Sorry, to hijack and bother you again, but how does network-centric warfare change this equation. Traditionally, stealth aircraft can be tracked with VHF/UHF Radars (the Iraqis could see the F117 relatively easily), it was fire control Radars which could not get a lock on. Won’t it a network-centric era it be possible for information from such a radar be delivered to an interceptor, which can then close and take out the attacking platform using IRST or electrooptical sensors. Or eyeball it.
That’s certainly the hope. The idea of on-orbit staring EO systems that can see everything is also out there. Orbiting radars now track ships, but AFAIK we’re not quite to the level of tracking aircraft by radar from space.
The real challenge right now is that long range missiles are all radar guided. Whether that’s via radar on the missile or radar on the launch platform or most often both. Which leads to, as you say, a need to go pick the stealthy platforms off by hand. Tracking radars can get interceptors into the neighborhood, but no closer.
The value of something like an S-300 (SA-20) S-300 missile system - Wikipedia is that it denies access to a huge cylinder of airspace. If they replace the same installation with a VHF radar and IR-equipped interceptors they have a much more expensive and leaky defense system.
The trade now is still that the best stealthing tech leaves an RCS in most quadrants that defeats missile-sized radar antennas except at very close range. Totally made up numbers: VHF radar fixes the stealthy target +/- 15 miles, the detection range of a fighter’s radar is 2 miles, and the radar missile’s onboard radar detection range is 1000 feet. The first tech to bridge the 15 miles to 1000 foot gap will hugely degrade the benefit of stealth. Networking certainly hopes to do much of that. If for no other reason than stealth is not equally all-aspect. Head-on, side-on, and tail-on have very different RCS. Place enough sensors around your side of the battlefield and once the stealthy enemy is in your airspace he’ll be ass-on to somebody. And much more detectable.
Triangulation is age-old tech. But with enough precision in the location of the sensors and enough angular resolution plus good time sync you can generate a nice tight targetable position.
Funny how things run in circles. The RAF and others developed acoustic sensors in WWI decades before they perfected radar. The idea was to hear the enemy aircraft coming and get a bearing on them. Acoustic location - Wikipedia
Now there are efforts to use LIDAR to detect the atmospheric wake of aircraft. Good luck stealthing that.
Interesting different aside:
I was reading today about an experimental submarine tracking tech based on the fact that a passing sub differentially disturbs the sodium and chloride ions in salt water. Which differences can be detected electromagnetically. Whether it can be made reliable and long-ranged enough is the current question.
Would be a real revolution in naval warfare if submarines rapidly became unstealthy.
How feasible would it be to have a kind of missile-based FLAK cover? If a stealth plane can be tracked but only within (to take your placeholder number) 15 miles, then sending several relatively dumb missiles with shrapnel or fuel-air explosives in that area might have a good chance of hitting the plane, no?
Are dedicated EW planes here to stay? If so, what will their role be like?
If not, will the simpler EW functions be integrated within each fighter while the more complex ones will be rolled into AEW planes?
Do I understand correctly that RWR which are effective against AESAs take time to throw up a red flag and that the CFAR settings very much matter here?
Hallo and thankings you fellow american for responder.
My boy daughter likes to hobby learning about western radar technology like we have here in USA.
Especially raytheon advanced RACR systema. Please send technicia schematya and capabilitys on AN/ALQ-184 pod
Along with location of all nuclear wessels. 
You’d be needing tens of thousands if not millions of simultaneous explosions to FLAK an area 15 miles across. Not practical.
No real comment on the future of EW. Not a topic I know much about. For sure a major design goal of all modern radars, AESA or otherwise, is to become very LPI and thereby all but indistinguishable from noise. Which, carried far enough, makes RWR impossible even in principle.
Cryptographically random spread spectrum transmission taken to the ideal simply *is *noise.
Heheheh, do you guys have interdepartmental communications problems? That’s already up on wikileaks!
Stealth is a good candidate obviously, as long as that holds. Which might be “not for very long”, or might be “not any more already”.
Another is hugging the ground - on the modern battlefield you’ve got a handful of BIG radars way high and back (e.g. AWACS & sats) and some more on the ground to get a precise picture of where every airplane and airborne radar is in a given area. Fly low enough and the ground features between you and them obstruct the ground radars while the airborne ones will, in theory, have trouble picking you out from the big noise that is the reflection of their signal by the ground. But there’s been a lot of software work to clear the latter issue, it might have been adequately solved since the last time I paid attention. And of course, flying very low very fast is very nerve-wracking and dangerous in and of itself. Modern airplanes have better and better autopilots to do it but it’s difficult to program and, well, there’s not a lot of time to bugfix in flight ;). There’s also the issue that flying low puts you in range of low-tech AAA batteries and jokers with shoulder-borne missile launchers, which may or may not be an issue depending on the context and the mission - but typically if you don’t want to be found you’re flying over enemy airspace.
