How do combat pilots identify friendly vs enemy ground forces? Infantry seems like it would be almost impossible to discern.
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Well, there’s many possible ways. For one thing, you can make a pretty decent educated guess based on positioning. You know roughly where your troops are, and thus, anything that isn’t in your troops position is probably an enemy. Not only that, there are things like laser guided weaponry. Your ground troops can mark a position with a laser pointer, and then, all the aircraft needs to do is get close enough for the bomb to guide itself in. These bombs can have an accuracy of a few meters. For vehicles such as tanks, it’s a bit easier. Firstofall, aircraft already have hardware that lets them tell friends apart from enemies at beyond visual range. An extremely important capability to prevent friendly fire, when all you have is a radar return. Such technology can also be implemented into tanks and other ground vehicles, albeit at shorter range. Not only that, a short range, high resolution radar or a good camera can potentially give you enough clarity to tell the tanks apart.
And, of course, communication. You would be surprised at the amount of money that western militaries in particular have invested into communication and interconnectivity. Look at the F-35. It can communicate with just about anything that has a datalink. It can target enemy aircraft that it cannot even see itself. Hell, look at AEGIS. It’s a system deployed by the US Navy that networks warships and other assets together to allow for more efficient missile defense (if a task force comes under fire, instead of each ship firing locally, AEGIS coordinates their defensive efforts, allocating each ship targets to intercept, thus eliminating the need for deconfliction, that is to say, preventing two ships from wasting interceptors on the same target while other missiles get through without one interceptor targeting them at any point, aswell as being able to reallocate interceptors if the missile they were aiming for was destroyed by a previous interceptor)
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