Royal Navy freshens up ships' electromagnetic warfare defenses

Britain's Royal Navy is to get updated electromagnetic warfare (EW) capabilities including launchable decoys to help defend its vessels against threats such as modern anti-ship missiles. The UK Defence Science and Technology Laboratory (Dstl) says it has been part of a major Ministry of Defence (MoD) program to radically …

[Anonymous Coward]

> Future updates could address the need to deal with directed energy weapons

I'm curious how that would work.

Surely the directed energy travels at the speed of light, so you can't detect it until it hits you and then it's too late to do anything about it.

Even if you had some kind of detector between the enemy weapon and the ship, the energy would hit the ship simultaneously with the warning signal being received from the detector.

[A Non e-mouse]

My limited understand of current energy weapons (i.e. lasers) is that they're not strong enough at the moment to do kill shots in a second or two: The beam has to point at the target for a period of time. So I suppose if you detect an energy weapon you might be able to do something to disrupt it before it causes fatal damage.

[Alister]

I can't think of any way an electronic countermeasures system could combat a directed energy weopon once it's started hitting you. Forcefields are still science fiction.

[Natalie Gritpants Jr]

Gatling gun with tinfoil dispenser

[I ain't Spartacus]

Alister,

You could put a cloud of something that attenuates or spreads the beam between you and the attacker. Smoke works for some wavelengths. I don't know if aluminium chaff would work - but maybe even something as simple as a few water vapour dispensers would work?

[Peter Gathercole]

Defence against directed energy weapons

The most likely way you could disrupt current directed energy weapons in a ship would be water-mist defences, because most laser weapons are seriously attenuated by airborne water, and there's plenty of water around when you're on a ship!

It's sort of interesting that RN ships from the '60s and '70s used to have such systems as part of their ABC (Atomic, Biological, Chemical) defence fit. I wonder if they still do?

[collinsl]

Re: Defence against directed energy weapons

They 100% still do, so this would be easily doable with a few upgrades to either output more water over the entire vessel, or just output where it's needed with enough volume, which would require individually selectable dispensers.

[alain williams]

Protecting against DEW

You are protecting two things: the ship and the sailors, they need different protection. It is not about burning holes - which would be much harder on a ship than a thin skinned aircraft.

Sailors. Eg: microwaves can cause problems but shields on windows will attenuate them

Ships: protect the electronics against EMP

It is not my subject but a quick search turns up "Defending Against Microwave Weapons" and "How to Protect Yourself from Directed Energy Weapons" and "DEW Countermeasures: A Notional Example of Hardening a System Against HPMs" and many more.

[Eclectic Man]

Archimedes and Wallis

Surely the directed energy travels at the speed of light, so you can't detect it until it hits you and then it's too late to do anything about it.

A modern warship is quite a large target, so when part of it is under attack from a directed energy weapon there would be a lot of ship left to respond. Conversely, in Ancient Greece, when Syracuse was besieged by the Romans, Archimedes designed weapons which incinerated enemy galleys using sunlight:

"The 2nd century AD author Lucian wrote that during the Siege of Syracuse, Archimedes destroyed enemy ships with fire. Around 500 AD, Anthemius of Tralles mentions burning-glasses as Archimedes' weapon. The device was used to focus sunlight onto approaching ships, causing them to catch fire."*

In WW2 thin strips of aluminium foil were used to deceive German radar during the invasion of Normandy.

"Sitting behind Perspex at the Boscombe Down Aviation Collection, the tangled strips of aluminium tape, called Chaff, helped to disrupt German radars. When dropped at the right point over the Channel, the tape would be picked up on radar and fooled the Germans into believing an invasion was happening. The method was invented by Barnes Wallis, who also famously developed the "bouncing bomb" for the Dambusters raids."**

* From: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archimedes%27_heat_ray#:~:text=The%202nd%20century%20AD%20author,causing%20them%20to%20catch%20fire.

** https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/ckvv3zek21po#:~:text=Sitting%20behind%20Perspex%20at%20the,believing%20an%20invasion%20was%20happening.

[Peter Gathercole]

Re: Archimedes and Wallis

My grandfather worked as a radar engineer at the RAE in Farnborough during the war. Amongst the things I remember that he used to have at his home workshop when I knew him (more than a decade after the war finished) were rolls of non-adhesive aluminium tape, and he explained that it was Chaff, and he used it during the trials to see how it would reflect radar signals. After the war, he used to use it to string it around the vegetable patch to keep the birds away!