Failing that, target saturation is another option. Those guided missiles cost a mint, there’s a finite number of them at the enemy’s airbase(s) and an even finite-er amount on board their launched planes. So instead of sending a flight of 4 planes each with 10 bombs at a given target ; you send 40 drones each with one bomb. Some will get through. Essentially what the Japanese did in 44 with their kamikaze planes, except, yanno, without a guy inside the expendable craft :). It’s an expensive way to wage war, though, and contingent on your ability to build lots and lots of cheap drones and control them all at once.
Finally, there’s the “holding the midget at arm’s length while you kick him in the balls” strategy : if your planes’ missiles can reach out and touch a friend from 100 miles away and theirs can only extend exothermic hugs from 80, all other things being equal you can theoretically clear the sky without a scratch, provided your missiles can clear those 100 miles faster than their planes can clear the 20 miles difference.
But basically, as **LSLGuy **says, these days detection and airspace monitoring is getting both leagues ahead of counter-detection and getting harder and harder to even pick up passively ; which means these days the first clue you’ll get that you’ve been spotted is your aeroplane suddenly scattering over a large area.
The other element in ECW is simply to saturate the space with noise to the point nothing works. Received radar power works as an inverse quintic (ie distance to the fourth power) of distance, but ECW noise emissions are still only at an inverse square. An aircraft standing off from the area can saturate the entire area in wideband noise and effectively blind radar. Three of them and you can do it from enough angles to make it very difficult for anyone to get any useful capability working.
Such measures are an interesting trade-off. Even communication becomes difficult for everyone. Use of an appropriate psuedo-random noise generation key can allow systems that know the key to manage some capability to fit in the gaps, and you get comms, but much more doesn’t happen. Satellite comms might remain OK for airborne craft. Such an ECW aircraft is going to have to worry about attracting a medium range missile that simply flies up the radio beam.
The current platform seems to be the FA-18/A Super Hornet in Growler guise. Its capability to keep up with other aircraft in an offensive sortie seems to be a big win over its predecessor.
What happens when you get into a shooting match with an opponent that also has the ability to blanket the airwaves gets interesting. Both sides probably retain a basic comms ability via sneaking in a spread spectrum channel inside the noise blanket, but radar guidance and any sort of high bandwidth comms (especially these fully networked scenarios) is likely gone for both sides.
Argh, "inverse quintic " no, inverse quartic. :smack:
Isn’t Doppler processing about 40 years old?
Doesn’t frequency-hopping make noise jamming largely ineffective except in circumstances where the opposing systems are of greatly different size and weight (e.g.: a destroyer noise jamming a fighter)?
The jammer has a range advantage as you explain but the jammee can concentrate all his energy in a narrow band for one pulse then concentrate all his energy in another narrow band for the next pulse.
I suppose noise jamming could be effective against AESAs since they transmit little power over each frequency band in each pulse.
I thought jamming today was mainly done with DRFM to make enemy radars lose their track.
I think you have got the tradeoff there. Any radar that is able to overcome the jamming raises itself above the noise floor and becomes a target or at least detectable again. If you are the noise generator you can probably process out enough of your own noise to find those signals.
The Growlers carry a number of jamming pods, and each pod seems good for about 7kW. That is less power than I imagined, but there are limits to what can be done. Eventually you can’t carry the power in antennas that fit in the pods. The US seems to be deploying the Growlers in the Navy, so clearly the role is projecting air power in the roles currently performed (ie strikes into far flung theatres.) Curiously Australia has bought 12 Growlers. Which for us is a lot. We don’t have any aircraft carriers anymore, but the role is likely similar. Projecting air power to our north.
My understanding of DRFM is that this is not so much an external jamming system, but an active confusing technique that is deployed on all possible target aircraft to make it hard for a missile in flight to track, or a targeting radar to get a lock on them. A Growler is intended to simply wipe out capability across the theatre. I may well have to totally wrong.
The reason for stand off jamming is that the attacking platform’s jammers and ECM will relay its position just as well as its own RADAR. (As an aside, I just read that after Yugoslavia and Iraq 2003, its standard for US Stealth assets to be supported by standoff jammers).
Which actually is a problem for HF/VHF/UHF Radars. While they can track stealth fairly easily, they are pretty susceptible to ECM. A stealth platform, has little incentive to use its own ECM and broadcast its position, but a stealth platform supported by distant jamming aircraft is making the defenders life even harder.
A B2 (and earlier an F117) is in trouble if it is tracked, once the Russians/Chinese know where it is, even if they cannot use fire-control radars to shoot it down, they can send interceptors to rip it shreds with cannon (an F22, has fantastic WVR performance, so less of a concern there).