Aerial Warfare Research Articles

Analytical game strategies for active UAV defense considering response delays

In the realm of aerial warfare, the protection of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) against adversarial threats is crucial. In order to balance the impact of response delays and the demand for onboard applications, this paper derives three analytical game strategies for the active defense of UAVs from differential game theory, accommodating the first-order dynamic delays. The targeted UAV executes evasive maneuvers and launches a defending missile to intercept the attacking missile, which constitutes a UAV-Missile-Defender (UMD) three-body game problem. We explore two distinct operational paradigms: the first involves the UAV and the defender working collaboratively to intercept the incoming threat, while the second prioritizes UAV self-preservation, with independent maneuvering away from potentially sacrificial engagements. Starting with model linearization and order reduction, the Collaborative Interception Strategy (CIS) is first derived via a linear quadratic differential game formulation. Building upon CIS, we further explore two distinct strategies: the Informed Defender Interception Strategy (IDIS), which utilizes UAV maneuvering information, and the Unassisted Defender Interception Strategy (UDIS), which does not rely on UAV maneuvering information. Additionally, we investigate the conditions for the existence of saddle point solutions and their relationship with vehicle maneuverability and response agility. The simulations demonstrate the effectiveness and advantages of the proposed strategies.

The Dynamics of Technological Spectacle in Billy Mitchell's Campaign for Aerial War

Abstract This essay examines the first major American debate over aerial warfare as a case study in the relationship between visual spectacle and warfighting technologies. In the early 1920s, Brigadier General William “Billy” Mitchell mounted a short but intense advocacy campaign to win public approval for a standalone and fully supported air force. He justified his arguments with sanitized depictions of the warplane's idealized deployment. I call such depictions technological spectacles, and I parse their three hallmarks in Mitchell's advocacy: the dissociation of violence and destruction, the self-justification of technology, and the confusion of possibility for probability. I demonstrate that these habits of spectacle pervaded not only Mitchell's rhetoric but the coverage he received in the press. The essay establishes Mitchell as a key figure in the history of American rhetoric about military technology and, in the process, offers new historical context and critical vocabulary for diagnosing rhetorics of technological spectacle.

Vom “Flugtraum” zum “Luftmord”: Der österreichische Luftdiskurs im Kontext des Ersten Weltkrieges

Abstract: This article looks at the literary and visual legacies of the development of weapons technologies and the prospect of aerial warfare in the early twentieth century, analyzing the literary and iconographic discourse on air warfare in the context of the First World War, as a development from “flight dream” to “air murder.” Even if Austria-Hungary represented a “remote province of international aerial activity” (F. P. Ingold), the rapid development of aerial technology in the form of aerodynamic airships and motorized flying machines did not go unnoticed there. Airspace acquires power as a political and military factor that is increasingly mobilized for national and imperial purposes. The article shows how these developments found their way into Austrian debates, literary production, and iconographic representation with reliance on the critical reading of texts and cartoons that announce something evil “in the air,” as if portending the use of air power in bombing civilian populations.

Framing data witnessing: Airwars and the production of authority in conflict monitoring

Civilian victims of aerial warfare too often go uncounted and unrecognised by the belligerents. Myriad images and video of attacks against Syrian civilians did little to end their suffering, for example. The UK-based not-for-profit Airwars has had tangible impact on civilian harm disclosures and reparations because they have been able to shape such representations in a form that will be recognised by those with the power to enact change. Building on established theories of media witnessing and their extension to what Gray calls ‘data witnessing’, we argue that Airwars reveals the operative role of framing in open-source investigation and the forms of it witnessing it produces. Through interviews with key team members and detailed analysis of Airwars published methodology and other materials, this article shows how open-source investigations broadens the frame for witnessing civilian harm and in doing so generates relational, multi-scalar accounts of state violence that remain open to contestation and confirmation. In doing so, Airwars claims an epistemic authority via its distinctive framing of emergent practices of witnessing that depend upon the assembling of roles, standards, spatialities and techniques.

