Long-Wave Radar Can Take the Stealth From Stealth Technology

AbrasiveCat (999190) writes "In the continuing game of cat and mouse between offensive and defensive technologies of war, the technology of radar stealth may have been matched by new multiple frequency radar systems. U.S Naval Institute News reports the Chinese and Russians may be developing such systems. The present radar systems use high frequency waves for accurately locating an incoming target. Stealth aircraft are designed to adsorb or reflect these waves away from the receiver. It turns out longer wave radars can see the stealth aircraft. The longer wave radar lacks the precision of the high frequency radar, but when the two are combined, as the Russians, Chinese (and U.S.) are doing, you can produce accurate targeting radar. The F117 may have been in a golden age for stealth technology, it will be interesting to see if the F35 arrives too late to be effective against other countries with advanced radar systems."

Comments

Might cause a re-thinking of the F-35

[timrod]

A few months ago, 60 Minutes aired a series of interviews with Air Force personnel who were behind the F-35 program. All of them said more or less the same thing about the F-35: it doesn't matter if the F-35 is less powerful or doesn't handle as well as other jets, because it was built around radar superiority and being able to detect Russian and Chinese fighters before they could detect it.

If it's the case that the Russians and Chinese now have radar systems that remove that radar superiority, the F-35 now looks like even more of a gigantic waste of money.

Re:Might cause a re-thinking of the F-35

[amicusNYCL]

It still might have an edge against fighters, at least for the time being. It sounds like the dual radar systems are being installed on larger surface vehicles, but there could always be a smaller version for fighters on the way. Of course, if the fighters are able to receive targeting data from the ships then it wouldn't matter (as long as that targeting data isn't being jammed).

Re:Might cause a re-thinking of the F-35

[spiritplumber]

It won't. The F35 is the classic "it tries to do 255 things, so it does none of them well" thing. It needed rethinking for all sort of other reasons already, but by now it has too much political inertia. You'd have to get too many people to admit they made a mistake.

Re:Might cause a re-thinking of the F-35

[pastafazou]

First off, the F-35 has forced China and Russia to commit a large amount of time and resources to try and counter it's superiority. From an economic standpoint, if you're forcing potential enemies to dedicate time and resources to try and counter your technology, it's a win. Secondly, just because Russia and China are able to develop technology to detect it doesn't mean it's useless. There are numerous other potential uses that don't involve Russian and Chinese radar.

Re:Might cause a re-thinking of the F-35

[bobbied]

Gee, I wouldn't be so quick to assume that the USA didn't already take such technology into account, like they didn't know or expect that changing the frequency of the radar might make detection of "stealth" aircraft possible. The F35 isn't going to be doing missions where this will matter anyway. I'd be more worried about the F22 and B2 platforms.

Having even traditional stealth like the F35 is known to have is a tactical advantage in the realms and missions they are planning to be used for. It's obvious to me that the F35's being used in close air support roles will have an advantage over the F18's used now which have radar cross section of a flying tractor trailer truck. Not to mention that in MOST places, they are not going to have the newfangled technology that defeats stealth anyway. Certainly it's going to be a long time before the guy on the ground with the shoulder fired weapon will have this radar (Not that he needs it as most of that stuff is IR guided anyway).

So, if you really want to complain about something, drop the F35 and get ready. I'm guessing we are going to be replacing the B2 over this. Strategic bombers are really expensive and complicated programs. Of course it would be cheaper to go the missile route, but I'm guessing we won't due to treaties we are in.

Re:Might cause a re-thinking of the F-35

[alen]

how long are fighters replaced? every 20-30 years?

dog fighting isn't that big anymore. US has AWACS now to direct our fighters and attack from behind or some other optimum angle. no one sends fighters against each other for a dogfight anymore.

even the F117 could be detected in the gulf war, which is why it flew as part of huge mission packages with jamming aircraft and wild weasels

Re:Might cause a re-thinking of the F-35

[tibit]

TL;DR: F-35 would have been picked up by British radars that came into use towards the end of World War II. So much for stealth. The funniest thing? Everybody who knows about radars has known it since day one. All stealth planes suffer from this problem. Once the wavelength approaches the facet size, the fact that the facet is smooth and "points elsewhere" doesn't matter. It produces what amounts to specular highlights.

