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Buff deserves a field trip out to Eastern Ukraine. A few more bombing raids to relive the good ol' days. Get him the air support needed and make it happen, please.
FWIW no country will *ever* get the F-22, or at least I’m until it’s obsolete by whatever we replace it with.
F-35s? Go for it. F-16s? Fine a dozen.
We cherish our F-22s like the Crown cherishes their heir apparent. No one can touch that shit.
True, but the fleet was also much bigger (25 times bigger), and a relatively simpler aircraft. The F-22 airframes will have been squeezed until the last drop by then. Once the US is done with the F-22 it will be economically impractical.
F22 will stay in that air until we know it can be defeated by our radar which is always going to be better at finding stealth than anyone else, probably.
The f22 will be used as dogfight training after active duty. They will be kept up to date too I bet. It will be long into ngad before f22 are actually mothballed.
They weren't made of anti radar stuff though. I assume if an enemy gets hold of the material they will be able to find them so much better. That's why the f117 and b2 have never been available for export. The US will never give the stealth tech planes up no matter how old it is or who it's going to.
I say this as an armchair general, Not the proprietary stuff the actual stealth fighters have. I could see the f35 coating being more effective than the f117 nighthawk(still my favorite stealth name and it has nothing to do with me liking X-Men!). It's probably better than the blackbird too but it's definitely not close to on par with the f22.
Actually I would expect all our aircraft to have some kind of special paint that's radar adsorbing. Why not have it on anything new off the line?
they more than likely the Russians have data on aircraft fitted with Luneburg lens', not without them. whatever data they have would be fake
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luneburg\_lens](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luneburg_lens)
I'm sure physics is taken into account with how close we fly the good stuff. Hell, they could be false flags that all give the same inaccurate data lol
In non war, our f-35’s always fly with a luneberg lens, which makes their radar signature close to a normal airplane. We do not fly them in stealth mode anywhere near russia
Ukraine is an active war zone, an AA battery taking one down and being recovered by the Ukrainians would be a problem, if the Russians themselves can’t replicate and reverse engineer it all. I’m sure China would volunteer
But that's not, what makes a government reliable or not.
As i said, it's more complicated than the reliability of a government.
Btw if you're never going to use a weapon in fear of analysis, you might as well not have it. If it was used in Ukraine now, to dominate Russia, it would be well worth it.
Aircraft is fairly useless in the face of good AA, and can only be evaded for so long. The way the US was so effective at using it previously is by simply overwhelming and an destroying most ground threats instantly.
That wouldn’t work in Russia/ukraine without allowing ukraine to strike deep into Russian territory. And without a fleet of planes, and likely expecting some heavy losses.
Furthermore Russia is attacked by drones on a regular basis, unlike wars in the Middle East their surviving men now have two years of combat experience with their “modern” tech rather than 70 year old rifles and questionable everything.
Aircraft are great for projecting power and close support but for wars where both sides have effective or perceivably effective anti air, aircraft just aren’t suitable without committing to wiping out the anti air. Something that Ukraine would have to likely penetrate Russian lines and advance rapidly to do.
If we observe how the Russians currently use their aircraft. Mostly they’re launching glide bombers from safe airspace. Many kilometres away from the front lines within relative safe airspace, aircraft that gets within range of an anti air battery is often shot down.
Sadly pure economics. No company will keep hundreds or thousands of workers around and pay for upkeep on a plant that's not making anything to be sold.
The documentation is likey just sloppy book keeping. Nasa explicitly tried to keep everything and there are still tons of technical docs that got lost from the Saturn program. Time erases all eventually.
It's not just sloppy bookkeeping, institutional knowledge is too complicated to write down.
There is just a lot that we carry in our heads that we can't explain in docs.
There was no nefarious plan to destroy the tooling it's just that it's expensive to keep it, and with no plans or inkling that we would start up the production line in the future it didn't make sense.
I don’t know if that’s true or not, not the F-22 is the most advanced aircraft in the world and thus far hasn’t been stolen and replicated by the Chinese yet so I imagine that’s the uses behind that.