Breathless war: martial bodies, aerial experiences and the atmospheres of empire

Following a widespread fascination with drones, the materiality of aerial warfare – its bodies, embodied experiences, technologies – has received increasing attention in International Relations (IR) scholarship. This article pushes for a deeper, political theorisation of air in the study of war in its material and embodied dimensions through a critical reading of the Abyssinian War (1935–1936) – a central yet largely neglected conflict in the colonial history of world politics. Exploring the joint deployment of aeroplanes and mustard gas in Ethiopia via a mosaic of sources – literature, strategic thought, cartoons and memoirs – I argue that aerial relations expose the production of a racialised global order underpinned by more-than-human war experiences. Bringing together geographer Derek McCormack’s concept of ‘envelopment’ and Black Studies scholar Christina Sharpe’s idea of ‘the weather’, I show how Italy’s imperial desires – and their international perceptions – cannot be theorised in separation from aerial experiences that are conceived as excessive of human bodies, sensing and imagination. This analysis thus makes two central contributions to the critical study of war in IR. First, an aerial reading of the Abyssinian War highlights the political importance of war experience beyond the human. Second, it challenges studies of drone warfare that reduce discussions of air to either the strategic, technical and ontological plane or to the intimate, embodied and phenomenological one. Instead, the more-than-human aerial experiences of the Abyssinian War call for a theorisation of air as both material and affective, technical and embodied, and grand strategic and intimate.

The Literature of Absolute War: Transnationalism and World War II

The Literature of Absolute War: Transnationalism and World War II

Rebecca Searle. Art, Propaganda and Aerial Warfare in Britain during the Second World War. New Directions in Social and Cultural History. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2020. Pp. 168. $115.00 (cloth).

Rebecca Searle. Art, Propaganda and Aerial Warfare in Britain during the Second World War. New Directions in Social and Cultural History. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2020. Pp. 168. $115.00 (cloth). - Volume 61 Issue 2

Doors in the sky: Detection, localization and classification of aerial vehicles using laser mesh

Stealth technology and Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) are expected to dominate current and future aerial warfare. The radar systems at their maximum operating ranges, however, are not always able to detect stealth and small UAVs mainly due to their small radar cross sections and/or low altitudes. In this paper, a novel technique as an alternative to radar technology is proposed. The proposed approach is based on creating a mesh structure of laser beams initiated from aerial platforms towards the ground. The laser mesh acts as a virtual net in the sky. Any aerial vehicle disrupting the path of the laser beams are detected and subsequently localized and tracked. As an additional feature, steering of the beams can be used for increased coverage and improved localization and classification performance. A database of different types of aerial vehicles is created artificially based on Gaussian distributions. The database is used to develop several Machine Learning (ML) models using different algorithms to classify a target. Overall, we demonstrated through simulations that our proposed model achieves simultaneous detection, classification, localization, and tracking of a target.

Aerial warfare: An inducible production of volatile bioactive metabolites in a novel species of Scytinostroma sp.

Antimicrobial volatile organic compounds (VOCs) may provide fungi an advantage over other competing microorganisms. As these defensive metabolites are often produced in response to microbial competitors, they are easily overlooked in axenic cultures. We used media supplemented with spent medium from Candida albicans to induce the expression of a broad-spectrum antimicrobial response in a previously uncharacterised white-rot fungus, Scytinostroma sp. Crude extractions of Scytinostroma sp. metabolites were found to be cytotoxic to fibroblast cells and antimicrobial to filamentous fungi, yeasts and Gram-positive bacteria. Volatile antimicrobial activity was observed for Scytinostroma sp. cultures and metabolite extracts using antimicrobial assays in bi-compartmentalised plates. Culture headspace analysis using solid-phase microextraction (SPME) coupled to gas chromatography-mass spectrometry (GC–MS) revealed a pronounced shift in Scytinostroma sp. VOCs when cultured on media supplemented with C. albicans spent medium. We observed a significant increase in the levels of 45 identified VOCs, including 7 metabolites with reported antimicrobial activity. Using preparative HPLC combined with GC–MS, we determined that isovelleral is likely to be the main broad-spectrum antimicrobial metabolite produced by Scytinostroma sp. Isovelleral is a sesquiterpene dialdehyde with both antibiotic and antifeedant properties, previously detected in fruit bodies of other Basidiomycetes.

Anglicans and Aviators: The First World War and the Forgotten Origins of Royal Air Force Chaplaincy

Nineteen‐eighteen saw the formation of the world's first independent air force, and the inauguration of the first independent chaplaincy organisation devoted to military aviation. However, the neglected creation of the Chaplains' Branch of the Royal Air Force (RAF) towards the end of the First World War represents far more than just a minor footnote in the institutional history of Britain's armed forces. The circumstances of its creation, which occurred just as the German sociologist Max Weber was identifying scientific progress as driving the ineluctable “disenchantment of the world,” not only belied this famous sociological maxim in the highly technological and supremely modern context of aerial warfare but also demonstrated the competence of Anglican chaplaincy methods and the resilience of British ‘“Christendom” in the context of a war which is widely perceived as having exposed and exacerbated the weaknesses of both.