He also had other equipment, and the story that I heard from my parents was that he built a green-and black television using a radar tube to watch Queen Elizabeth II's coronation.

I still have various interesting gun sights, aircraft bomb bay switch boxes etc. that I ended up with which were re-purposed for other uses over the years.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Archimedes and Wallis

Maybe he got a mention in the RV Jones book.

If he wasn't actually RV Jones himself?

[Peter Gathercole]

Re: Archimedes and Wallis

He wasn't RV Jones. He was just one of the many unnamed people who worked behind the scenes. As I have been told, he worked on getting RDF and Radar equipment installed on heavy bombers during the development and testing phases.

Like many people of that generation, he didn't actually talk that much about the war, even though he was a non-combatant, What he was doing would have fallen into the scope of the Official Secrets Act, and he would have taken that very seriously. He was more open about the fact that he was a volunteer bus driver in the evenings and weekends!

I note the misuse of chaff in my original post. I actually don't remember the exact conversations, he died when I was 8, so he may have said window, not chaff, but I remember how he explained how it was used. When I stayed with my grandparents, I used to spend much of it in their garden while he tinkered in his shed/workshop, chatting about all sorts of things. It was his influence that set up my curiosity to take things apart, see how they worked, and fix them, which extends to this current day!

[I ain't Spartacus]

Re: Archimedes and Wallis

Peter Gathercole,

Ah. The good old shed! As a denizen of a flat, I am sadly shedless. The tragedy! Oh the wonders that can be achieved by some old bloke in a shed! Especially if they've got access to some tactically acquired army-surplus gubbins - that's how you get radio telescopes.

Or Mum's great uncle, who'd had polio, so suffered increasing mobility problems as he got older. No problem, if you can't do something, you head off down the shed to build a contraption of some sort. In one case two short step ladders, some wheels and planking to build a mobile platform that he could sit or lie on to paint the house. using a ceiling roller - whose long shaft doubled as a punt to move himself round the room.

Also his children and granchildren got wooden multi-story carparks to keep their toy cars in and drive them around the ramps.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Archimedes and Wallis

I thought we British called it Window during WW2? Wasn't Chaff the American name?

[EvilDrSmith]

Re: Archimedes and Wallis

Yup.

[EvilDrSmith]

Re: Archimedes and Wallis

Operation Gomorrah in July 1943 - a major air raid on Hamburg - was the first use of window (aka chaff). The use of the decoy is credited with one (of several) factors that led to that raid being particularly successful for the RAF / particularly devastating.

[KittenHuffer]

Re: Archimedes and Wallis

My brain read that as "Operation Gonorrhea" first time round!

The double-take was quite amusing!

[I ain't Spartacus]

Re: Archimedes and Wallis

My brain read that as "Operation Gonorrhea" first time round!

No - that was from earlier in the war. In 1939, as the BEF started arriving in France, General Montgomery nearly got himself sacked for proposing that organised brothels should be set-up for the troops - with regular medical and sanitation inspections. This is nothing different to what had been built up during WWI - but to just talk about sex, in an official memo, with no preceeding crisis of troops all reporting sick with STIs - well that just wasn't done! Our soldiers are gentlemen! How dare you suggest such a disgusting idea! Shame!

Monty was just a realist who cared about his troops.

[Eclectic Man]

Re: Archimedes and Wallis

Our soldiers are gentlemen! How dare you suggest such a disgusting idea! Shame!

They had obviously forgotten the first Duke of Wellington's assessment of the British fighting man:

"I don't know what effect these men will have upon the enemy, but, by God, they frighten me."

https://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/duke_of_wellington_130783

[Like a badger]

Re: Archimedes and Wallis

"Monty was just a realist who cared about his troops."

I never met him, but my grandfather tended Monty's extensive collection of clocks when both had retired. But before he retired, said grandfather worked on early airborne electronics, and was awarded the Imperial Service Medal for that work - I have a picture of him at RAE, in a large mob of colleagues standing in front of an Avro 707. Ahh, them were the days apparently.

[Tim99]

Re: Archimedes and Wallis

Sod em?

[gryphon]

Re: Archimedes and Wallis

If memory serves it was actually the Dambusters (617 squadron) who were dropping the window (chaff).

Required very, very precise flying for hour after hour to simulate an advancing fleet attacking towards Calais rather than Normandy.

