So the 60's was a great time of invention for military aviation... jet engines, guided missiles, and RADAR. RAdio Direction and Ranging.
RADAR. Airborne objects miles and miles away could be detected,
designated and have explosive packages sent their way without ever
casting a shadow on a human being's retina. It was so good it was a
weapon in and of itself. Big, skyscraper-sized antenna farms soon got
miniaturized to a few clothes-dryer fences poking out the front of a
fighter. A new era of aerial combat was begun.
The antennas became smaller, and basic computers entered the loop.
They could now map out the ground and find building-sized targets, or
detect groups of fighters 20+ miles away. More advanced computers came
along, and from 30 miles away the face of spinning engine fans gave
away what kind of plane you were. Electronically-steered arrays of
radars came about and now from 50 miles away, it could be seen what kind
of payload your jet is carrying. And well, that seemed to be that.
Nowhere else for radar to go. I see you a weather system away and whoosh
you're dead 30 seconds later. A new technology came along, EW, or
Electronic Warfare, where a radar signal could be blocked, blinded or
spoofed.
And that worked fine for us. Our adversaries caught on to or stole
the tech from us, and began trying to use it against us. So, we just
developed new technology- stealth. Area rules, plane angles and radar
absorptive materials now wrapped out military airframes and made them
hard to useless to detect by the enemy. Even our own,
older-but-still-in-service fighters couldn't detect them with what we
had boasted as the best radar tech in the World. We chuckled over how
frustrated our enemies would be in the next war.
Until, that is, our adversaries figured out stealth with a twist,
and U.S. ingenuity had to deal with them. They were current, fast and
deadly, and all our current radars had real trouble detecting them down
low to the ground, where radars have to fight ground clutter and EM
interference to detect, track and launch against.
Now, by stealth aircraft I'm not talking about the latest Russian
and Chinese stealth fighters, which aren't even in production yet. I'm
talking about stealthy cruise missiles that carried nice, big surprises
of unhappiness that could be launched from a hundred miles away by
long-range aircraft that, while big and slow, had the navigation down to
get just close enough to launch against or coast, turn around, and
outrange our fighters as they launched these invisible little bees. At
which point the targets aren't the bombers anymore, they're the six or
1/2 dozen or the other stealthy cruise missiles that each of the bombers
just launched.
"So, that's okay," some military-minded geeks said, "we can re-design
AESA radars and pump up the software behind them with new algorhythms to
detect those." And we did. With all the intent being, "We've got to
stop these missiles from breaking through." And we did it. With a nice
side effect. Now, our radars could not only detect stealth missiles,
flying low and fast between trees and laundry fences... they could
detect stealth fighters.
Oops. Was I supposed to make that public? Well, yeah, it's out
there. But the military knew it before we did, and started slapping
those new radars into all our fighters. So now, our 20-30 year old
fighters can detect stealth fighters, at long range, and shoot them
down, inmultiples, simultaneously.
Which is kinda funny, and I'll tell you why. With all the success
we'd accomplished with stealth fighters, our adversaries began designing
stealth fighters, too. China and Russia. Pre-production jets flipping
around the sky, now, saying, "Ha-ha! We have caught up with America and
are now as stealthy as they are! Ha-ha! Fear us!"
Except we don't, because now we can shoot them down like they're flying tennis courts anyway.
Hence, our own technology, can shoot down our own technology, no matter who uses it.
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