adios
03-26-2003, 11:44 AM
I think Kuwait, I think Turkey, I know Syria, and I suspect the civillian portion of Baghdad were hit with errant smart missles. I could be wrong about all this anyway here goes. I read an article in today's WSJ about the USA taking out Iraqi GPS jamming instruments allegedly sold to them by the Ruskies. Basically what the article stated was that GPS jamming was responsible for the errant missles. The also talked about some bombs that have more than one Navigation system namely Inertial Navigation and that they would reach their target irregardless. My take is that their will be a significant amount of upgrading of DOD equipment as a result of what has happened during the war. I've worked myself on military aircraft navigation where both GPS and Inertial Navigation were used. Actually in military aircraft a lat-long position is calculated by several navigation instruments. A decision tree is implemented to determine the most accurate lat-long position. I haven't worked on them for about 4 years. But 4 years ago the most accurate position acheived was using a very sophisticated mathematical technique called the Kalman Filter which filtered the positions output from GPS and Inertial Navigation. The accuracy of the Kalman filter was astounding within feet of the true lat-long position. There was talk when I left the industry about differential GPS which is much more accurate than what I was accustomed to 4 years ago so I don't know precisely where the state of the art is in GPS. Anyway I would suspect that a lot of the smart weapons have room for improvement in their navigation systems and it will cost the military a lot of money to improve them to make them as robust as the military aircraft systems are. Also military aircraft systems have backup computer that take over for the main computers when they fail. Sorry for the long post but I'm fairly certain that there will be major dollars thrown the contractors way as a result of the war. It appears that one of Chuck Weinstock's points about an over reliance of the military on technology may be in the process of being confirmed. Yes the collateral damage is minimal (tell that to the Syrians who died) but in the bigger scheme of things it may show a vulnerability that needs to be corrected.