Next step in US OPSEC measures
In March 2023, Scramble Magazine first reported on the latest US Air Force Operational Security (OPSEC) measures in which legible serial numbers and unit markings were removed from USAF aircraft, especially Air Mobility Command (AMC) operated aircraft.
More recently, members of the US Senate started pressing the Department of Defense (DoD) to adopt more measures to limit the ability to track US military flights via their Automatic Dependent Surveillance-Broadcast (ads-b) transponders.
Two senators of the Senate Armed Services Committee, Chairman Jack Reed (Democrat) and ranking member Roger Wicker (Republican), filed a congressional guidance attached to a report for the FY24 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) in which they expressed their concerns about the current ease with which aircraft could be tracked. Their main concern is about military aircraft carrying senior officials.
In a first reaction, the DoD confirmed that it has developed a number of tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs), which it calls Joint/Interagency-Ground/Air Transponder Operational Risk Reduction, that are intended to mitigate the operational security threats posed by third parties tracking DoD aircraft through open source data broadcast by ads-b transponders. The Department confirmed that these TTPs have already been tested and that they can be effective against tracking. The DoD also acknowledged that the use of these TTPs is not consistently applied for sensitive DoD flights.
Four years back, in July 2019, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) permitted US federal, state and local government aircraft performing sensitive operations to fly with their installed ads-b position reporting electronics turned off. One could think of various additional measures to disguise military aircraft like using Mode S where the transponders can be set to not pump out specific geolocation data or send out information of any kind automatically or using bogus hex codes, which identify a transponder as belonging to a specific aircraft, to help mask certain sensitive flights.
US Congress is now actively pushing the DoD to take more uniform additional steps. It will definitely become harder to track certain US military flights. This combined with the measure to remove serials and unit markings, makes it a lot more difficult for aviation enthousiasts to identify aircraft. The world is changing ...
Photo of 89th AW C-32A 98-0002 by @Headdancer7 (Twitter)