Looking for info about the new Secret Service ‘Presidential’ buses (there are two, and the SS plans to use them for various official duties, not just carting the President around), I came across this statement:
“The new bus is jet-black because, as true with the White House limousines, it had to be. All official presidential vehicles are coated with radar-absorbent material to deter the bad guys.”
Is this true? Searching just seems to bring up more such assertations, yielding nothing concrete that I could find. Wiki indicates the Presidential Motorcade includes a Radar Jamming Countermeasure vehicle but nothing about the paint & finishes of the motorcade vehicles having stealth charateristics themselves.
It wouldn’t do anything, except for adding a lot of weight. Radar visibility depends more on shape than materials. If you’ve already blown it by having a shape that generates a lot of returns (like a car), then all the RAM in the world won’t help you.
I’m struggling to think of what possible benefit radar-absorbing material would be to presidential vehicles. Yes, they could avoid getting caught in a speed trap, but they usually have police escorts for their motorcades, so that’s not really a consideration. I can’t think of any ground-to-ground or air-to-ground weapons systems that use radar. That environment is so cluttered in radar that they usually use laser targeting for ground vehicles. Am I missing something?
Yeah, I’m thinking it’s more likely to be an IR suppression coating. The “stealth” helo that went down in the Bin Laden raid was said to have a silver-based coating like this.
Random trivia, while you can use radar to detect a target on the ground, my understanding is that infra-red is the best means of finding vehicles. Combustion engines get hella-hot, and pretty much show up on infra red like flares. Aircraft have been using infra-red detection at least as far back as the Korean War (though back then it was less “There’s a truck right there!” and more “Hey, there’s a truck somewhere down there probably.”
ETA: For the most part, when it comes to highly technical details about niche subjects, you can often assume that journalists will get the wrong idea and run with it, if only because most of them do not come from the right background to understand what is being talked about (I mean, how often do you think a journalist will end up writing about stealth buses? That might not be a lot of time to become properly familiar with the topic.)
Car and Driver, IIRC, had an article in the 80’s about using radar-absorbing material on a car. They called the manufacurers of the stealth coating for cruise missles and ordered a sheet; from that they fashoined a crude bra and did some tests.
The material was pretty simple -it was (IIRC) foam rubber with reflective particles evenly distributed. Since it was about the thickness of 1/4 wave of a typical radar frequence, the reflection even distributed across that thickness effectively cancelled the readability of the signal. They got it to the point where the police radar would not see anything until the vehicle was a few hundred feet away. If you don’t see the policeman before then, you deserve a ticket. OTOH, during one test they said the car was still not reading when a big Detroit lead sled came around the corner half a mile away and lit up the radar. So being stealth, you could get blamed for others’ speeding.
I agree though, most shoulder missiles I’ve heard about are heat-seeking. I don’t know if the black would help with a laser-guided missile… what’s better in that situation, very reflective or a flat matte finish?
You will find official information and you will find rumor, probably generated from the same source, better known as disinformation. Despite people’s desires to know all they can, this really falls into none of your business security.
If the government were to publish the detailed specs and their exact intent in using the materials, they’d have revealed a whole lot of information that really should not be public knowledge.
It is not reasonable to expect access to classified national security information - in this case, the exact nature of the defenses incorporated into presidential transportation equipment - simply because one is a taxpayer.
Sure, but there’s a difference between publishing the exact materials used and telling people, “yeah, this bus incorporates some radar defeating technology”.
Even the stealthiest jets we have aren’t radar proof. They still return a radar signature, just one that is low enough to get lost. At a Lockheed facility I toured, one of the engineers told me whichever jet they were making there that was the most high tech had a radar signature smaller than a duck. Basically anything tuned fine enough to catch the jet would also catch every decent sized bird in the air. A car having a very small radar signature might be useful in some circumstances, but if the exact nature of the radar defense measures was known, it would be far less useful.
Basically, you want to be defended from as much as you can and not have the offense know how defended you are on any specific item.
I wouldn’t be terribly surprised to know that there were anti-thermal measures on board as well, possibly some kind of insulation combined with a tank of liquid that would rapidly cool the engine in an emergency.
The AGM-114L Hellfire Longbowvariant and the Brimstone missile both use millimeter-wave radar guidance. Envisioning one as a threat to a Secret Service vehicle requires one to assume that not only the missile, but also the launch platform, were either stolen or suborned.
From using laser measuring devices, you probably want a reflective coating. You either get no return or you saturate the sensor. With a matte finish you generally get a good return which would be bad in this context. If you are using an infrared laser you need to test against the wavelength you are going to be attacked with.
I’m curious about the assertion that the vehicles are black because they have to be. What other color would they be? When was the last time you saw a limo in any color other than black? When was the last time you saw one used by someone who wanted to seem distinguished?
And as such, the government takes very seriously their obligation to protect his investment. All that taxpayer money is wasted if they go running their mouth off about all the capabilities of what they spent it on, at least in terms of specific things like specs on military hardware or details of security for the President.