"How many kinds of electronic warfare?" Topic

I'm thinking about EW for my SciFi rules and want to create "categories" of electronic warfare. Examples:

Passive Scan: You have a receptor that "listens" for something. Radio waves, sound, pressure waves, fluxon emissions, whatever. This system does not broadcast anything, so other than having a small power signature, does not alert the enemy to your presence.

Active Scan: Think Radar/Sonar. With this system you emit a pulse/noise/tachyon stream and analyze the "echo." Can detect more things than passive, including those with no power signature some times, but alerts the enemy.

Hacking: Using covert methods to get control of your enemy's computer net.

Jamming: Emitting a pulse/wave/tachyon stream to overwhelm/blind an enemy's sensor system.

Obviously each of these general categories can be fine tuned to detect/jam just metal, or heat, or radar, or unobtainium traces. But I'm interested in identifying other categories of electronic warfare.

What other categories can you think of?

Mark,

I think you identified them all. When I was in Army intelligence, the training I received just identified two methods – active and passive. When active you were jamming or otherwise actively interfering with the enemy's communications or radar systems. When passive you were trying to listen, intercept, and identify his communications or radar emissions. With computer systems, I would think it would be the same – active interrupting or passive intercepting.

Jim

Communications intercepts – allow reactive moves and firing at unseen units.

Masking – using signals to make a model or unit seem to be something else.

Dummies or Phantoms – communications traffic to look like units that do not really exist.

You can also send false targets or false range info to their systems.

Yup – what Major B and Sergeant Paper said – putting false (or inaccurate) positives in the enemy's systems is also pretty important, and seems to me to be distinct from jamming. I'd lump all such activities into a category of its own and call it "Spoofing."

Doug

Signals intelligence. Working out what something is from its behaviour -- if you have four radio sources and one is putting out way more traffic, good guess is that it's the company HQ and the other three are the platoons.

Working out what "normal" traffic looks like so you can see the bursts of activity which come when their units spot yours…

If you wanted to include chaff, you'd have Confusion, Distraction and Seduction Chaff. It's all chaff, just differs in the manner in which you use it. I tend to get Confusion and Distraction confused (no pun!), but here goes:

Confusion Chaff: deployed prior to seeker activation in order to disguise the actual target. This is used against the enemy operators more than the weapon.

Distraction Chaff: deployed after seeker activation but prior to target lock to lure the weapon from a valid target. Pretty much Confusion Chaff directed against the weapon.

Seduction Chaff: deployed after target lock to lure the weapon from the identified target.

Regards,

Scott Chisholm

what Major B and Sergeant Paper said – putting false (or inaccurate) positives in the enemy's systems is also pretty important, and seems to me to be distinct from jamming. I'd lump all such activities into a category of its own and call it "Spoofing."

You can, but I think the better way of handling that is to lump spoofing, jamming, decoys, and even hacking missiles or guidance systems into one roll, the way Shadowrun 4 handles it. After all, it really doesn't matter to either the target or the shooter which of the defensive systems worked as long as one of them does!

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Broadly speaking, you have active and passive systems. Active systems involve actively broadcasting a signal and waiting for it to bounce back. Passive systems just detect the other guy's active emissions.

There's actually a third class, but it's really only used in cameras, hasn't been effectively used to detect/track/id anything else that I'm aware of. I've heard a claim that the Israelis developed a way to track F117s and B2s by the way that they disrupt radio signals, but I don't think it really works. I've seen a proposal to use 'daylight' as a fancy sonar system, but I can't say that I've seen anything other than optics using emissions NOT from the target or the detector but getting bounced off the target and received by the detector. As you can tell from a camera, it's pretty much impossible to detect a 'daylight' system in operation. If you remember the show 'SeaQuest DSV' from the 1990s, their sonar displays were examples of Acoustic Daylight imaging. Completely passive at the "watcher's" end, so it's basically impossible to tell when someone is tracking you using the 'daylight' systems.

Computer hacking or drone guidance is an active thing, which can be detected by passive systems at about 4x the range you can detect the receiver with the active system.

Lots of different passive EW systems, though they broadly split into 3 classes. The most critical is the basic Radar Warning Receiver, that tells the target that he's being tracked or has been locked onto. A fancier RWR is a SIGINT (Signals Intelligence) receiver that can tell you what type of radar is tracking you. There's also a communications-frequencies version of a SIGINT receiver, and you use that to ID what systems people are talking on. Then there's Radio Direction Finding, where you track where someone is using their own signals to triangulate. Very often, SIGINT systems include direction-finding capabilities, but I list it separately because it's simple but very effective in locating scouts or forward observers (who then get some artillery shells raining on them).

Active systems are your radars and jammers, along with your communications radios. Extended use of distinct systems can let you get located via radio-direction-finding. Some of the newer radars (called low-probability-of-intercept or AESA) generally broadcast a slew of noise and use some fancy tricks to build what bounces back into a conventional radar picture. Because each individual signal is not very intense, it is hard to ID those systems as an actual radar and not just random noise. I don't know that there's a communications equivalent of those LPI radars, though the spread-spectrum frequency agile radios come close.

It's important to think about what active and passive systems are in use, because a stealth aircraft that suddenly lights off jammers has announced its presence on the field just as if it had lit off a search radar.

That's exactly what I want to introduce. You have passive systems that have power profiles. Active ones are like "look at me beacons" but having to decide when/if to use each is something I want to work in to the game.

well looks like you got all the one that are "public" knowledge.

There are others for sci-fi from people you would call the tin hat crowd.

Even the tinfoil-hat crowd stuff breaks down into active, passive, or daylight types, and 90+% of the stuff they're talking about is 'active' type that you can detect via the appropriate hardware.

Again, hacking is an ACTIVE emitter, as is jamming.

I don't know that you could make a radio-frequency daylight imager work, at least not one small enough to mount on a vehicle. With all the RF noisemakers there are, I suspect that using 'daylight' sensors is going to be limited to optical instruments and very large sonar arrays (something needing thousands of individual hydrophones, each with a mechanical focusing piece is going to be huge, I wish I could find the picture of a low-boy trailer loaded with Thresher's spherical array ~16 feet in diameter).

This pic is of the Seawolf's spherical array, it's 24feet in diameter. The Seawolf's hull is 40 feet in diameter, but the spherical array lives forward of the widest part of the hull.

I suspect that an Acoustic Daylight array is only going to be feasible if you used most of the outer hull for all the sensors needed.

There is also the option to use other folks active signals received by passive seekers/systems – for example a missile platform (Patriot battery, or Navy warship) that could fire without firing up its own radar system (I worked on a project to do this 15? years ago, so I'm sure there something better now)). That let you fire around obscuring terrain, or hide your launchers…

True, that's how laser-guided bombs and artillery shells work.

(I know, most modern aircraft packing laser-guided weapons also carry a laser to designate targets. But that's not how they started out!)

But there's still someone radiating an "I'm going to kill you" signal.

Another place to look for further info are the various documents from the DOD such as the Air Force Doctrine Documents (AFDDs) or Army Field Manuals (FMs). FM 3-38, Cyber Electromagnetic Activity ( CEMA) has some of the latest doctrine in it – you should be able to Google it. The Army has a unique perspective – might be readily adapted for a SciFi game.

Also, you have the more general term of IO – Information Operations – which can incorporate PSYOPS (influencing "hearts and minds") and MILDEC (Military Deception). These cover a wide range of topics from leaflets, radio broadcasts, etc. to specific forms of targeted Computer Network Operations (CNO) to old fashion "sleight of hand" like Patton's fake invasion Army in Britain in 1944. I could give you a lot more if you like but would have to do so off line.