Accessing children’s historical experiences through their art: four drawings of aerial warfare from the Spanish Civil War

ABSTRACT This article considers the potential for children’s drawings to be utilized more widely as documentary evidence by historians. Children remain seen but not heard in much of history, with a noted source problem hampering efforts to address this. Drawings are a different type of ambiguous evidence but there is a compelling case for their usage, partly demonstrated by various professional uses including the acceptance of children’s drawings as evidence in courts. This article analyses four boys’ drawings of aerial conflict from the Spanish Civil War which are powerful visual reminders of the toll of war on children and exemplify the communicative power of non-linguistic sources to a heavily textual discipline.

Building Socialism: The Afterlife of East German Architecture in Urban Vietnam by Christina Schwenkel

Reviewed by: Building Socialism: The Afterlife of East German Architecture in Urban Vietnam by Christina Schwenkel Katrin Bahr Building Socialism: The Afterlife of East German Architecture in Urban Vietnam. By Christina Schwenkel. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2020. Pp. vii + 403. Paper $30.95. ISBN 978-1478011064. In recent years, historians have started to increasingly immerse themselves with questions of the transnational relationships between the German Democratic Republic (GDR) and their socialist allies in the Asian and African world. While there is some research on the East German experts in Africa, less is known about the relationships between Vietnam and the GDR. In her book Building Socialism, anthropologist Christina Schwenkel offers a multifaceted perspective that includes the transformation of urban spaces, architectural planning, and the everyday life of Vietnamese people living in development estates. Schwenkel examines the various stages of urban development and the longing for modernity as part of the socialist vision in the city of Vinh during the 1970s and 1980s and its resulting failure and disillusionment post-1990. In addition to an analysis of modern architecture—and its [End Page 620] planning—to explain the process of socialist nation-building, Schwenkel also stresses the importance of the subjects striving, living, and opposing the socialist model, and how this "unplanned obsolescence" influenced the understanding of the urban past and future, as well as the remembrance of socialist solidarity (5). The book is divided into three main parts: Ruination, Reconstruction, and Obsolescence. Part 1 sets the ground for the international help by socialist countries, focusing on the US invasion from 1964 to 1973 and the devastating assault on the urban landscape by air. The first chapter details the efforts of the strategic bombings by US pilots through aerial photography to construct the enemy, and in which "racialized optics" justified the killings (19). The second chapter moves from the air to the ground and exposes the lived experiences of the Vietnamese people during aerial warfare. While aerial photography distanced itself from the human aspects of destruction, photographs taken on the ground created a "moral and civil knowledge," thereby bringing to light the vast destruction of not only the urban landscape, but also of Vietnamese culture and livelihood, and the consequent exodus from urban areas (49). As the events unfolded, news of the warfare began to mobilize socialist countries to express their international solidarity with Vietnam. Relevantly, the third chapter focuses on the GDR and its justification and deployment of solidarity efforts to Vietnam. Not only did the GDR envision its engagement as a chance to claim its geopolitical space in the competition with West Germany and the Soviet Union, but also to use postwar German history as a collective and shared experience while simultaneously opposing US imperialism. The second part of the book looks at the vision of socialist modernization and Vietnam's collaboration with East German experts in the process of rebuilding the city after US destruction. Solidarity between the GDR and Vietnam had already started in the 1950s and represented one of the earliest friendship agreements the GDR signed with decolonized countries. In light of this, the special agreement between the East Germans and the Vietnamese instilled a mindset of postcolonial solidarity that allowed for "new forms of legitimacy and intimacy" (21). Chapter 4 discusses the project divisions within Vietnam among the Soviet Union, China, and other Eastern bloc countries, as well as the lack of knowledge those countries brought to Vietnam—a feature exemplified by unrealistic design proposals and a lack of skilled labor. As the chapter shows, this did not apply to GDR projects, which "succeed[ed] on account of social, political, and affective forces" and recognized the importance of housing, technology, and training the returned displaced people to achieve modernity (112). Chapter 5 then incorporates the collaboration between planners and architects from East Germany and Vietnam, and their negotiation of the "mutual cooperation" (140). Discussions included the different visions of urban development to achieve economic efficiency and to balance tradition with modernity. Chapter 6 concludes with the urban housing estates' aim to advance technology and to improve the living conditions, but [End Page 621] at the same time also provided the state the opportunity to...

