End of Stealth?

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Bistatic Radar


Typical RCS

So, Joint Force Quarterly has an article on the end of stealth (PDF link for article)

Certainly, the air forces of the world have been trying to make Giulio Douhet's vision of strategic bombing vision reality for many years, and stealth technology had the potential of reducing the costs of striking a target to something approaching the Italian general's original vision.

Of course, even in the case of air supremacy over the target, WWII over Germany and Japan, Korea, Vietnam, and both Iraq wars, it turns out that air power, at least without Hiroshima and Nagasaki, has been an abject failure at winning wars.

While I do agree with the basic thesis of the article, that improvements in processing technology, particularly in processing power available in compact packages,which allow for intermittent signals from disparate platforms to be fused into a coherent picture.

The author Arend Westra, places a high degree of value on what he calls "bistatic' and "passive" radars, where the receiver is well removed from the transmitter, and, in some cases, the transmitter is something like a civilian TV or radio facility.

I am far more dubious of the capabilities of such systems for a number of reasons:

• They have multiple points of failure.
• For the United States in particular, civilian broadcasting infrastructure, because of its ability to transmit civil defense instructions and "enemy propaganda", these are considered militarily significant infrastructure whose locations are well known, and are hit early in any war.
• As an interesting philosophical aside, by the standards of the United States, the World Trade Center towers were legitimate military targets, because they were festooned with civilian radio and television transmitters.
• I think that using processing will be cheaper than new technology.

This is not to say that I think that these sorts of systems won't be deployed, as there is already an existing civilian infrastructure to piggyback on, but that they will be a part, and for anyone with half a brain a small part of a total system.

I think that as we move to the future, that any sort of strike package heading into an integrated air defense system will do with the Israelis did, where the idea of somehow blocking or flooding the network used to integrate the various sensors will become the most significant part of any mission planning.

I think that the biggest impact will be in the arms market, where nations concerned about air attacks may very turn toward increasingly sophisticated Russian air defense systems.