The Phantom Menace
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China puts phantom space force concept to the test with aim to swamp enemy missile defences
A team of Chinese military engineers is developing a “phantom space strike” – a new tactic to overwhelm missile defences by creating a swarm of fake target signals from space.
They revealed the project to the public for the first time this month while announcing they had conducted a proof-of-concept computer simulation.
The modelling results were positive and the project would move to the next stage to tackle engineering challenges, the team said in a paper published in the Chinese-language Journal of Electronics and Information Technology on February 10.
In the simulation, a ballistic missile was launched against an enemy protected by a state-of-the-art missile defence system. The missile did not carry a nuclear or conventional warhead.
After reaching an altitude above the atmosphere, the missile released three small spacecraft.
Radio interference instruments on the spacecraft picked up enemy radar network signals and sent back phantom signals making the unarmed missile appear to be a much bigger threat than it really was.
Based on those signals, the simulated enemy forces on the ground then launched an interceptor towards the ghost warhead.
“Generating phantom tracks in space is extremely difficult,” the team wrote.
“We solved one of the major challenges … with a clever design,” wrote the team that was led by Zhao Yanli, a senior engineer with the People’s Liberation Army Unit 63891.
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China puts phantom space force concept to the test with aim to swamp enemy missile defences
A team of Chinese military engineers is developing a “phantom space strike” – a new tactic to overwhelm missile defences by creating a swarm of fake target signals from space.
They revealed the project to the public for the first time this month while announcing they had conducted a proof-of-concept computer simulation.
The modelling results were positive and the project would move to the next stage to tackle engineering challenges, the team said in a paper published in the Chinese-language Journal of Electronics and Information Technology on February 10.
In the simulation, a ballistic missile was launched against an enemy protected by a state-of-the-art missile defence system. The missile did not carry a nuclear or conventional warhead.
After reaching an altitude above the atmosphere, the missile released three small spacecraft.
Radio interference instruments on the spacecraft picked up enemy radar network signals and sent back phantom signals making the unarmed missile appear to be a much bigger threat than it really was.
Based on those signals, the simulated enemy forces on the ground then launched an interceptor towards the ghost warhead.
“Generating phantom tracks in space is extremely difficult,” the team wrote.
“We solved one of the major challenges … with a clever design,” wrote the team that was led by Zhao Yanli, a senior engineer with the People’s Liberation Army Unit 63891.
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@George-K said in The Phantom Menace:
“We solved one of the major challenges … with a clever design,”
that they picked up at the US patent office.
If it was that great they’d have kept it secret
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Veracity of this news aside, it looks like it will come down to sensor network and computation power for the defense. Need a comprehensive, sensitive sensor network to take in lots and lots of readings, pretty fast network to gather/transport the readings, then do tons and tons of computation to tell real threats apart from decoys using those readings.
Reminds me of the submarine tech race. Running “silent” used to be enough, but then given increased computation power, what used to be “silent” also get exposed under intense DSP scrutiny.
