F35 and Americas BMD

MY postulation is that other than the other worldly ECM in the bird is the fact that seems people have glossed over, the amazing EODAS sensors, and radar


i think the reason the push for the F35 and the continued support of what APPEARS to be a money black hole is the reality the F35 is a MAJOR and integral part of our missile defense system and the more of them in the air the better we can intercept a 'rouge' missile in the boost phase.


i wonder if there is a long range air to air(or ground) hyper sonic missile going to the F35......

and that isnt even getting into the distributed computer network it will provide....





i believe the F35 is a fighter oh yes, but is more a distributed sensor suite.

What the maturation of sensor technology is bringing to the armed services is great because you no longer need a single platform dedicated to X Y & Z. You can spread it across a wide variety of platforms. That bandwidth though...

a reply to: Masisoar

MALD and link 16 plus interlinked intranets to everything in the battle field solves that issue

look what plat forms got the upgrades...as well as the timing of the public release dates

i dont think bandwidth esp with some of the new sats and pother airborne systems will be an issue


and in reality you wouldn't need to see a 1:1 picture of the other crafts sensors just the targeting and other data and i know i said you dont need a video feed but computers only need data not video.


The us made a huge effort in secure high speed comms from all advanced platforms....dont even get me started on the HF upgrade on the B2

a reply to: penroc3

Bandwidth is a huge issue. The F-35 is walking a very thin line between useful information and information overload with all the data it pulls in. One of the things brought up is the sheer amount of data that gets transmitted.

a reply to: penroc3

Bandwidth aside..

It can also be frustrating sometimes because if someone that can provide a high fidelity air picture jumps on the link and filters aren't adjusted appropriately, you're stuck with a lot of tracks, even perhaps overlaying the tracks being received from other sources (ATC, Aegis, CRC, AWACS, etc). If they don't correlate with each other, your air picture becomes an absolute mess. It's not as big of a worry in established AORs like the Middle East (it can happen sometimes), but in a new threat environment, I can't even imagine how much spillover data the F-35 would provide back to C2.

a reply to: Zaphod58

with line of sight communication/networking would be able to transmit allot of data and again the more in the air the faster it goes.

there has to be a way to transmit that much data other wise why would they put something on the aircraft that would be useless

ow much bandwidth does it really take to update your other guys in the air where threats are, without video.


each F35 can act like a node in a large air network passing processed sensor data to other aircraft, and if its line of sight communication transfer rate would be pretty quick.

battlefield awareness feed into another aircraft data screens wouldn't take that much data at all.

a reply to: penroc3

That's assuming every node has the ability to efficiently process the data provided by the F-35. You have to think, some of the systems & platforms we have in service are not as modern as the F-35. The US military has some old stuff out there.

a reply to: Masisoar

of course, but i was only referring to the F35

With a system such as will be used in air theres going to be a lot of the theoretical bandwidth used for error detection and correction and various methods used to get the data to/from the aircract as the requirements go up for more data to be shifted from node to node the effects of errors and the requests for retransmission can basically soak up everything as its just one massive traffic jam with more cars joining every second.

Generally theres going to be tradeoffs between transmission speed and how important data is so whats termed quality of service will be used to make sure that the most important stuff gets first dibs and then other stuff that may not need updating 20,000 times a second left to grab a spot as and when.

Compression and encryption will have overheads at the sender/recipient ends requiring special kit to handle it which takes up space/power on a limited platform as well.

F35 is only one part of the connection..