
Blimps Protecting Washington, D.C - dnetesn
http://www.fastcompany.com/3040209/there-are-secret-blimps-protecting-washington-dc
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Animats
This is Raytheon's JLENS tethered radar surveillance blimp. It's not a new
system, or particularly exotic.

Sales pitch video:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q8hkpQ8ujyM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q8hkpQ8ujyM)

The dumbed-down version:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SiJWBszuq-c](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SiJWBszuq-c)

Detailed procurement history: [http://www.defenseindustrydaily.com/jlens-
coordinating-cruis...](http://www.defenseindustrydaily.com/jlens-coordinating-
cruise-missile-defense-and-more-02921/)

Tethered radar blimps aren't new. One of them provided the first warning of
the invasion of Kuwait in 1990. ([http://www.tcomlp.com/aerostat-system-
kuwait/](http://www.tcomlp.com/aerostat-system-kuwait/)) That system had just
been installed, and hadn't even been turned over to the Kuwaiti military, what
there was of it, yet. A radar operator from TCOM, the manufacturer, detected a
big group of approaching tanks. They called in a warning. Unlike Pearl Harbor,
it wasn't ignored; the Kuwaiti royal family immediately left the country,
escaping the invasion.

The JLENS system, unlike older systems, has fire-control capability. That
means it has not just a surveillance radar, but can lock onto targets and
direct weapons. The real question to ask is what weapons systems are being
installed in the Washington area for it to direct. There's no point in having
fire-direction capability without weapons to direct.

There is an optical surveillance add-on for JLENS, but it's supposedly not on
the Washington area blimp.

It's surprising this is going up now. I would have expected something like
this to have been deployed around November 2001.

~~~
dragontamer
Old tech designed to protect the President, very likely.

    
    
        A 2013 test confirmed the ability to track short-range ballistic missiles in their boost phase.
    

If a Nuke is to hit Washington DC, we'll want to make sure that the President
is warned in time and can enter his nuclear bunker.

That said, "Captain America 2: The Winter Soldier" just came out, so people
are probably thinking this is some sort of auto-kill sky cannon mounted on
Helicarriers for the purpose of suppressing the US Population.

~~~
jedmeyers
What kind of a short-range nuke is going to hit Washington, DC? If it was
installed in Seoul, South Korea then maybe, but not DC. There is already a
large system in place to detect long-range ICBMs.

~~~
stonogo
The kind fired from a submarine.

~~~
mikecb
This looks roughly down from about 10k feet. For a midcourse or terminal
ballistic missile, you want to be looking up, like the cobra dane radars or
THAAD or patriot batteries. To find the launch, we rely on infrared satellite
sensors like cobra brass, and use radar to track. But again, this would be
inappropriate, and other radars would be used.

~~~
mikeash
Who said it was ballistic? A submarine launched, nuclear armed cruise missile
could be potent and worth defending against.

~~~
mikecb
You're right. That's exactly the sort of weapon this was designed to detect.

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flurpitude
"As of press time the aerostats are intended to stay in the air 24/7, and to
be taken down only for a monthly maintenance cycle and during extreme weather
events such as hurricanes."

To any potential attackers, read that statement carefully. There's a clue in
there.

Disclaimer to NSA etc.: not advocating attacks on the US. Just spotting an
apparent loophole.

~~~
TeMPOraL
Probably they'll keep their detection areas overlapping and take down one
blimp at a time...

~~~
baddox
And probably aerial attacks against the United States are even less practical
during a hurricane.

~~~
olefoo
Depends on how much you trust the guidance systems on your cruise missile.

That said, I can't see the advantage to any one player in taking out
Washington DC unless they can shift attribution to someone else. I mean the
small crazies (DPRK etc.) might want to do so but have to know that even
success would be fatal to them. And the big crazies (Putin, the Ayatollahs,
whoever's really running the show in China) would be too concerned about the
consequences.

Not saying it couldn't happen, but the odds are, any entity capable of
carrying out such an attack successfully has enough to lose that they would be
dissuaded from doing something that would have extremely unpredictable
consequences.

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tantalor
How does this compare to traditional ground-based radar?

~~~
TwoFactor
Ground-based radars a typically constrained by line-of-sight on the horizon,
and the curvature of the earth - you can't see anything beyond the horizon.
Being elevated gives you a much larger range as that tangent line moves
significantly outward.