Re:Might cause a re-thinking of the F-35

[lgw]

If it's the case that the Russians and Chinese now have radar systems that remove that radar superiority, the F-35 now looks like even more of a gigantic waste of money

The F-35 was designed to be stealthy, not stealth. It doesn't need to be undetectable, as it's not a strategic bomber, it just needs to be able to get missile lock on it's foes before they get missile lock on the F-35. That doesn't seem like to change any time soon.

While any new military project whatsoever will be ridiculed as a colossal waste of money by the left ("it doesn't cost anything to just be nice to everyone!"), the main problem with the cost of most of the recent programs is a large R&D cost that isn't spread across enough planes/ships/whatever. I'm not the biggest fan of the F-35, but at least the idea of having one plane that will be used for many roles and by many allies keeps the per-unit cost from being insanely high - it's a wise procurement approach in a time of quickly falling defense budget.

Re:Might cause a re-thinking of the F-35

[timeOday]

the F-35 now looks like even more of a gigantic waste of money.

I wouldn't jump immediately to that conclusion. Every advance has some countermeasure, but just because you can build a research prototype that's somewhat (we don't know how much) effective at this, does NOT mean that all the eastern bloc air defenses around the world suddenly have that capability. It doesn't even mean they will get it within the next 20 years.

For example the longer wavelength might require large antennae and multiple fixes from different positions that are far apart, which is a big limitation, especially if you want to build an radar that can fit on an aircraft or missile. I am just guessing here what the limitations might be. But there are always countermeasures, but almost never 100% effective and without added cost and other drawbacks.

Anyways, stealth is far from all the F35 brings to the table. The summary criticizes it for perhaps not being a good dogfighter, but if all aircraft are easy to track, that's even more irrelevant, because something easy to track is easy to shoot down at long range.

Re:Might cause a re-thinking of the F-35

[the eric conspiracy]

Physics may prevent the antennas needed for long wave radar from working on fighters fast and maneuverable enough to be a threat to the F-35.

Re:Might cause a re-thinking of the F-35

[lisaparratt]

There's a story that the USAF sent a stealth bomber to Farnborough airshow as part of the display. Apparently, the pilots were very surprised when Air Traffic Control got in touch to tell them they were doing the display over Farnham, 6 miles down the road.

Re:Might cause a re-thinking of the F-35

[Sand_Man]

"no one sends fighters against each other for a dogfight anymore"

Every generation re-learns the falsehood of that kind of thinking at the expense of pilots and planes.

Re:Might cause a re-thinking of the F-35

[alen]

we didn't have cruise missiles in vietnam. and not sure about AWACS either.
these days we have more people "managing" the battle than the war fighters because historically most battles have been won or lost before the fighting began

Re:Might cause a re-thinking of the F-35

[flyingfsck]

Long waves on short antennas are just less efficient. It means more electrical power is needed for the transmitter on a small fighter plane.

Re:Might cause a re-thinking of the F-35

[flyingfsck]

Military IFF also does civilian ATC. No surprise there at all actually.

Re:Might cause a re-thinking of the F-35

[DarthVain]

That was my understanding. Particularly when coupled with lack of payload.

Like they shouldn't bother even painting the thing, as if it works as it should, no one will ever actually physically see the things anyway. Radar lock on multiple targets over the horizon. Fire missiles. Go back and reload. Repeat until nothing else is in the air but actual birds.

The enemy situation should basically be "Uh sir, we have a shit ton of missiles coming at us from out of nowhere!".

That said, I still think the F35 is a colossal waste of money that could be much better spent on other things. If you absolutely must spend it on military I can think of better ways, even if you say it has to be in the air force.