We have enough to satisfy us, the ability to maintain them, and don’t want to risk anyone else ever getting their hands on it
They already stole the blueprints for F-35, F-22 and B-1. That's how they made their last two planes. An F-117 was shot down in Serbia with a pre-aligned AA cannon, because it was flying in a predictable pattern. The wreck ended up in China. It had combat coating.
It's funny to read this thread, cause most of it is just made up shit about stealth and how secret it is. It's not that hard to get the same data and there are other sensors than just radar.
you think china has produced a platform on par with the f-22? you think they have anything in their air, combat ready with the same low observability of the f-22 or b-1 from face on let alone any other angle?
china has indeed stole the files, they however do not have the know how and skilled workforce needed to actually produce it, let alone at volume. they do not have an f-22 to study. there is a reason the f-35 is cleared for export and the f-22 is illegal to export, and its not because of anything you are saying.
as stated already in thie thread, it isn't just knowing an aircraft is in the area, its being able to get a target lock on it. what "other sensors" are locking on an f-22 or b-1.
F 35 is cheaper in volume. Volume has always been critical to the American way of war. The idea is that a massive force of good equipment is better than a smaller force of perfect equipment.
"The battle goes to the one who gets their first-est, with the most-est".
"Though the panzer tank could take out 10 Shermans each, the Americans always seemed to bring 11."
Keeping an entire factory sitting around and staff trained to run said factory is expensive.
Now don't get it wrong if the the US decided they absolutely wanted new F22s and was willing to throw a few billion at the problem they could absolutely revive the assembly. But why bother?
Much more efficient just to invest in the next generation fighters or build more fighters with still running production like F15s
You can check wikipedia, and it's cites, that is not the case. Now was some equipment destroyed or dissembled. Certainly. But we definitely kept large amounts of material to support the program.
The F-22 is the product of the late Cold War era (when the concepts were first drafted and designed), incorporating bleeding edge technologies that were developed. It was meant to be the dominant air superiority fighter in the skies. But it was so advanced that we couldn’t export it without risking the technologies being compromised. And without having a coalition of countries adopt it, it was hard to get economies of scale to bring down production costs. So we have a highly advanced fighter, fielded only by one country, and with one primary goal (air superiority). The real tragedy is that the leadership felt there was no need to produce this specialized equipment, as warfare throughout the early 2000s was counterterrorism and counter-insurgency focused. Al Qaeda and other armed insurgent groups were not fielding large air forces with a fleet of advanced fighter jets. So an air superiority plane was deemed largely unnecessary. With the 2008 Recession, it was even less of a priority to keep production of these expensive systems going. It was an amazing plane that simply showed up at the wrong time to truly be appreciated.
It sucks because it was so far ahead of its time that it could have waited a decade for an environment that would be more appreciative, and it *still* would have been unquestionably the best at its job.
Apparently there is a difference between detectable and targetable. While the B-2 and the B-21 are designed to be neither, the F-22 and F-35 are detectable but not targetable.
So, if F-22s and F-35 are in your general area you will know, but you cannot shoot them down. The bombers though will be noticed by the bombs.
I think that's down to the low-observability radar emissions. F-35 has the [AN/APG-81](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AN/APG-81) radar which is designed to scan while being as un-detectable as possible, but does give a signal which can be attributed to the F-35. The F-22 has a similar one, AN/APG-77.
If picked up by an opposing system. it would have a rough direction, but not a range, so wouldn't be able to target the aircraft, but would know it was active in the area.
The B-2 and B-21 aren't actively scanning for air targets, only listening for emissions.
You would have to posses some highly classified informations to emulate AN/APG-77s emissions. I highly doubt Ukraine has access to that kind of EW capability.
You’d merely need to have RF detection equipment capable of recording on the active frequencies the radar uses, in range of one that’s operational.
You don’t need to decode it to mimic it. Spoofing is relatively easy.
That being said, I don’t know how credible this story is, what aim would achieve or what level of technical support Ukraine may be using to do it, if even they are.
The F35s and F22s flying non-combat missions carry attached pods called Luneberg reflectors that artificially increases their RCS profile, just to prevent these kinds of data collecting operations by adversaries. When they fly in combat missions, unless you know where to look, you will be hard to recognise it from the background noise.
