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Old June 30th, 2005, 11:34 AM

narwan narwan is offline
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Default Re: Friendly Fire from aircraft

Ahhhh, Heinlein, I have a whole row of them in my bookcase.... Startship troopers is one of my favourites.

But the starship troopers view of soldiering doesn't really change the problem. If the trooper only carries the smart weapons, there's still the question where he carries them, what targets he picks, and to what degree he can trust his sensors. It is sometimes surprisingly easy to fool these.
During the Kosovo campaign for example NATO used technology that could identify the shapes of tanks and other AFV's (as opposed to humans having to poor over the pictures). To verify that these were actual vehicles and not decoys they verified it with heat sensing data to see if the vehicle had an actual engine (different signature from the rest of the vehicle). Then they had a smart missile (worth hundreds of thousands) fired at the target. Which often was nothing more than the silhouette of a tank painted on the road with a big container of water placed on the area where the engine would be.

narwan
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