Delete comment from: Elements Of Power
I checked out the paper you mentioned -- it is quite interesting. One of the statements I see coming from today's "reformers" seems to be that low-observability is "useless." According to the armchair generals on the Interwebz, "everything is observable below two GHz" and low-frequency radars have some kind of magic anti-stealth properties. Yes, it is true that low frequencies begin to produce half-wave resonance effects, but at the 0.5 GHz to 2.0 GHz range -- which is where all non-OTHR or "passive" low-frequency radars operate, the half-wave resonance effect is still relatively small -- even at 0.5 GHz, the half wavelength is a foot long, so only the very small leading edges of the aircraft will resonate -- and those leading edges are typically covered with radar-absorbent materials. It is commonly stated by the anti-JSF crowd that RAM doesn't work below 800 MHz, but it seems that the actual radar absorbing material isn't the only component of RAM. I found a pretty interesting document about how engineers at Lockheed found new components to add to RAM to improve its abilities against low-frequency radar.
http://www.airplanedesign.info/52-radar-stealth.htm
So it appears that the addition of other components to RAM can make it effective against C/D-band radars.
So it seems that the only radars that can reliably defeat low-observable technology are extremely low-frequency VHF radars commonly used in OTH roles, where half-wave resonance affects the entire aircraft and even with supplementary materials, RAM is ineffective.
However, with VHF radars, you have to deal with the fact that you only get a 2D image (so no altitude information, and thus no ability to fire a missile based off of a VHF track), the resolution is so poor that, at typical detection ranges, you only know where the aircraft is within several kilometers (or more!), and the radar set is large and not particularly mobile (moving it is difficult, and some designs are completely immobile), so it is easy to attack it with, say, a missile fired from an SSGN.
So, it seems like the anti-JSF crowd isn't entirely correct when it comes to low-frequency radar, either...
Jun 17, 2013, 8:16:40 PM
Posted to The F-35 and the Infamous “Sustained G” Spec Change: Part 3