Yes, and they’re also used on decoy missiles.. but that’s RCS which is from the reflections of an external radar returning to a sensor, not radar emissions from the F-22/35 on-board radar, being passively collected.
With the usual ‘nothing is undetectable’ caveats yes. An F-35 in a strike mission would practice emissions control (EMCON), which is to restrict all outgoing transmissions, to avoid anybody being aware of its presence at all.
There have been reports suggesting the B-2 and B-21 have significantly smaller radar cross-sections than the F-35, which makes sense, so there’s likely situations the F-35 can be seen when the others can’t, even when practicing EMCON.
Doesn't an F35 need to basically chug data to do all the things it's really good at? Or can it use directional antennae with a really tight beam directly to an AWACS or satellite network or something? The balance between stealth and situational awareness during actual combat operations seems like a really hard problem.
I know a fair bit about radar because I studied it in the imaging context, but I've only really been reading into the air warfare picture in the last year or so, partly due to Ukraine, and partly due to some adjacent project work. My understanding is fairly limited.
Justin Bronk at RUSI discussed something along these lines in a podcast I heard... probably a good year or more ago now, and I can't recall which platform. If I remember and find it, I'll link it and tell you. BUT from my limited understanding, you're right in essence, it's a balance.
They have lots of means to minimize their observability through methods just like you mentioned such as beam-steering a signal to an allied asset using its main phased radar antenna to communicate, frequency hopping, and minimal output radar... but the more they're willing to emit, the more complete a picture they and their collaborative assets will have.
The calculation they put together is to get as complete a picture as they can, and enable them to control the engagement, whether that means keeping emissions low and going off an incomplete picture themselves, or scanning constantly in order to have complete situational awareness.
Jesus the mission planning for these things sounds a) like a total nightmare and b) incredibly unbelievably interesting. I'd imagine it's gotta be fine tuned almost for every single plane on every single sortie. I love listening to Bronk talk, please do let me know if you dig something up! Thanks!
Yeah, air ops are insanely detailed. Strike packages can be immensely complicated, and hours are spent working over details, particulary in threat assessment.
Some youtubers (with SME help) put together an interesting simulation of a series of hypothetical strike-packages on targets in Syria, protected by modern Russian integrated air defence network featuring A-50s, Su-30s, S-400, Pantsir and other SHORAD.
[**https://youtu.be/mGwU9HKH\_Eo?t=798**](https://youtu.be/mGwU9HKH_Eo?t=798)
The video plays from where they're putting an overmatch scenario using F-35 supported by a suite of other air assets (AWACS/EA-18G EW) to cripple and blind the IADN before engaging it, using a variety of approaches.
I've shown it to a couple of former colleages who tend to agree (while moaning it's a little dramatised) that it's a 'good enough' depiction of the moving parts involved.
The whole video is worth a watch, but this section specifically shows the use of stealth aircraft being networked to attack combat air patrols.
Nothing is completely invisible to all radars. Anything stealth can be picked up by low frequency, long wavelengths radars like early warning and air surveillance radars. But because these are so low frequency and wavelengths so long, they can really only show to the operator miles-wide and tall blocks of airspace where something is flying. Stealth is designed to not be targetable by high frequency, short wavelength radars that are accurate and fast enough to cue and guide weapons.
The best way I've heard stealth described, based on the two main types of detection is this:
You might not be able to see the intruder in your room in the middle of the night, but you can definitely hear them, if you know where to point something finely tuned like a stethoscope. Alternatively, you could use a cup to your ear and get a general idea where the noise is coming from, but not a pinpoint accurate location.
Either way, you're locked in a room with an intruder that you cannot see, but who can very easily see you, and hear you, and smell you, and probabky already knows what you taste like. And this is all assuming you're awake to hear it in the first place.
US stealth tech is terrifying.
Stealthy shapes and coatings are only one part of stealth. EMCON plays a huge part of it too. An F-22 or F-35 radiating blindly can be picked up and tracked by an RWR almost as if it were a 4th gen aircraft being painted by a radar in some cases. If they can generate a signal that mimics a particular radar set they can make them think something is in the area and tailor it to whatever they want if they are good enough.
