Saturday, January 19, 2013

Where's Sky Pirate Waldo?

Enemies know that taking an American prisoner is a high priority task for them. So we go to great efforts to keep our military people out of their hands. Aircraft crew will have a tool to let our search and rescue teams to them fast. Couldn't we use this enemy objective to our advantage?

This is good:

The U.S. Air Force recently ordered another 674 AN/PRC-112G CSAR (Combat Search and Rescue) radios, pushing sales of the AN/PRC-112 to over 31,000. Pilots and crew of aircraft that went down use CSAR to let rescue aircraft know where they are. This is especially critical if you go down in hostile territory. The AN/PRC-112G uses GPS and satellite phone technology to send a brief ("burst") transmission of the radios (and downed pilots) location via satellite. When the rescue chopper is close enough (within line-of-sight) the AN/PRC-112G provides encrypted (the enemy can't listen in) two way radio capability to get any essential information from the downed pilot before the pickup is made.

Couldn't we also make versions of this transmitter to drop during our air operations to simulate a downed pilot trying to get help? For many enemies who make claims of shooting down our planes all the time, they'd easily believe that signals are proof of that claim coming from the guys shooting. In the heat of battle, those guys shooting probably believe they must have shot something down with all the noise and weapons they lit off.

Then we could have strike aircraft high up waiting to find their search teams looking for our "downed pilot." Smart bomb a number of those teams and won't we make the enemy more cautious when one of our air crews really does go down and need rescuing? That would buy more time to get our real people out, wouldn't it?

Heck, pair the ruse transmitter with something that blows up to simulate a plane going down, with the ruse transmitter separating before impact and set to start transmitting a short time later.