[UT] Tactical & Operational Ground Combat

[DCB]

Originally Posted by Anthony

Read noise on a large CCD array should do the trick. Anything capable of detecting single photon events will work.

You have to ensure that the bits are truly random, though, and I would expect there to be a correlation between the probabilities of nearby CCDs getting an incident photon at about the same time. Scaling up to billions of bits per second while maintaining bit independence will require some work.

I'm not saying it can't be done, just that there will be a tradeoff between the quality of the randomness and the effort required to obtain it. These are pretty much details beyond the needs of the situation we're talking about here, though - there seems to be broad agreement that critical communications can be securely encrypted without unreasonable difficulty.

[Joseph Paul]

Why don't we look at what UT offers in the way of Communications and ECM and see what we can glean from that? All Comm equipment is assumed to routinely use encryption. There are radios, IR communicators, and lasers. The rules for decryption make a quantum computer supreme since it can decrypt in real time the most secure encryption if it can arrange bonuses to Complexity 14 (at TL9). So if Quantum comps are available TL 9 SigInt is going to have them. If it is Quantum and Fast it is expensive so this may be at Division level. Regimental and Battalion SigInt assets may be grunts riding herd on drones that are doing signal interception and IDing of units and passing that along.

Interception of signals has to happen first of course. IR and Laser comms are very hard to intercept but the units using them need to stay in LOS of each other. This is not always possible so I am not at all convinced that these are going to supplant radio. Broadcast radio is easy to intercept except that UT says that spreading a message out over the full-spectrum makes it hard to find though it neglects to give a modifier for that. –4?-6? IDK. Of course with an appropriate receiver you could try to listen in to all of the frequencies and put a quantum comp or AI on the job of piecing together this rich tapestry of broken messages. Given some of the assumptions in RAW this has to be happening on a regular basis or you would not have enough info to let the decryption begin.

Moving on to disrupting communications there are Deceptive Radar Jammers and Jammer warheads. I can't find anything else in UT. The Deceptive Radar Jammers have rules for fooling radars. A strict reading of the rules will mean that these don’t affect radios. I am presuming that is because Radars use frequencies that radios do not. This leaves (as far as I can tell) the Jammer Warheads. These slap a -10 on all EO(radio) communication in the defined radius for that size warhead. This keeps going as long as the warhead has power but there is no definitive rule on how long that is. Surprisingly there is no way to target the jammer. This flies in the face of current experience where we have built missiles that, when their tracking of the intended target is interfered with, will target the loudest ECM and paste it instead.

Given these rules and facing a foe using radio communications I would want sticky warheads that adhere to my opponent's vehicles and personnel so that the disruption moves with them. As long as it is on they are incommunicado and they can disrupt others by moving close enough. The Jammer warheads can also be timed so that if a target is hit with multiple jammers one may be working immediately and die off and later one of the others starts up. I would want to make my opponent so inconvenienced that he has to spend time removing these. Package them as submunitions from cluster bombs or artillery or fire larger ones like a SEFOP munition at specific targets. Mix in mines that look the same for even more aggravation. If a GM decides that you can indeed track a Jammer then anyone afflicted with one is a target for a homing munition or a fire mission that pastes an area.

There appear to be no other dedicated jamming devices in UT so we don’t have anything with stats attached that might dominate the airwaves over a larger part of an engagement.

EMP warheads may affect unarmored/unshielded radios. GM call as to whether or not an unsealed helmet’s DR is effective against the HT-8(2) attack. It may affect ETC/K guns, lasers, EM guns, battery powered scopes, and other powered equipment that a soldier has. Your ESM is now broken, fancy MEMSwear fails (does this mean that uniforms fall off of soldiers? Talk about getting caught with your pants down!), would powercells in ammo mags be affected?

Electromagnetic Smoke impairs radar and imaging radar. Blinding your opponent just before you strike is probably good for you. Probably need to use Radiant Prism to foul up all of the extended senses that troopers and drones have available to them. I think this is an effective counter to forward PD. Blind it (possibly with infantry weapons firing smoke. A TML Nebelwerfer?), then let Arty pound it.

Distilling this down to what formations may look like we get scouts or pickets that are using drones to fix and ID an enemy force.

SigInt gets more done with quantum computers. With out them decryption is not a battlefield exercise but an effort to find out what is being planned before it happens. Once the shooting starts non-quantum comps are too slow to help much on the future’s fluid battlefield.

Forces dedicated to disrupting communications and sensing equipment with special munitions. This is likely to be pushed all the way down to platoon level possibly in the form of a special weapons squad. At company and battalion there will be assets that do more. There may be one large unit charged with handling weird munitions or it may be broken into smaller units with distinct tactical tasking. One unit handles smoke assets, one unit handles jamming assets, one unit handles EMP. These higher level assets can be parceled out to bolster individual companies or platoons or kept together under one command even if the fire assets are distributed. These are good tools for isolating portions of the enemy force from the rest of his forces for long enough to make him bleed.

All together the force on the receiving end of this sort of attack should be out of radio communication, cut off from communicating by LOS laser/IR, unable to target with radar, IR, hyperspectral systems, or see much with the naked eye. The GPS coordinates of the attack should then receive incoming fire from artillery assets. These can be straight up HE, or mines like SADARM that can use magnetic and accoustic sensors to target with. Of course any friendly infantry or armor assets near the area can work at shooting anything that wants to get out of the area.

Future containerized NLOS assets may be able to pull off this sort of attack right out of the container. One launch container with a mix of warheads to deprive the target of communications, imaging, and targeting assets and another to do the pounding.