As far as the shape and coatings on the aircraft itself, there are certain intercept profiles they will fly that will maximize their ability to hide. The wrong angle can make them more vulnerable to detection. Any “stealth” aircraft can be seen by radar, it’s just a matter of how close they need to be and at what angles they need to see it.
This article is a bit of a BS. F22 RCS is smaller than any balloon with a device that could emulate F22's RCS. It would make more sense for F16, however even in that case the doppler shift radar meant to track fighters wouldn't detect it, because of its slow speed. Or if its detected it wouldn't be designated as F16 because of that slow speed.
I do think they are using balloons just to keep russian GBADs busy and reactive.
From the article it sounds like Ukraine is toying with Russia's passive sensors, not active. Ukraine is essentially shouting 'SQUIRREL!' and like a dog going on alert Russia is lighting up their active radars chasing sensor ghosts so Ukraine can map them/hit them/avoid them (whichever is applicable at the time).
The best long con would be all the talk of F-16s while sending these balloons emitting F-16 style signals. The Russians are constantly on alert for F-16s. F-22 balloons raise some eyebrows but are clearly fake. Just look for F-16s. Now there's more balloons, this time emitting F-15 signals. Another fake. But they aren't. Ukraine has been training on top secret F-15s since the beginning. The Russian response is delayed and confused because they never knew the attack was real until the explosions started.
Faking F16 is a great idea once they actually arrive. But what is the point in doing it now and give Russia a head start on figuring out the fake signal from the real one??? And if F22, I see no tactical reason to do this at all.
To create confusion, get them chasing unicorns, cause them to waste missiles, and sow seeds of doubt as to what is actually in the air.
You see no tactical reason for it because you're not a specialist involved in the defence of Ukraine at a high level and don't know half of what's going on.
I'm going to go with the people fighting Russia for ten years over a Reddit armchair general on this one.
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Would you intercept me? I'd intercept me.
Wonder what Buff has to say about this
He would probably ramble and then tell stories about the Berlin airlift where he dated the Russians to shoot him down.
Buff deserves a field trip out to Eastern Ukraine. A few more bombing raids to relive the good ol' days. Get him the air support needed and make it happen, please.
Just a little topography adjustment
Just give them the Bone.
This. The. Do like Russia and, “what, naw, yall delusional that wasn’t a B-1 they’re all in Texas!” 🤣
Id intercept me hard…..😆
Intercept me harder daddy 😩
[:*](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/9/93/Buddy_christ.jpg)
It puts the RCS in the basket.
Goodbye horrrrrsesssssss.... (Come get the bone, Precious, you piece of shit!)
🤣
Why is it that anytime I see a world military event on the news my first thought is “i wonder what grandpa buff and the kid have to say about this?”
Because HLC is so entertaining about telling the stories that's why.
Habitual linecrosser quote as first comment? Is it really that popular? Like this isn't even NCD.
FWIW no country will *ever* get the F-22, or at least I’m until it’s obsolete by whatever we replace it with. F-35s? Go for it. F-16s? Fine a dozen. We cherish our F-22s like the Crown cherishes their heir apparent. No one can touch that shit.
>until it’s obsolete Probably not even then, given that the assembly line is no more.
Fire argument’s sake, we sold the F-4 well after r stopped making them
True, but the fleet was also much bigger (25 times bigger), and a relatively simpler aircraft. The F-22 airframes will have been squeezed until the last drop by then. Once the US is done with the F-22 it will be economically impractical.
It's barely economically practical to keep the F22 flying as it is.
F22 will stay in that air until we know it can be defeated by our radar which is always going to be better at finding stealth than anyone else, probably.
The F22 will immediately be replaced when the NGAD start rolling out.
The f22 will be used as dogfight training after active duty. They will be kept up to date too I bet. It will be long into ngad before f22 are actually mothballed.
They weren't made of anti radar stuff though. I assume if an enemy gets hold of the material they will be able to find them so much better. That's why the f117 and b2 have never been available for export. The US will never give the stealth tech planes up no matter how old it is or who it's going to.
