Couple this with big name/external validation, and the fact that the best and brightest techs don't flock to the military (too dogmatic)...
The F35 is the new Bradley tank, and how much was spent?
Anyhow, you're probably correct, but I take exception to the reasoning being how much the military spent, or how long they worked at it.
(note: In times of war, all the political jockeying ends, disappears, and the military becomes lean and efficient. In times of peace, politics exist, including funding games.)
https://old.reddit.com/r/WarCollege/comments/erpmjm/having_j...
https://www.secretprojects.co.uk/threads/truth-to-the-pentag...
And finally a bit on the background of the Fighter Mafia member who wrote the black PR book that was used as basis for the movie (PhD thesis on the Fighter Mafia/Reformers and their influence in decision making in both USAF and elsewhere):
https://krex.k-state.edu/dspace/bitstream/handle/2097/38768/...
Theoretically maybe still a problem if the enemy is waiting for that moment to shoot at you, but to wait for a friendly fire incident seems a bit inefficient.
Those things use active radar themselves, or alternatively, follow a laser (presumably generally from the firing vehicle).
I’m not sure if the temporary radar pulse is going to make much difference.
Not really, but if the aircraft launching that Hellfire announces itself like that prior to firing, just to check who you are, it may give you just enough information to fire at it preemptively, or at least know (or let others know) where to look for it.
It's not a problem if the US is fighting a technologically inferior opponent, but apparently (from what I've read on HN the other day), the US military is retooling itself towards competition with China, so they have to consider their technological trickery being used against them.
I think this only works for the targeted party, which sends a pulse, which you could potentially triangulate on. The firing aircraft sends a very narrow beam of signal, so unless you have a specific setup to detect the direction of the signal, you’ll just know you were hit by an unidentified radio beam.
I’m not a radio expert though, who knows what I’m missing :)
Simply, he’s not Raytheon et al. It’s a rare piece of tech that any large military adopts from individual inventors.
It's a hard problem.
...that they're willing to spend billions of dollars and account for them as "investment in prevention of FF". Whether that means they actually want to prevent friendly fire or not is a different matter altogether, because of the way the money-distributing and -spending decisions are made.
The only testimony about why the military is not interested in his solution comes from the inventor himself. The military meanwhile does invest in different solutions, which the inventor claims are inferior.
> “I gotta give ’em credit for trying,” he said. “They spent about a billion dollars, and the thing wouldn’t work with [individual] soldiers.
To me, it seems more likely that the military has identified certain disadvantages to his proposed solution, than that there is some sort of conspiracy theory against solo inventors or this inventor specifically. I find it hard to believe that this person could come up with a solution in one year, that is superior to anything that professionals have been able to come up with after 30 years and billions of dollars of investment, but that the military dismisses his idea out of hand just because he's a solo inventor and not a big contractor.
The fact that the military has and is investing billions of dollars to try and solve friendly fire events shows they're definitely interested in reducing friendly fire, but the article over and over tries to imply the military isn't that keen on it. The title itself implies that too.
Not once in this 6000 word article is there a definitive reasoning for why his solution was rejected. It's all just conjecture and testimony from the inventor himself. Poor.