[I ain't Spartacus]

Re: Archimedes and Wallis

The Dambusters flew in a massive racetrack pattern, creeping across the Channel at something like 12 knots - while a small group of destroyers sailed underneath them, playing the sounds of a large fleet of ships from speakers that had been installed. When they got to Calais, that group then went and did some shore bombardment, and convinced Hitler to keep 6 panzer divisions tied up there for the next couple of days. Or helped convince, seeing as he knew that's where the allies would attack due to his inate military genius.

Also, one of the "Double Cross" agents actually radioed the Germans about 3 hours before the actual invasion to tell Germany that the Normandy landings would happen that morning. But that it was just a diversion for the main attack on Calais, which would be launched with Patton's US 1st Army Group. Which didn't exist, but was pretending very hard in and around Kent. The guy said he felt absolutey awful sending actual military plans to the Germans in advance, what if they went on alert because of it and extra people got killed?

[collinsl]

Re: Archimedes and Wallis

That was actually one of the Twenty Committee's (so named because twenty = XX = double cross) great spy plans. The double agent actually sent warning with the wrong dates a few weeks before D-Day started, but sent a follow-up letter saying she'd been given the wrong dates and that the invasion via Calais was pushed back a month. The letter would arrive after the actual invasion and would "rehabilitate" her mistake, keeping her available as a resource. More info here from the National Archives

This was part of a wider scheme wherein multiple double agents (real and invented, there was a whole spy network in the mind of one guy) all reported similar information about the Normandy landings being a feint for a full attack at Calais a few days later, which Hitler believed and kept troops pinned at Calais awaiting an invasion which never came, troops which could have been used to push back the Normandy landings.

[KittenHuffer]

All of the various radar domes will be covered by little square mirrors.

That will be called Deter Incoming laSer Channelling Optics around BALLS!

-------> Mine's the nice leather one! With the sequins!

[smudge]

All of the various radar domes will be covered by little square mirrors.

Jeez! As if Noddy Holder doesn't already get enough royalties from "Merry Xmas Everybody" :)

[I ain't Spartacus]

When are the British Army to be issued with silver platform boots? That's what I want to know!

1 pair boots: Defence Issue Silver Covering Orthopedic!

[I ain't Spartacus]

There are several reasons the carriers might not get their own decoy units. For a similar reason to why they don't have much in the way of their own air defences. Apparently the RN looked at giving them a 30mm cannon - and came to the conclusion that shots which missed might end up doing a lot of damage to the carrier's close escorts.

Decoys can be equally dangerous. The Exocet that destroyed Atlantic Conveyer (which was transporting most of the helicopters to the Falklands) was decoyed using chaff from either one of the escorts or one of the carriers. I can't remember which. So one of the problems in firing decoys, is that it's not just what you're decoying the missile away from, but also what you're decoying it towards. As it's liable to come out of the chaff cloud and start looking to acquire a new target. Although some of the modern targets might be convincing enough to get the warhead to explode - in which case you still need to be careful - as you don't want that right next to anything.

Obviously it could also be cost, though I doubt the individual units and decoys are all that expensive, and the RN have a single Combat Management System for all their big ships - so if it's integrated with one then it works with all. So I suspect it's doctrinal, rather than financial. Also launching little bits of crap from what are effectively litle mortars on your ship - seriously risks covering your flight deck in crap during flight operations - and possibly causing your expensive aircraft to fall out of the sky.

This leads me to suspect that the carrier's escorts are supposed to be in charge of decoys. On the other hand, the MoD does sometimes do some bizarrely stupid things on the grounds of penny-pinching. But equally, the Royal Navy sometimes come up with a doctrine and stubbornly ignore the rest of NATO - because they're sure they're right dammit! This is why we have the Type 45 destroyer, which is completely built around having a radar 10 storeys up - which gives twice the detection range for sea-skimming missiles than every other ship afloat, except big aircraft carriers. Obviously built after experience from the Falklands - and because we insisted on that we refused to stay in the Horizon destroyer program with the French and Italians - which sadly meant all three of us ended up with fewer ships combined than just what the RN would have got if we'd stayed in. Whether that decision was right or wrong is impossible to know - although if supersonic cruise missiles get abandoned in favour of ballistic anti-ship missiles then it will have been.

[Peter Gathercole]

For all that it was tragic, I'm sure that the loss of the Atlantic Conveyer, even with the Chinook helicopters aboard, was preferable to having Exocets hit either HMS Hermes or Invincible, one of which was what the Argentinian pilots thought they were attacking. With either carrier out of commission, and reduced air cover and ground attack capabilities, the result of the conflict could have been very different.

