan. Its work focuses on the development and testing of new technologies and equipment.
The system applies to space what has already been done in the sky: feign an attack to confuse the adversary
In the simulation, a ballistic missile was launched against an enemy protected by a state-of-the-art missile defense system. The missile carried neither a nuclear nor a conventional warhead. At an altitude above the atmosphere, the missile released three small space artifacts.
Recounts the article by JEIT that its radio-interference instruments picked up signals from the enemy radar network and sent out phantom signals that made the unarmed missile appear to be a much greater threat than it really was.. The enemy acted accordingly and launched an interceptor toward the phantom warhead.
China had but applied to space what had already been done in the sky: feigning an attack to confuse the adversary. As the SCMPIf several aircraft participate in the jamming operation, sending manipulated signals to different radar sites operating on different frequencies at the same time, an entire radar network can be fooled.
Generating phantom tracks in space is extremely difficult. We have solved one of the biggest challenges… with clever design.”
And doing it in space? Zhao Yanli head of the engineering team recalls that. until now it was not thought possible to perform the same trick in space.. This is because the aircraft/ship to be jammed must change course from time to time so that the signals received by the various radar stations appear to be coming from the same target.
“Generating phantom tracks in space is extremely difficult. We have solved one of the biggest challenges … with clever design,” Zhao’s team has written in their paper. Their solution, they explain, takes advantage of two weaknesses in a global missile defense system.
The weakness of radar stations
To do so, to generate this false information, Chinese researchers have exploited a weakness in radar stations. where signals can be blurred and crossed. In addition, in order to detect small objects in space, missile defense radars must be very powerful and be housed in large buildingsstructures that, according to Zhao, are not difficult to find.
Engineers claim that the jamming spacecraft. Would be cheap because it would not need engines to propel itself.. Its flight direction, speed and formation would be established on the basis of information on the locations of enemy fixed radar stations prior to launch.
In their published study, they explain that the three-ship configuration in the simulation was a starting point, but that the technology could easily be scaled up to create a swarm.. Thus, they would include many more jamming devices and create a large number of ghost tracks on the enemy radar screen.