I mean WTF does Canada need F-35's for?! Buy some ships, heavy lift capability, multi-purpose helos. Most of what we do are support activities, aid, and rescue. The F-35 does not increase our capabilities in ANY of those things. If it comes to a shooting war with some country that you actually need F-35's for, Canada would be sort of screwed anyway in theater. However any sort of invasion is more less impossible (unless it comes from the US :) given the logistics of location etc... Even then other assets would be more valuable than F-35's. Not to mention the US being an ally likely isn't going to stand around and do nothing either which is more than a little thing. In fact they ONLY reason I can see this happening, is that the Canadian government needs a convenient way to funnel a bunch of money to the US in a gesture of goodwill or something.

Re:Might cause a re-thinking of the F-35

[Anonymous Coward]

It won't.

The F35 is the classic "it tries to do 255 things, so it does none of them well" thing. It needed rethinking for all sort of other reasons already, but by now it has too much political inertia. You'd have to get too many people to admit they made a mistake.

Wrong! The F-35 does exactly what it was designed to do very well: Provide almost half a trillion dollars in corporate welfare to the aerospace industry spread across 45 states. So what if it's not safe to fly, doesn't do what it was meant to do, and is incredibly expensive over its projected lifetime? Gotta keep Lockheed Martin, insider trading Congressional staffers and Senators, et alia, in Cadillacs and Mink coats...

Re:Might cause a re-thinking of the F-35

[cheesybagel]

IRST is enough of a problem at mid and short ranges as is.

Re:Might cause a re-thinking of the F-35

[rickb928]

Arrays will be steerable enough.

Keeping them small enough to fit on ships, that's fun.

Re:Might cause a re-thinking of the F-35

[rickb928]

If a ground-based LW radar can guide the AAM, Alli the fighter is doing is getting the middle close enough.

GBLW radar can use a lot of computer power to get the middle close enough to burn the stealth, or go IR.

Re:Might cause a re-thinking of the F-35

[Savage-Rabbit]

If it's the case that the Russians and Chinese now have radar systems that remove that radar superiority, the F-35 now looks like even more of a gigantic waste of money

The F-35 was designed to be stealthy, not stealth. It doesn't need to be undetectable, as it's not a strategic bomber, it just needs to be able to get missile lock on it's foes before they get missile lock on the F-35. That doesn't seem like to change any time soon.

While any new military project whatsoever will be ridiculed as a colossal waste of money by the left ("it doesn't cost anything to just be nice to everyone!"), the main problem with the cost of most of the recent programs is a large R&D cost that isn't spread across enough planes/ships/whatever. I'm not the biggest fan of the F-35, but at least the idea of having one plane that will be used for many roles and by many allies keeps the per-unit cost from being insanely high - it's a wise procurement approach in a time of quickly falling defense budget.

It's no longer all about whether the F-35 can detect a Su-35, J-10, etc. with it's onboard radar first or not. Sure, being able to see the opponent on your onboard radar first is an advantage the F-35 has and it is an important one but modern fighters that operate in an integrated and networked air defense system, situational awareness can flow from many different sources these days other than just your fighter's onboard radar. The Su-35, J-10 (or whatever) can give the F-35 a very hard time if it carries IRTS, is connected to a battlefield networking system, backed by AWACS, ground radars and other sensors capable of seeing F-35s and is protected by modern SAMs. The resiliance of such a system is even greater if the missiles fired by the Su-35 can receive mid-course updates from systems other than the launcing aircraft. The Russians already have air to air missiles whose guidance can be handed over to a nother aircraft or a ground or air based sensor system which can be a long band radar since you only need to get the missile close enough to detect an F-35 with the missile's onboard sensor which is what the article is talking about, combining long band radar for situational awareness with short band radars and other sensors for terminal guidance.

Re:Might cause a re-thinking of the F-35

[rickb928]

The F-4 was multi-service. Navy variants may even have different refueling probes and avionics.

And its multirole functionality was largely due to avionics and weapons systems.

Look what they did with the F-15/16s, everything but carrier ops.

Re:Might cause a re-thinking of the F-35

[Penguinisto]

What sibling said, and in addition most stealth-based aircraft carry radar reflectors in peacetime to aid ATC as a safety measure (the F-117's reflectors bolted right onto the sides.)