The markings of military aircraft under the law of aerial warfare

The markings of military aircraft under the law of aerial warfare

Using KOCOA Military Terrain Analysis for the Assessment of Twentieth Century Battlefield Landscapes

Military terrain analysis serves as a tool to examine a battle commander’s view of a battlefield and permits to hindcast some of the rationale for actions taken. This can be augmented by physical evidence of the remains of the battle that still exist in the cultural landscape. In the case of World War II-era battlefields, such terrain analysis has to take into account the influence of aerial warfare—the interrelationship between attacking aircraft and the siting of anti-aircraft guns. This paper examines these issues using the case example of the Japanese WWII-era base on Kiska in the Aleutian Islands (Alaska).

Aerial warfare: the battle for the skies

Aerial warfare: the battle for the skies

Impact of mission requirements on the design of low observable UCAV configurations

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to characterise the effects of mission and performance parameters on the design space of low observable subsonic unmanned combat aerial vehicles (UCAVs) operating in typical Hi-Lo-Hi ground strike missions.Design/methodology/approachConceptual design methodologies appropriate to low observable, tailless UCAVs have been integrated into a multidisciplinary aircraft design environment, GENUS, developed at Cranfield University’s aircraft design group. A basic Hi-Lo-Hi mission is designed and a baseline configuration is established through the GENUS framework. Subsequently, an evolutionary optimiser and a robust gradient-based optimiser are used to obtain convergent design solutions for various leading edge sweep angles, mission ranges, cruise Mach numbers and other operational constraints.FindingsThe results indicate that performance constraints, specifically in the form of specific excess power (SEP), have a large influence on the overall sizing of subsonic tailless UCAVs. This requirement drives the engine sizing, which represents a considerable proportion of the empty and gross mass of the vehicle. Cruise Mach number studies show that no significant advantages exist for operating at low speeds while maintaining performance requirements consistent with combat missions. There is a drastic increase in the vehicle’s mass and thrust requirements for flight speeds above Mach 0.8, with low sweep configurations showing a more pronounced effect. Increases in the range are not overly dependent on the leading edge sweep angle. Top-level radar cross section (RCS) results also favour configurations with higher leading edge sweep angles, especially from the nose-on aspect. Finally, research and development costs are shown to be directly linked to engine size.Originality/valueThis research shows the use of an integrated aircraft design environment that incorporates aerodynamics, performance, packaging and low observability aspects into the optimisation loop. Through this methodology, this study supports the efforts towards characterising and establishing alternate visions of the future of aerial warfare through the use of low cost, survivable unmanned platforms in network-centric cooperative tasks.

Using 3D Spatial Visualisation to Interpret the Coverage of Anti-Aircraft Batteries on a World War II Battlefield

Heritage Building Information Modeling (HBIM) focuses on the documentation and visualization of heritage properties which are confined in their permanent terrestrial space. This paper extended the concept of Heritage Building Information Modeling to the airspace above the sites. It presented a methodology for the 3D spatial visualisation of the aerial space controlled by anti-aircraft (AA) guns, taking into account the masking effects of the underlying terrain and the technological capabilities of the guns (rate of fire, projectile weight, etc.). The tool permits a nuanced analysis of the interplay between attacking aircraft and the siting of anti-aircraft guns and thus, allows for the analysis of the cultural landscape of World War II-era battle fields, which has to take into account the influence of aerial warfare. The applicability was illustrated by the case example of the Japanese WWII base on Kiska (Aleutian Islands).

Frank Ledwidge, Aerial Warfare: The Battle for the Skies

Frank Ledwidge, Aerial Warfare: The Battle for the Skies. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018. 184pp. ISBN 978-0-19-881813-7 (hardback). Price £12.99.

Terror from the Skies: The Propaganda of Aerial Warfare in the Emerging Mass Media of the First World War

Aerial warfare was developed and used in the First World War to terrorize soldiers and population centers, and modern mass media played a dominant role in spreading the fear of the new innovation of war to a global audience. This view of the propagandistic value of aerial warfare played a major role in combat strategies and tactics of the war as military and political leaders began to utilize psychological operations. This paper explores the historical context of this era in light of the emerging broadcast media of the day. The study concludes with observations of the characteristics of this new ‘terror propaganda,’ the use of which continues today.

Defense Economics: Perspectives on Air Forces, Air Defense and Aerial Warfare

The aim of this working paper is to explore the domain of aerial warfare through the lens of economic thought, drawing upon rudimentary but salient economic perspectives to discuss the nature of air forces, aerial warfare, and aerospace sectors, particularly in light of the emergence of the recent sub-discipline of Defense Economics. The findings of the paper indicate that, as with countless other sectors that form the basis of society, economic factors influence aerial warfare and air forces through important tacit and overt means. As such, institutes of aerospace research can and should incorporate defense economics into their research agenda to arrive at more comprehensive approaches to the complex problems they examine.