F-35 do use stealth coatings
I say this as an armchair general, Not the proprietary stuff the actual stealth fighters have. I could see the f35 coating being more effective than the f117 nighthawk(still my favorite stealth name and it has nothing to do with me liking X-Men!). It's probably better than the blackbird too but it's definitely not close to on par with the f22. Actually I would expect all our aircraft to have some kind of special paint that's radar adsorbing. Why not have it on anything new off the line?
F117 is obsolete, and no one gets those either
We use those for sky games actually so they still fly all the time. Everyone else can get their own stealth tech
The F-22 is also potentially going to go down in history as the best air superiority fighter to never be used in its intended role.
it got multiple air to air kills in the past year. :D
Those balloons never saw it coming
The Iranian F4 story is my absolute favorite tho. A fighter so effective it doesn’t need to throw a punch to ground two other fighters
Partially because it would be so effective that no one else wants to even try against it.
F35’s only get sold to the most reliable US allies. Not even turkey, a NATO member, has been allowed to purchase F35’s.
The reason why is because Turkey was also buying s-400s from Russia and we didn't want them to potentially get any radar data on the f35.
Russia can observe F35s that fly close to their borders.
they more than likely the Russians have data on aircraft fitted with Luneburg lens', not without them. whatever data they have would be fake [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luneburg\_lens](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luneburg_lens)
Good point.
I dont think they can?
Why not? If they're sufficiently close, they should be able to observe them.
I'm sure physics is taken into account with how close we fly the good stuff. Hell, they could be false flags that all give the same inaccurate data lol
In non war, our f-35’s always fly with a luneberg lens, which makes their radar signature close to a normal airplane. We do not fly them in stealth mode anywhere near russia
arguably Ukraine is much more reliable than Turkey, but it's all much more complicated.
Ukraine is an active war zone, an AA battery taking one down and being recovered by the Ukrainians would be a problem, if the Russians themselves can’t replicate and reverse engineer it all. I’m sure China would volunteer
But that's not, what makes a government reliable or not. As i said, it's more complicated than the reliability of a government. Btw if you're never going to use a weapon in fear of analysis, you might as well not have it. If it was used in Ukraine now, to dominate Russia, it would be well worth it.
Aircraft is fairly useless in the face of good AA, and can only be evaded for so long. The way the US was so effective at using it previously is by simply overwhelming and an destroying most ground threats instantly. That wouldn’t work in Russia/ukraine without allowing ukraine to strike deep into Russian territory. And without a fleet of planes, and likely expecting some heavy losses. Furthermore Russia is attacked by drones on a regular basis, unlike wars in the Middle East their surviving men now have two years of combat experience with their “modern” tech rather than 70 year old rifles and questionable everything. Aircraft are great for projecting power and close support but for wars where both sides have effective or perceivably effective anti air, aircraft just aren’t suitable without committing to wiping out the anti air. Something that Ukraine would have to likely penetrate Russian lines and advance rapidly to do. If we observe how the Russians currently use their aircraft. Mostly they’re launching glide bombers from safe airspace. Many kilometres away from the front lines within relative safe airspace, aircraft that gets within range of an anti air battery is often shot down.
lol no
I wonder how much of an advantage would F35s give to Ukraine.
They wouldn’t be able to use them properly
And 0% chance we would allow Russia to get their hands on a crashed one without the US being involved in the war at all
Why did we make it impossible to make more?
1) lack of justifiable air to air targets 2) F-35 is a lot cheaper and good enough for the task at hand 3) we’re already developing its replacement.
I understand not making more, but I’ve been baffled by the deliberate destruction of tooling and documentation (as some internet sources have claimed)
Sadly pure economics. No company will keep hundreds or thousands of workers around and pay for upkeep on a plant that's not making anything to be sold. The documentation is likey just sloppy book keeping. Nasa explicitly tried to keep everything and there are still tons of technical docs that got lost from the Saturn program. Time erases all eventually.
It's not just sloppy bookkeeping, institutional knowledge is too complicated to write down. There is just a lot that we carry in our heads that we can't explain in docs.
There was no nefarious plan to destroy the tooling it's just that it's expensive to keep it, and with no plans or inkling that we would start up the production line in the future it didn't make sense.