Re:Might cause a re-thinking of the F-35

[SydShamino]

First off, the F-35 has forced China and Russia to commit a large amount of time and resources to try and counter it's superiority. From an economic standpoint, if you're forcing potential enemies to dedicate time and resources to try and counter your technology, it's a win. Secondly, just because Russia and China are able to develop technology to detect it doesn't mean it's useless. There are numerous other potential uses that don't involve Russian and Chinese radar.

Not if it costs 1000x more to create the technology than it does to counter it. Nor if the money to build it was borrowed in part from that potential enemy.

Re:Might cause a re-thinking of the F-35

[ColdWetDog]

Canada can always count on the other commonwealth nations for defense assistance as well.

Rest assured!

New Zealand has your back!

Re:Might cause a re-thinking of the F-35

[delcielo]

Yes.

Dogfighting hasn't been important for a while because none of the top tier militaries have squared off against each other. U.S. vs Iraq was never going to produce a serious air war. Neither would U.S. vs Iran, or North Korea, etc.

But, if the U.S. and Russia ever squared off, you would see dogfighting. Our fighters would try to eliminate their close support and ground attack aircraft. They would send fighters to attack ours. Both would send fighters after each other to suppress them.

The asymmetrical nature of modern wars has kept it from happening, but we would be foolish to ignore that component of air superiority just because we haven't needed it in 40 years. After all, who were we fighting back then? Oh yeah, Russia by proxy.

Re: Might cause a re-thinking of the F-35

[rickb928]

It means you need a hobby. Or your meds are low.

Re:Might cause a re-thinking of the F-35

[riverat1]

Canada is of course a member of NATO so all the members including the US would come to their defense if necessary.

Re: Might cause a re-thinking of the F-35

[kqs]

Welfare to the poor: bad because it removes the incentive to improve oneself. Welfare to the rich: fantastic!

Re:Might cause a re-thinking of the F-35

[Anonymous Coward]

Physics may prevent the antennas needed for long wave radar from working on fighters fast and maneuverable enough to be a threat to the F-35.

Nothing prevents a fighter from towing a long thin wire through the air . . .

Re:Might cause a re-thinking of the F-35

[AmiMoJo]

Developing these new radars is not a direct response to the F-35. In fact it has been known that stealth aircraft are vulnerable to this kind of detection since the late 80s, and it was used successfully to shoot them down in eastern Europe in the 90s.

These developments are just the natural progression of radar development, in a world where every new military aircraft is getting at least some stealth capabilities. I think we are likely to see a swing back the other way soon, towards massive ECM instead of trying to simply hide. Such aircraft have already proven very effective in theatre.

Re:Might cause a re-thinking of the F-35

[bears]

Not so. Actual radar, secondary *and* primary, is used by my ATC customer. They have some multi-lateration systems, but to date pay no attention to the transponder reported GPS position.

Perhaps you think we should just equip the controllers with a FlightRadar24 app each?

Re:Might cause a re-thinking of the F-35

[Dorianny]

It won't. The F35 is the classic "it tries to do 255 things, so it does none of them well" thing. It needed rethinking for all sort of other reasons already, but by now it has too much political inertia. You'd have to get too many people to admit they made a mistake.

Everyone seems to not understand that that's exactly what the F35 requirements were. Unlike previous so called multi-role aircraft, which typically were designed for the Air Force and then poorly adapted to other roles, the F35 is a true Swiss army knife. The criticism seems to be heaviest for the Air Force version, probably because as I mentioned, multi-roles it replaces were initially designed for them. It cannot take on air-superiority fighters in combat, penetrate or evade advanced air defenses but that is not its role, we have specialized fighters and bombers to do that. The role I see for the Air Force F35 is to support the specialized aircraft, mop up remnants and to take over as front line fighter only when air superiority is achieved. It seems terribly expensive for that role now, but this is a Aircraft that's being designed to have the largest and longest production run in history.

