"Stealth Is Dead! Long Live Stealth!" Topic

"A Russian military expert has sounded a seemingly dire warning for the United States. Dr. Igor Sutyagin claims that stealthy fighter jets and bombers can't stay hidden much longer as enemy radar technology improves.

The U.S. military is betting hundreds of billions of dollars—in essence, its whole air-power investment—that detection-dodging stealth works … and will keep working for many decades to come.

So if Sutyagin is absolutely right, America could be in big trouble. The roughly trillion dollars Washington has spent designing and building F-117s, B-2s, F-22s, F-35s and new Long-Range Strike Bombers since the 1970s has been a waste. And the United States is about to lose its aerial advantage…"
Full article here
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Amicalement
Armand

It will happen at some point.

Stealth tech will go a lot longer in the civilian world, Government officials never see me when I'm at their kiosks looking to sort out a problem. :(

I wonder who considers Sutyagin to be an expert on anything . He was in jail for espionage for 11 years till 2010, then he was exchanged for Russian spy (and some even considered that he was just talking too much without having access to real secret information back then…). Therefore, for 15 years he had no idea what was really happening in Russian defence industry. I heard about about radar visibility of stealth planes as far back as during Yugoslavian conflict. New generation of Russian fighters is delicately called "reduced detectability" plane, 'cause there're still ways to see it, just less easily than a "normal" fighter.

Yeah, a Rapier III system got a track on a B2 bomber at about 8 miles range back in the late 1990s. (BAE was bragging about it after one Farnborough air show.)

Problem is, a Paveway LBG or JDAM has a range of better than 12 miles at 20,000ft. Doesn't do much good to be able to detect the bomber AFTER it's dropped it's load!

While big ground-based radars can be made to track stealth aircraft, it's a mathematical and engineering impossibility to get those long wavelengths out of or into a small antenna. As in, an antenna small enough to be mobile at all.

Plus, there have been several changes in stealth design since the F117. That was designed to not bounce much RF energy back to the radar. All that RF energy still got bounced somewhere, just not where the transmitter was. It's like the glints off a diamond. The F117 has a very large flat belly, which doesn't do a whole lot of good for controlling your reflections while the jet is maneuvering. That's why the B2 has a curved belly.

'back in the late 1990s.'

I'm guessing BAE have improved their systems since then…

read a piece a while back, memory a bit hazy
said the f22 f35 stealth was optimised for radars in the ku, x and c bands
new radars are being designed and built that operate in both l and s bands combined, that will allow them to detect these stealth aircraft with ease

According to Israeli sources, F-35 stealth advantage will expire about 5 years after it enters service in 2019.

The USN has also warned against putting all eggs in stealth basket (hence they're still keen to adopt more F/A-18 Super Bugs and have been cutting F-35 buy).

Bring back the F-4?

Bring back the F-4?

The answer is "keep more than 1 tool in the tool box."

That means electronic warfare assets, cruise missiles and other stand off munitions as well as fighter aircraft of various sorts.

Also focus on what your true threats are. Stealth is completely useless against opponents with no IADS ala most of the world or various insurgency groups.

The most useful capabilities in the 21st century that will be used (and are being used) in actual combat are loiter time, PGM capability and ordnance hauling capability. For third world operators that are slow on embracing PGMs (and medium-high altitudes tactics as such), some ruggedness and resilience is also critical.

Wow! A few high power ground based radars can detect our stealth aircraft (designed 35 years ago) at short range! Whatever shall we do?

Lol.

I'm guessing BAE have improved their systems since then…

I would certainly hope so, but there is only so much energy you can push through any given antenna size. More importantly, there is only so long a wavelength you can feed through any given antenna size.

Given the open-source estimated radar cross sections at typical air-search frequencies, you'd need to push a thousand times more power through that Rapier radar to 'burn through' the B2's stealth at ranges beyond the max range of JDAMs. Or so somehow increase the sensitivity of the receivers by a couple orders of magnitude without overwhelming them with false contacts like dust devils and then only bump the power of the transmitter up by a factor of 34 (assuming an increase in RX sensitivity of about 34x).

You need to use (much) longer wavelengths or (maybe) much shorter ones to work around the stealth. Much longer wavelengths require much larger antennas (you need roughly 1/4 wavelength, 1/2 wave, or full wavelength for efficiency and sensitivity), which tends to make the antenna less than portable. For example, the B2's radar is Ku band, which has wavelengths of 2.5cm down to 1.67cm. The Wedgetail AESA radar is L band, wavelengths of 7.5-5mm (NATO definition of L band, the IEEE wavelengths are 30cm-15cm), and S band radars have wavelengths of 15cm-7.5cm.

The F15's original radars were X-band, wavelengths of 3.75 to 2cm.

Each frequency bounces differently, based on the wavelength, so many stealth features are extremely frequency-sensitive. More precisely, each frequency has a different spread rate.

Yea, apparently the older, long-wave radars are not so easily fooled by stealth.