alt Hacker News> high-bandwidth, low-latency mesh network in a contested electronic environment.
Hard to win at jamming, when you're further away and the opponents are frequency agile.
1. They can use directionality more effectively to their advantage
2. Inverse square law works against you (unlike e.g. jamming GPS where it works for you).
3. They can be frequency agile, strongly rejecting everything outside of the 20MHz slice they're using "right now"-- and have choices of hundreds of those slices.
Fighters already have radars that they expect to "win" with despite that being inverse fourth power, a longer range, and countermeasures. They can send communications-ish signals anywhere over a couple GHz span up near X-band. Peak EIRP that they put out isn't measured in kilowatts, but tens of megawatts.
Fair point, “jammed” was too binary.
My concern is less total link loss than what happens under degraded or intermittent connectivity. If the wingman still depends on the manned aircraft for tasking or weapons authority, then the interesting question is how it behaves when the link is noisy rather than gone.
That feels like the real hinge in the concept.