Re:Might cause a re-thinking of the F-35

[budgenator]

The real purpose of stealth isn't to be invisible, but is to avoid being visible enough to hit. The bird I worked on, the HAWK missile was a semi-active radar homing missile operating in the military portion of the x-band, 10GHzish and was 37 cm, or 14.5 inches in diameter which is about 10 wavelength in diameter which is the rule of thumb for getting enough angular resolution for to hit what your shooting at. By having to go long-wave any semi-active homer isn't going to be able to resolve the target clearly enough to really hit it, having missiles flying close misses to your aircraft is still freaky enough to make a pilots asshole tighten considerable just like you don't want a blind man throwing knives at your sound, which brings us to the other components of stealth which are not being where your expected to be and not doing what your expected to be doing.

Re:Might cause a re-thinking of the F-35

[sillybilly]

There is a way to get any wavelength out of any short piece of antenna, even much shorter than half wavelength or quarter wavelength that are ideal, with a coil that creates a longer characteristic length, as done with police car antennas at the base for semi-long wavelengths, or really done with am radio antennas, for huge wavelengths. But as you say accuracy drops, and for precise targeting, you'd need more than one plane interact, via a separation distance between them. You got two eyeballs, and every time I see people who have a really huge spacing between their eyes, and their eyeballs almost drop off at the edge of their face, I think they must have very good stereo and distance vision. Same goes with high performance binoculars, the eye-spacing is enlarged with prisms, or even radio astronomy things where receivers around the globe interact, and two or three of them can get a very good resolution, almost equivalent to as if the space between them was also filled up with radio receivers. So in this sense a key in long wave radar is interaction between 2 or 3 planes, and using the distance between them for more precision, like using the increased distance from a binocular with prisms for better vision. There is no such thing as true stealth, as far as we know it, in the radio-frequency sense, any object, like a fighterjet, is a huge size with a different impedance than free space, and reflects wavelengths that are halfwave of their overall size, no matter what kind of stealthing technology you use. Even in the 1st gulf war, when Saddam invaded Kuwait, there were for sale some Czech long wavelength radars, but there are standard radars that hillbillies use around the poorer Muslim world and places like Africa, and traditional funky shaped stealth technology works great against them, but not against the long wavelength ones, for which it's almost useless to use square shapes, and it's better to go back to aerodynamic shapes and speed, like the Blackbird plane used to be, non stealth, but so fast, that it outran any rocket shot at it. But it's very limited on range, very expensive on fuel, and lacks maneuverability, because it's aerodynamically very stable, and for best maneuverability you need highly unstable fast turning fly by wire planes. One exception to stealthing might be an airplane that you can divide up into tiny objects, so they pass a wave coming at them like Scipio passed Hannibal's elephants at the Battle of Zama, or like a wave breaking wall on a lake passes much of the waves if it has lots of large gaps, and the ratio of pass area to reflection area is high, and then it's harder to find an overall characteristic wavelength. But by their very presence, even the very small wave breaking pillars, that you would use as a loosely connected set of pieces to make out your UAV airplane that passes waves shot at it, even the small amount of pieces there modify the overall "dielectric constant" of free space, and create a disturbance in the 377 ohm impedance, and create a transmission-cable impedance mismatch like reflection, if they don't act like proper Ethernet or SCSI cable terminators, or anti-reflection coatings on a lens. There is a new field in physics, with negative dielectric constants, where, under certain conditions, you can make weird shapes that act and shape waves as if their dielectric constant were negative, and you could use those to balance out the average dielectric constant increase created by the parts of your "sieve-UAV-plane," but there is some really funky math involved, and I'm too stupid to comprehend it, and so is pretty much everybody else I know, or the whole military leadership of the country, but you don't have to comprehend how it works if it works, and you can find smart enough people to comprehend it. Also this negative impedance or negative dielectric constant behavior might be at some characteristic wavelength only, so you would have to sense what frequency beam is shot at you, and adjust the spacing or sieve-mesh of your UAV to match that, and then the game goes to simultaneo

Re:Might cause a re-thinking of the F-35

[CaptnZilog]

All irrelevant - China has the ultimate 'trump card'. If the US starts giving them too much in the way of problems, they simply stop making iPhones, and the 'smart' phone addicts in the US will be begging them for new phones to stare into all day.

