[don_esteban]

I can see the following technology replacing motorcycles for communication:

(works up to 20-30km, a bit more if needed)

a) preinstall your fiber optic cable between points A and B (say AA platforms that need/want coordination for distributed passive/multistatic tracking of intruders)

b) when it is torn, send a fiber optic drone from A to B and use its line to replace the torn one (those are flying in Ukraine with bomb payload, now just use its fiber optic reel, you can reuse the drone; not durable, but very cheap and fast repair of radiation-free communication lines)

Today's technology offers so many opportunities ...

[phatskat]

Wouldn’t a WiFi mesh network be more reliable in war-torn areas? If you just need communication then actual “internet” is incidental and probably a security risk - just having a fairly secure local mesh network, with nodes covering hot-spot areas, seems like a good idea - it can cross areas where fiber isn’t reliable because of all the war, and it can potentially remove the need for some by-hand communication.

[don_esteban]

Wifi mesh makes sense in a densely populated area, not over mostly desert.

Also, communication over longer distances (even few km) will add so much latency that it will be unusable for coordinated AA targeting.

Furthermore, all that radiating will just invite bombs from the attacker.

Maybe I was not clear enough about the goal: not "robust command and control communication network", but more of:

quickly and temporarily set up a high-bandwidth low latency communication network to accomplish AA ambush using coordinated mobile passive sensors (a quick radar burst might for initial acquisition might be useful, but probably not necessary).

[DoctorOetker]

Right, but those are realistic engineering considerations.

Nowhere in your message do you describe light-speed motorcycles.

You didn't arrive at this conclusion thanks to a light-speed motorcycle thought exercise...

[don_esteban]

I was not talking about light-speed motorcycles. That was an artifact of imperfect war simulation.

The relevant concept is undetectable (by electronic surveilance) communication usable for tactical warfighting. Real life motorcycle messengers are a partial (detectable, high-latency) solutions for which there are currently (not at the time of that war exercise) better options (e.g. the one I presented).

You can nitpick that due to imperfection of the exercise (allowing red team to use light-speed motorcycles) the whole result of the wargame was compromised. To which my answer is: That is a nitpick, real-life offers the red team enough options to achieve the same results without relying on physically impossible feats.

Most recent example: Isrealis are learning to cope with fiber optics drones in the southern Lebanon, to great detriment to their Merkavas.

[DoctorOetker]

both in Ukraine and elsewhere there is the fiber optic challenge.

shouldn't it be possible to lock-in amplify imagery of known fluorescent centers in the main types of fiber optic?:

flash/flood the scene with appropriate stimulation wavelength for suitable fluorescent center, take a picture (and observe the emission wavelength), then take the same picture without the flash, repeat this N times and add all the ones with the flash present and subtract all the frames without so one can observe the exact paths of the optic cables...

It seems one could mass produce a cheap detection and imaging platform that can aid cutting all the umbilical cords cost-effectively.

[don_esteban]

Can you point me to more information on:

"shouldn't it be possible to lock-in amplify imagery of known fluorescent centers in the main types of fiber optic?"

In Ukraine, there are areas densely covered with fiber optic lines, almost all of them old. How would you detect and cut only the active ones?

A brightly flashing drone examining and cutting fiber optics lines would a) be slow and very obvious, easy to disable b) need a lot of battery power for all those flashes, and risk getting tangled in branches when cutting

On the other hand, if you can easily remotely detect the fiber optic cables, it might be useful for quickly detecting them and tracing them back to the operator.