As I understand it, the Exocets were launched from over the horizon at targets based on the size of their radar signature, so they hit the intended target, and any chaff that was deployed was not the cause of the missiles hitting Atlantic Conveyer. I don't know how an Exocet decided on it's target, but I would make a guess that it would seek the largest radar signature ahead of it as it reached it's terminal phase.

[I ain't Spartacus]

Peter Gathercole,

I recall that the missiles were decoyed by chaff, from a history of the conflict I read years ago. It's a bit tough to find sources on this sort of thing from a quick Google, but I think I have a good one here, from Think Defence. I mean I did find the official report on the sinking, but they're usually very long and not easy to quickly glance through. Anyway there's a diagram on here which shows HMS Alacrity was the target of both missiles - which were both decoyed by Alacrity's chaff - and that diverted their course to Atlantic Conveyor. Had it been possible to decoy the missiles the other way (right and away from the whole formation instead of left), it's possible they'd have behaved differently. Although I don't know how they were programmed to search, if there wasn't a radar target immediately ahead of them.

Had we lost Alacrity instead of Atlantic Conveyor, then it's probable we wouldn't have lost Sir Galahad, later in the war. When ships were used to move troops to Bluff Cove in an incredibly unsafe manner, rather than the helicopters from Atlantic Conveyor. Although the loss of life may have been much worse. But that's why we now have decoy dispensers that can be much more controlled - to try and better protect the whole task group, rather than just individual ships.

Some modern missiles are a lot brighter now. Some use imaging infrared and hold a database of targets - so you can task the missile to hit a particular type of ship, rather than just firing at the nearest or biggest radar return.

Apparently it's one of the reasons the RN retired Harpoon. Because their version was old-skool and so even if you fired it at the right target - using more up-to-date ship's systems, if it was decoyed by chaff, it would just wander off and hit anything else it could see. Which might be anything. This meant that it couldn't be "safely" used, unless in the direst of emergencies.

[EvilDrSmith]

I think Roland White's 'Harrier 809' includes a fairly full description of the loss of Atlantic Conveyor (If I am remembering correctly - even if I'm not, it's a good book)

[Vestas]

Exocets/Falklands experience were primary reasons the ESM kit on the Lynx got an upgrade ASAP in the 1980s. That and an ECM module suspended below the Lynx which was supposedly going to be used to seduce missiles away from the ship, then the helicopter was supposed to "pop up" at the last second to survive/evade the missile. Bloody silly idea IMO but a lot quicker/cheaper than scrapping a load of ships/building newer ones without such a huge radar signature.

[Fruit and Nutcase]

Type 45

SAMPSON radar on the Type 45 Destroyers...

https://www.navylookout.com/in-focus-the-royal-navys-sampson-radar/

There is a nice picture of HMS Daring and Diamond with HMS Gloucester (Type 42), showing the relative heights of the radar on the new and old types.

[ChrisElvidge]

Fly-by-wire drones seem to be almost unstoppable (in Ukraine). Over water there'd be no trees or buildings to snag the wire (fibre optic).

[EvilDrSmith]

But you can only carry so much wire on your drone.

So if the target ship is close in to a coastline, a wire-guided drone may be an issue - further out to sea, probably not so much.

[Roger Kynaston]

When I see those Destroyers

I am always reminded of what I christened them when I first saw one in the Tamar - a Bollock of Death

[Eclectic Man]

Electronic warfare

It is electronic warfare they are talking about. Maybe they will just replace the attacker's actual guidance system with an up to date UK rail and 'rail replacement bus service' map and timetable, and watch it have the silicon equivalent of a breakdown.

I live in the UK, you can tell, can't you?

[EvilDrSmith]

Re: Electronic warfare

Wouldn't that constitute a Weapon of Mass (transit) Destruction?

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Electronic warfare

Isn't there something against deploying anything "cruel and unusual"?

[Eclectic Man]

Re: Electronic warfare

Tell that to the Department of Transport.

[Anonymous Coward]

My cat occasionally does MEWSIC, usually when she's moulting.

[nigglec]

Does this miss the target?

With modern systems I would have thought that EW would be much more limited than historic systems. How hard is it to add an additional visual sensor and algorithm to identify the actual ship. I suppose if the EW is good enough the missile will find itself too far away to do anything, but I would have thought that more focus on active protection systems is the future.

[collinsl]

Re: Does this miss the target?

Yes but then you've got a missile which doesn't work in the dark or in fog or cloud or over the horizon etc. Some of these EW systems can be deployed when the missiles are quite far away.

[Extreme Aged Parent]

I didn't think we had that many ships!