Rebirth of the Russian Woodpecker

[Anonymous Coward]

Longwave radar is not new,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_Woodpecker

Re:Rebirth of the Russian Woodpecker

[RobKow]

The Nyquist rate (and Shannon's theorem even further) severely bounds digital communications bandwidth in the little bit of usable bandwidth that lies below 100 MHz. The long distance and irregularity of the propagation puts additional bounds on the number of simultaneous transmitters. So there are good reasons other than just censorship and rent-seeking to desire the short-ranges available in the shorter bands, such as the increase in simultaneous talkers (if you don't propagate as far, someone closer by can share the frequency), and the additional bandwidth available.

That said, the 20 m band is plenty fun, even if every idiot in the world can't use it.

Not news

[afidel]

The F117 that was lost in the Balkans NATO mission in 1999 was shot down by an S-125 modified to use longer wavelenths than the RAM paint on the aircraft would absorb. The issue has been known since then and it's very likely that the F22 and F35 low observability design characteristics have taken this into account as much as physics and material science will allow.

Re:Not news

[jon3k]

Partially correct. It was only seen because the bomb bay doors were open:

From Wikipedia:

In 2005, Colonel Zoltán Dani confirmed in an interview suggested that those modifications involved using long wavelengths, allowing them to detect the aircraft when the wheel well or bomb bay doors were open.

Duped article and not insightful

[CajunArson]

Articles like this have been around since the 1980s and have appeared on Slashdot before in regards to practically every stealth aircraft in existence including at least the F-117 and the B2.

Here's the kicker though: The long-wave radars that can sort of track stealth aircraft aren't able to track them with the precision needed to get a missile up there to shoot one down. If an adversary already knows that you are sending planes into a general geographic region, then the long-wave radar doesn't really tell them anything that they didn't know already.

Anyone in the military who has dealt with stealth technology will tell you that "stealth" is much more than a coating or wing shape that magically makes your airplane disappear. It's a whole strategy that uses technology + suitable tactics to make stealth work in practical situations. Stealth aircraft are not completely invisible and do not have to be completely invisible to be effective.

Re:Duped article and not insightful

[Obscene_CNN]

Not really, your latency will be based on the time it takes to receive a few wave lengths (a 10MHz signal would be one ten millionth of a second for a single cycle and one millionth for ten). The radio energy would travel at the same speed as a higher frequency signal however. Accuracy lost to latency of a plane traveling at Mach two would be about 0.68mm since Mach two is about 680 meters per second (assuming a 10MHz signal and you could detect with ten wavelengths).

Re:Duped article and not insightful

[DaveAtFraud]

Definitely well known for a long time. I remember seeing an article around 1990 about one of the radar systems that I worked on in the mid-1980s as being able to track the B-2. Both systems were over the horizon radars (very long wave length; antenna arrays stretching for a mile or so). Good tracking accuracy if you looked at it as a percentage of the range but the minimum range was like 400-500 miles (not classified; characteristic of the radar) so even a 1% accuracy means at best a location within 4 or 5 miles. Great for early warning but not useful for targeting. Also, not something that can be made mobile; let alone stuffed into an interceptor.

Cheers,
Dave

Eastern block has always used VHF and UHF radars

[Zeorge]

I should say, former Eastern Block, that is. But, this is nothing new and has been known for some time now. They have these huge deployable radar arrays that operate in the VHF and UHF bands. Originally, it was due to their limited technology capability but then it was realized that there was specific advantages to using those bands. Notably, no one else is looking for radar in VHF and UHF so you could be being tracked and have no idea.


This is also how they took down a stealth fighter over Kosovo, they used 900MHz-band cell towers, tuned ground radar station to look for the return, and then manually guided the missiles until they were close enough (probably for the heat signature to become evident) to lock on.


I really hope this was all factored into the design of these multi-billion money pit of an aircraft.

Re:What is "steath technology"?

[tekrat]

The "L" is hidden from view. That's what makes it so stealthy, or steathy, as the case may be.

Re:Old news

[Sentrion]

What the heck is a sitting dug?