Mac-Coleman

7 November  2013

Range Gate Stealing: [A metaphor for] changing the message and distorting the truth.

Mark Twain famously said: “There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.”  A fourth lie we often don’t recognize is when the truth has gradually been distorted and changed.   We find this latter type of lie in politics, in law, and in every day conversations. 

The air combat technique known as Range Gate Stealing perfectly illustrates this kind of deception:

An aircraft loaded with missiles flies over enemy territory.  It is charged with destroying the enemy’s air defenses so more bombers can come and destroy other enemy targets and return home safely.  This first aircraft is immediately “painted” by enemy ground-based radars, which emit an electronic signal that hits the aircraft and bounces back to the radar dish to determine the aircraft’s location in the sky.  This tracking data then is sent to a missile battery that fires at the aircraft.  From the time the aircraft is detected by the radar to the time a missile is fired may be only ten seconds.  Death comes quickly to the unprepared.  

But the attack aircraft can survive by using electronic countermeasures—ECM—to deceive the ground radar.  ECM slows down the radar’s response and gives the attacker enough time to bomb the radar site and eliminate threats to the follow-on attackers. 

Here’s how it works: every electronic emitter, from radio stations to radars, operates at a specific frequency.  But they are never exact; they actually vacillate within a narrow band on the electromagnetic spectrum.  Remember turning the dial on an old radio to “lock on” a station?   As the dial approaches the assigned frequency—the center of the station’s narrow frequency range—the music becomes clearer.  This wiggle room in the spectrum, however narrow it may be, is what range gate stealing exploits.   

The attacking aircraft detects when the ground radar’s signal hits it, and immediately identifies the radar’s frequency.  The aircraft then sends back a signal from the center of identified frequency range to the ground radar, but one more powerful than the radar’s original signal.  The ground radar then locks onto the more powerful return signal within its frequency range.  The attacker then moves the center of its deceptive signal’s frequency slightly closer to the edge of the ground radar’s original frequency range.  The ground radar will follow the deceptive signal because it’s the strongest one in the acceptable range.  The attacker then moves its strong, deceptive, return signal to the edge of the ground radar’s frequency range, showing the attacking aircraft in a false position in the sky.

Finally, the aircraft moves the deceptive return signal beyond the ground radar’s frequency range and turns it off.  The radar on the ground now “loses lock” on the deceptive signal.  It must reacquire its original signal and find the attacker all over again.  This process gives the attacker time to fire on the radar, kill it, and return safely home. 

This is range gate stealing.  It works in war, it works in our lives.

Consider the prosecutor who range gate steals a domestic situation, completely changing it while questioning a defendant:

Prosecutor:  What were you and your wife doing before the police arrived?

Defendant:  We were arguing.

Prosecutor:  And while you were yelling, your son came home?

Defendant:  Yes.

Prosecutor:  And he saw you screaming at your wife? 

Defendant:  Well...

Prosecutor:  And while you were threatening your wife, the police arrived.  No further questions.

Many of our elected officials also are adept at political range gate stealing.  They declare something clearly and plainly, reiterate it with slightly different words and meanings each succeeding time, and then, in our confusion or complacency, execute something well beyond the scope of what they originally declared they would do.  They lie faster than most people can prepare a response.   

   

To defend ourselves against such perfidy we must focus on the substance of our position, and not allow even seemingly innocuous changes to our original message.  We must not allow our opponents to change the vocabulary, the names, or the rules of our argument.

And if our elected officials try to move us from our core, we cut them off. Period.  If they strengthen their rhetoric by shifting from the original message, we demand that they return to the real issue.  Period.  If they change their promises, falsely declaring that the new information was really the essence of the old information; if they pretend that what they have said is not what they meant; and, if they change the objectives of their own promises, we stop their monologue and hold them accountable for their lies. Period. 

Aircraft that practice range gate stealing win the day.  Politicians who practice range gate stealing must be stopped.   Anything less is deadly.