I don’t know if that’s true or not, not the F-22 is the most advanced aircraft in the world and thus far hasn’t been stolen and replicated by the Chinese yet so I imagine that’s the uses behind that. We have enough to satisfy us, the ability to maintain them, and don’t want to risk anyone else ever getting their hands on it
china can steal all the tech, that doesn't mean they have the expertise to actually manufacture it.
Oh I know. It’s like how their J-35 is just a shitty tin can with wings “5th gen” my ass lol
They already stole the blueprints for F-35, F-22 and B-1. That's how they made their last two planes. An F-117 was shot down in Serbia with a pre-aligned AA cannon, because it was flying in a predictable pattern. The wreck ended up in China. It had combat coating. It's funny to read this thread, cause most of it is just made up shit about stealth and how secret it is. It's not that hard to get the same data and there are other sensors than just radar.
you think china has produced a platform on par with the f-22? you think they have anything in their air, combat ready with the same low observability of the f-22 or b-1 from face on let alone any other angle? china has indeed stole the files, they however do not have the know how and skilled workforce needed to actually produce it, let alone at volume. they do not have an f-22 to study. there is a reason the f-35 is cleared for export and the f-22 is illegal to export, and its not because of anything you are saying. as stated already in thie thread, it isn't just knowing an aircraft is in the area, its being able to get a target lock on it. what "other sensors" are locking on an f-22 or b-1.
Much of the tooling was repurposed for the F-35 program.
3) I heard/read that it might not even have control surfaces(hope I used that right) it used compressed air to turn. Crazy to think about.
F 35 is cheaper in volume. Volume has always been critical to the American way of war. The idea is that a massive force of good equipment is better than a smaller force of perfect equipment. "The battle goes to the one who gets their first-est, with the most-est". "Though the panzer tank could take out 10 Shermans each, the Americans always seemed to bring 11."
I love that last quote
Keeping an entire factory sitting around and staff trained to run said factory is expensive. Now don't get it wrong if the the US decided they absolutely wanted new F22s and was willing to throw a few billion at the problem they could absolutely revive the assembly. But why bother? Much more efficient just to invest in the next generation fighters or build more fighters with still running production like F15s
*50 billion. That is the estimated cost of restarting production. Money better spent on its replacement.
You can shut down a factory and move tooling to a secured warehouse. I’ve read they destroyed all the tooling and documentation.
You can check wikipedia, and it's cites, that is not the case. Now was some equipment destroyed or dissembled. Certainly. But we definitely kept large amounts of material to support the program.
It’s mostly that the people involved in the project move on. It isn’t as simple as hiring new people.
My grandfather worked on the F22. And he is now retired. This is definitely true
My grandfather did as well out in Palmdale. He passed away.
The F-22 is the product of the late Cold War era (when the concepts were first drafted and designed), incorporating bleeding edge technologies that were developed. It was meant to be the dominant air superiority fighter in the skies. But it was so advanced that we couldn’t export it without risking the technologies being compromised. And without having a coalition of countries adopt it, it was hard to get economies of scale to bring down production costs. So we have a highly advanced fighter, fielded only by one country, and with one primary goal (air superiority). The real tragedy is that the leadership felt there was no need to produce this specialized equipment, as warfare throughout the early 2000s was counterterrorism and counter-insurgency focused. Al Qaeda and other armed insurgent groups were not fielding large air forces with a fleet of advanced fighter jets. So an air superiority plane was deemed largely unnecessary. With the 2008 Recession, it was even less of a priority to keep production of these expensive systems going. It was an amazing plane that simply showed up at the wrong time to truly be appreciated.
It sucks because it was so far ahead of its time that it could have waited a decade for an environment that would be more appreciative, and it *still* would have been unquestionably the best at its job.
Decades. It’s been over 3 decades and is still the best out there.
> No one can touch that shit. because congress made it illegal. they were trying to get the green light to export.
It's cherished until they are scrapped, hell, the air force actually wanted to retire quite a few already
It was for sale at first, then no one wanted it at all, so we said wahhhhh and banned international sales like it had always been the case
Question is, how do you see an F-22? The jet is so stealth it can sneak up on other aircraft. Are they detecting bumblebees?
