How do combat pilots identify friendly vs enemy ground forces? Infantry seems like it would be almost impossible to discern.
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They don’t.
They are given coordinates before they take off or by radio, and they shoot at the coordinates. They see nothing.
This was just in the news I think?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Identification_friend_or_foe?wprov=sfla1 this is one way
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)
Deploye lazer pointer, pop smoke, and limit directions incoming planes drop/point their ordinances. And, pray pilots understand the terrian they are seeing. ‘Drop North of big rock”.
There is usually some form of Mission Control, coordinating all forces. This might be back on the ground, or some kind of air combat officer in a AWACS/EWACS type plane.
Fire missions will be given by the mission coordinator, who should know the location of troops.
Also there might be preplanned “safe zones” or similar, such as a planned convoy route – don’t shoot shit in the corridor.
Imagine you have a big box of Legos. Some Legos are red and blue, and those are like the bad guys in a game. But other Legos are yellow and green, and those are like the good guys and the people who just want to play.
Sometimes, from really far away, it’s hard to see exactly which Lego is which. So if you want to take away the red and blue Legos, it’s tricky not to accidentally bump some yellow and green ones too.
That’s kind of what happens with airplanes and machines that fight from far away. They want to stop the bad guys, but it can be hard to tell them apart from the good guys who might be nearby. Even if they try really hard to be careful, sometimes they hurt someone they didn’t mean to.
–Google Gemini
Are squawk transponders/IFF not still a thing?
friendlies are marked by green and the enemies are marked by red. have you never played a video game? jeeeez
I had to read through a lot of these to understand the solution.
It looks like you are quite right, it is almost impossible to discern friend vs foe.
The solution is to have a person in the friendly group guiding you to attack the foe. This is hard to do so the JTAC is a skilled position. If no such person is available, anyone could try to do it but this may not work out well. There are various technical add ons that make this process simpler for the people on the ground but the approach is still similar.
Now, this likely rests on someone on a radio or similar calling for help so you have to have a way to authenticate they are in fact a friend and not a clever foe or a foe’s AI.
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