Stealth Is Dead! Long Live Stealth!

Stealth will be effective for a long, long time. With the elimination of corner reflectors multiple radar installations are required just to get a hint that there is an aircraft out there. Stealth will be with us until some very advanced optical technology comes along, and that’s going to be decades from now IMHO.

Interesting since the first mention of what we now call stealth technology was a paper published in an obscure soviet mathematics journal during the cold war that hypothesized the clever arrangement of surfaces to minimize radar echos, that was noticed by US researchers who ran with the idea.

Dr Petr Ufimtsev was the Soviet physicist who derived the equations for defusing radar signals away from their source. He took his work to the Kremlin who concluded that it had no military relevance whatsoever and allowed him to put it in the public domain. The rest is history.

The Designer Of The F-16 . . .

He didn't design the F-16. He had some input (among many others) into the requirements that led to the F-16, and his net contribution is more from being vocally anti-F-15 than pro-F-16.

And here he is again vocally anti-something. It's easy to make a lot of noise by saying someone else is wrong. That doesn't make him right.

(By the way, I worked on the F-16 and the F-22 and the F-35. They are all awesome aircraft and I think the US should buy thousands of each - thousands more of F-16s.)

I am not anti-F-16, but there are things the F-35 can do that no other aircraft in history could do. Whether those new capabilities are worth it is a valid matter of opinion and analysis, but there are many, many scenarios where F-35s will succeed and nothing else would.

There are also scenarios where an equal-cost force of F-16s will beat any other aircraft every invented. It's very cost effective at what it does well.

I'm more in the mode of giving those who are charged to make the decisions the benefit of the doubt over outsiders - especially those who inflate their own importance.

Multiple triangulations in real-time will kill any advantage stealthy designs might have.................

And anti-gravity will revolutionize our commute to and from work. Of course, making anti-gravity work, or multiple, real-time triangulations on something that doesn't reflect or emit anything is kinda hard to to.

The idea that the stealth aircraft will create a shadow in the sea of other emissions is fine . . . until you get above the top of the TV towers. Then you'll only notice it if your receiver is on the line-of-sight (upward) from the tower through the aircraft. And if you want more than an instant of digital noise (as the aircraft goes by), you need a *lot* of high-altitude receivers. Not an easy solution. That's the same problem with bi-static radars.

The article is fundamentally wrong in saying that low-band radars are good at detecting bumps and things on aircraft. The exact opposite is true. And low-band radars need antennas that are many wavelengths long to get any pointing accuracy. Those are huge, expensive, and difficult to move to track a high-speed target (look up Cobra Dane, or the very-low-precision Soviet/Russian Tall King). They're impossible to use on targeting systems that need precise target location for terminal maneuvers.

This topic is a case that a little knowledge is a dangerous thing. I really hope that the Russians (and other potential adversaries) think beating stealth is that easy. It will mean a lot of F-35 pilots get through and come home safely.

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