What prevents unmanned vehicles from being jammed or controlled by a hostile power?

Whether it’s ground, sea or air unmanned vehicles, what does the military do to make sure that it keeps in communication with them?

Is it accomplished the same way for ground unmanned vehicles in rough/obstructed terrain?

How could a hostile force cut the communication link? How could this be remedied?

Would it be possible for a hostile force to remote control another military’s unmanned vehicles?

While neither jamming nor acquisition of control, surreptitiously stealing the camera feed because the defense contractor was too stupid to encrypt the feed and you see what they are seeing.

The large ones are remotely controlled via satellite. Since the signals come from up above, the enemy has a difficult time jamming from below.

Also, the military likely employs some very sophisticated anti-jamming technology.

I’m sure the control channel is encrypted, which would prevent anyone grabbing control. When done properly, encryption is effectively unbreakable, despite what the movies say. I expect jamming is possible, but there are various ways of making it difficult, such as frequency hopping and a directional antenna.

The US’s unmanned vehicles also have some degree of intelligence of their own, and probably have some hardwired “standing orders” for what to do if they get jammed. My guess is that it’s either “use inertial guidance to navigate back to base”, or “find source of jamming and fire missiles at it until jamming stops”.

I’d guess that this is unlikely, as the potential for unwanted/unfortunate results is too high.

Eventually you can jam anything. But you may need infeasibly large amounts of power.

As has been noted, the communications link is from above, and will be from one of a number of satellites owned by the US military. Indeed they launched another such satellite earlier this year. The communications occurs way up in the microwave region. One can assume that they use a spread spectrum. Spreading means the frequency hops continuously. This has a number of advantages. The actual frequency hopping sequence can it self be a cypher. Unless you know the hopping algorithm you won’t be able to keep track. The algorithm can be adaptive - it can avoid frequencies that appear to be occupied (i.e. filled with jamming energy), and can be constructed in such a manner that transmissions are almost undetectable beneath the background noise.

The wide range of frequencies that spread spectrum will use means that you don’t have a single frequency to jam. Rather you have to fill the entire spectrum with energy. That is a much harder prospect.

To actually control a UAV needs a very low bandwidth link. As has been noted, they mostly are capable of flying themselves. Control input is little more than direction control. You could get away with less than 100 bits per second. This very low rate means that there can be a huge amount of robustness in the signal. In addition to encryption, the channel can carry large amounts of redundancy and error correction without impacting on its utility.

Unless the UAV was very close, there would be essentially no feasible way of jamming it. Eventually, when it was close enough, a brute force jamming would be successful. But by this time you almost certainly have much more urgent problems to worry about, mostly in the form of a recently arrived missile.

What’s the lag like, and how do they deal with it? I understand that real time flying control is not required because the drones fly themselves but I would have thought firing decisions might need to be made very quickly on the fly, or do they only use them against stable targets?

I assume satellites are in the Wideband Global SATCOM series, which is geostationary. That gets you a best case one directional latency of one fifth of a second, and double that for a control loop. Which probably isn’t great. But given the ground controller isn’t actually flying the UAV, but rather directing it, it isn’t going to go unstable. (The aircraft is apparently initially controlled by the launching crew, and handed over to the mission control crew once aloft.) The issue of targeting and target designation is probably not easy. They are known to have hit moving targets, in particular vehicles. Head on, or from behind one assumes the target may be reasonably stable from the viewpoint of the aircraft. The Predator carries a laser designator, so one assumes that despite the latency they can keep things stable enough to use it. In an uncluttered environment it probably wouldn’t be all that hard to build an autonomous laser designator controller that operates visually, and once locked onto the target is capable of guiding the missile. Given a Hellfire missile is supersonic, the flight time isn’t going to be long.

The actual reality is likely not going to be public.

The lag isn’t an issue, because today’s generation of soldiers have been trained to compensate for lag by years of experience playing online games.

I understand that the missiles UAVs use fly themselves too. As for deciding on the fly, a fraction of a second likely doesn’t matter that much. If the projectiles were unguided, lag would matter, especially for air to air combat. But I can’t really imagine how firing 1/2 a second later would be likely to have negative consequences.

What’s so special about unmanned vehicles? Manned aircraft and vehicles also need data links to communicate with each other and base. So the answer to your question would be “the same thing that prevents manned vehicles or any number of guided missiles from being jammed by a hostile power”?

I mean I’m not an expert here but it seems to me that if “jamming” is basically flooding the air with radio signals, it would be a simple matter to whack the source of the jamming with a missile that homes in on those radio signals.

But they have a rather smarter onboard guidance system.

They don’t have a person inside them. If you lose communication with a manned plane, the pilot can still operate the plane. Not so with a UAV.

That’s not a particularly useful distinction in the context of this question. Commanders don’t want to lose communication with their manned aircraft any more than their UAVs so they would take the same precautions for both.

That’s why pilots are always officers. The assumption is that a human officer is trained enough and responsible enough to make decisions on his own, even without contact with a superior. If the military doesn’t trust you to make decisions on your own, they don’t make you an officer to begin with.