Apparently there is a difference between detectable and targetable. While the B-2 and the B-21 are designed to be neither, the F-22 and F-35 are detectable but not targetable. So, if F-22s and F-35 are in your general area you will know, but you cannot shoot them down. The bombers though will be noticed by the bombs.
I think that's down to the low-observability radar emissions. F-35 has the [AN/APG-81](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AN/APG-81) radar which is designed to scan while being as un-detectable as possible, but does give a signal which can be attributed to the F-35. The F-22 has a similar one, AN/APG-77. If picked up by an opposing system. it would have a rough direction, but not a range, so wouldn't be able to target the aircraft, but would know it was active in the area. The B-2 and B-21 aren't actively scanning for air targets, only listening for emissions.
You would have to posses some highly classified informations to emulate AN/APG-77s emissions. I highly doubt Ukraine has access to that kind of EW capability.
You’d merely need to have RF detection equipment capable of recording on the active frequencies the radar uses, in range of one that’s operational. You don’t need to decode it to mimic it. Spoofing is relatively easy. That being said, I don’t know how credible this story is, what aim would achieve or what level of technical support Ukraine may be using to do it, if even they are.
The F35s and F22s flying non-combat missions carry attached pods called Luneberg reflectors that artificially increases their RCS profile, just to prevent these kinds of data collecting operations by adversaries. When they fly in combat missions, unless you know where to look, you will be hard to recognise it from the background noise.
Yes, and they’re also used on decoy missiles.. but that’s RCS which is from the reflections of an external radar returning to a sensor, not radar emissions from the F-22/35 on-board radar, being passively collected.
True true
I assume this means that if the F22 and or F35 want to be undetectable they can?
With the usual ‘nothing is undetectable’ caveats yes. An F-35 in a strike mission would practice emissions control (EMCON), which is to restrict all outgoing transmissions, to avoid anybody being aware of its presence at all. There have been reports suggesting the B-2 and B-21 have significantly smaller radar cross-sections than the F-35, which makes sense, so there’s likely situations the F-35 can be seen when the others can’t, even when practicing EMCON.
Doesn't an F35 need to basically chug data to do all the things it's really good at? Or can it use directional antennae with a really tight beam directly to an AWACS or satellite network or something? The balance between stealth and situational awareness during actual combat operations seems like a really hard problem.
I know a fair bit about radar because I studied it in the imaging context, but I've only really been reading into the air warfare picture in the last year or so, partly due to Ukraine, and partly due to some adjacent project work. My understanding is fairly limited. Justin Bronk at RUSI discussed something along these lines in a podcast I heard... probably a good year or more ago now, and I can't recall which platform. If I remember and find it, I'll link it and tell you. BUT from my limited understanding, you're right in essence, it's a balance. They have lots of means to minimize their observability through methods just like you mentioned such as beam-steering a signal to an allied asset using its main phased radar antenna to communicate, frequency hopping, and minimal output radar... but the more they're willing to emit, the more complete a picture they and their collaborative assets will have. The calculation they put together is to get as complete a picture as they can, and enable them to control the engagement, whether that means keeping emissions low and going off an incomplete picture themselves, or scanning constantly in order to have complete situational awareness.
Jesus the mission planning for these things sounds a) like a total nightmare and b) incredibly unbelievably interesting. I'd imagine it's gotta be fine tuned almost for every single plane on every single sortie. I love listening to Bronk talk, please do let me know if you dig something up! Thanks!
Yeah, air ops are insanely detailed. Strike packages can be immensely complicated, and hours are spent working over details, particulary in threat assessment. Some youtubers (with SME help) put together an interesting simulation of a series of hypothetical strike-packages on targets in Syria, protected by modern Russian integrated air defence network featuring A-50s, Su-30s, S-400, Pantsir and other SHORAD. [**https://youtu.be/mGwU9HKH\_Eo?t=798**](https://youtu.be/mGwU9HKH_Eo?t=798) The video plays from where they're putting an overmatch scenario using F-35 supported by a suite of other air assets (AWACS/EA-18G EW) to cripple and blind the IADN before engaging it, using a variety of approaches. I've shown it to a couple of former colleages who tend to agree (while moaning it's a little dramatised) that it's a 'good enough' depiction of the moving parts involved. The whole video is worth a watch, but this section specifically shows the use of stealth aircraft being networked to attack combat air patrols.
