RPVS, Data Links, and the Jamming Threat,

Soviet exploitation of their own technological developments has produced increasingly strong foward battle area surface-to-air defenses and, at the same time, strengthened the need for our own combat fire support to help offset the massive enemy ground force fire power advantage. Recent technological innovations on our part--e.g., standoff munitions, homing weapons, remotely piloted vehicles--promise to alleviate this situation, but the data links needed by many of these new devices present a new, and potentially attractive, vulnerability that the enemy defense may be able to exploit. Analysis of that potential vulnerability requires a contextual systems approach rather than the traditional one-on-one. This means including system life-cycle costs, examining alternatives open to both sides other than simply entering into an electronic countermeasurescounter-countermeasures game, and assessing the utility of those alternatives in terms of a total combat system payoff criterion. Within this context, an approach is discussed that can help identify those circumstances favoring the enemy use of jammers and the resultant data link jam-resistance performance requirements and allowable costs. Author