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ilikepi
Tethered to the ground from almost 2 miles up? I'd imagine this would require
a decent sized exclusion zone for air traffic.

Also, there's always going to be some wind aloft pulling the blimp away from
its anchor. It would be interesting to see a risk assessment for the land
immediately surrounding the anchor point given the worst case of the cable
separating from its attachment point on the blimp.

~~~
spacefight
Yes, it's within a restricted area ('R'):

[http://skyvector.com/?ll=39.34010380401439,-76.1800231869041...](http://skyvector.com/?ll=39.34010380401439,-76.18002318690418&chart=301&zoom=2)

~~~
ilikepi
Ah, the sectional I was viewing on flightaware.net didn't show that note. I
was just reading[1] how a similar aerostat is flown from Cudjoe Key, Florida
by the DEA. That one appears to be marked in its own 4 mile wide zone.[2]

[1]:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cudjoe_Key,_Florida](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cudjoe_Key,_Florida)

[2]:
[http://skyvector.com/?ll=24.664298,-81.482339&chart=301&zoom...](http://skyvector.com/?ll=24.664298,-81.482339&chart=301&zoom=2)

------
codezero
I'm curious whether it is common to test this kind of technology right on top
of large US cities?

Don't most missile defense technologies get tested in more practical, or at
least, remote settings? Why aren't these hovering over places that actually
are subjected to, or at least more likely to be subjected to missile attacks,
like Korea or Israel?

~~~
ceejayoz
I suspect they're interested in tracking aircraft (and drones) to enforce the
flight restrictions around the White House and other areas. As it can track
ground vehicles, it could also be useful for tracking vehicles of interest for
undetectable surveillance.

If I were a Secret Service agent, my biggest fear would be swarm of off-the-
shelf drones carrying grenades into something like inauguration. Something
like this could give the early warning they need.

~~~
kenrikm
Not sure about that being feasible to detect things of that nature with this
system. For example you can build a mini quadcopter (size of a bird) weighing
5-800gms that can provide 2+KG of thrust. Back of the napkin math says a 400gm
m67 grenade is easily within the payload capacity (Assuming 70% throttle to
hover all up payload would be 1400+-gms). I would be very impressed if this
could differentiate "bird sized flying objects" from birds. With that in mind
I think we can be glad that complicated plots of that nature stay in the realm
of James Bond rather then reality. Also I think the Boston bombings show that
bad people don't need complicated technology to do bad things.

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rbcgerard
This seems more likely to be used against ground targets (u.s. Citizens) than
any arial threat that ground based radar couldn't detect. What non-state
actors have cruise missiles?

~~~
electromagnetic
Ground based radar is blind below the horizon, and generally blind near the
horizon.

At 3.2km (2 miles) up the horizon is 202km away. At 12m (40ft) for a ground
based radar (pulled that out of my arse, just for an example) the horizon is
at 12.4km.

Then we discuss things like the Clutter Zone, which is a big issue for ground
based radar systems. Planes and helicopters can fly Nap-of-the-Earth - below
about 500ft is the usual stated height - because everything from buildings to
wind over 15mph can make it unreliable for ground based systems.

An elevated system eliminates most of these problems, and this system has a
radar horizon that covers all water and land from DC out to the Atlantic
coast.

There's a lot of areas where a submarine could launch from unnoticed, and I'm
guessing trying to detect a sub in busy waters is a lot harder and less
reliable than a radar system to target a missile launch and try to take down a
short range ICBM.

~~~
hga
Or a nuclear tipped supersonic missile like the Mach 3 Sunburn
([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P-270_Moskit](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P-270_Moskit)),
or back in the '80s I heard of the concept of using SLBMs in a "depressed
trajectory" mode, where they didn't really get up high but used their rocket
energy to travel horizontally really really fast.

Putting these sorts of defenses in D.C. is in part about avoiding a
"decapitation" attack.

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ryan-allen
It looks like something out of Half Life 2. Very creepy.

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tomaskafka
Surprised that nobody mentioned blimp's usefulness for real-time tracking of
crowd of revolting citizens in streets.

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squozzer
Cool. But are we fighting the last war?

~~~
mikeash
The threat of MAD and nuclear WWIII never actually went away. People just sort
of forgot about it.

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eric_h
The current proximity of this story to "The weirdness of 50s bomb shelters" on
the front page seems remarkably apt.