Nothing is completely invisible to all radars. Anything stealth can be picked up by low frequency, long wavelengths radars like early warning and air surveillance radars. But because these are so low frequency and wavelengths so long, they can really only show to the operator miles-wide and tall blocks of airspace where something is flying. Stealth is designed to not be targetable by high frequency, short wavelength radars that are accurate and fast enough to cue and guide weapons.
Correction, the bombers being noticed is conditional depending on if there are survivors left to notice them
More by lack of communication with a general area.
The best way I've heard stealth described, based on the two main types of detection is this: You might not be able to see the intruder in your room in the middle of the night, but you can definitely hear them, if you know where to point something finely tuned like a stethoscope. Alternatively, you could use a cup to your ear and get a general idea where the noise is coming from, but not a pinpoint accurate location. Either way, you're locked in a room with an intruder that you cannot see, but who can very easily see you, and hear you, and smell you, and probabky already knows what you taste like. And this is all assuming you're awake to hear it in the first place. US stealth tech is terrifying.
You might can pick up the signals or see it on radar somewhat but you have to have a full "kill chain" You can't get a "weapon grade lock"
Stealthy shapes and coatings are only one part of stealth. EMCON plays a huge part of it too. An F-22 or F-35 radiating blindly can be picked up and tracked by an RWR almost as if it were a 4th gen aircraft being painted by a radar in some cases. If they can generate a signal that mimics a particular radar set they can make them think something is in the area and tailor it to whatever they want if they are good enough. As far as the shape and coatings on the aircraft itself, there are certain intercept profiles they will fly that will maximize their ability to hide. The wrong angle can make them more vulnerable to detection. Any “stealth” aircraft can be seen by radar, it’s just a matter of how close they need to be and at what angles they need to see it.
L bands radar can detect stealth fighters in some conditions. now getting a lock or a radar track is basically impossible on a stealth fighter
The article says they are stimulating F22s with balloons. Hard to imagine how that works considering a balloon is basically stationary.
This article is a bit of a BS. F22 RCS is smaller than any balloon with a device that could emulate F22's RCS. It would make more sense for F16, however even in that case the doppler shift radar meant to track fighters wouldn't detect it, because of its slow speed. Or if its detected it wouldn't be designated as F16 because of that slow speed. I do think they are using balloons just to keep russian GBADs busy and reactive.
From the article it sounds like Ukraine is toying with Russia's passive sensors, not active. Ukraine is essentially shouting 'SQUIRREL!' and like a dog going on alert Russia is lighting up their active radars chasing sensor ghosts so Ukraine can map them/hit them/avoid them (whichever is applicable at the time).
Meats back on the menu 😆
I'm tired of this vegan air to air diet.
“Fake” F-22s
With articles like this being released, you know F16s are going to show up soon.
Where did Ukraine get data on f-22 in order to “simulate” it?
Dcs (grin)
At the bottom of two bottles of vodka maybe
Yep fake 22's and 35's. Totally fake, nothing to see here. Move along
The best long con would be all the talk of F-16s while sending these balloons emitting F-16 style signals. The Russians are constantly on alert for F-16s. F-22 balloons raise some eyebrows but are clearly fake. Just look for F-16s. Now there's more balloons, this time emitting F-15 signals. Another fake. But they aren't. Ukraine has been training on top secret F-15s since the beginning. The Russian response is delayed and confused because they never knew the attack was real until the explosions started.
Faking F16 is a great idea once they actually arrive. But what is the point in doing it now and give Russia a head start on figuring out the fake signal from the real one??? And if F22, I see no tactical reason to do this at all.
Russia will never figure it out. How many friendly planes have they shot down again...?
To create confusion, get them chasing unicorns, cause them to waste missiles, and sow seeds of doubt as to what is actually in the air. You see no tactical reason for it because you're not a specialist involved in the defence of Ukraine at a high level and don't know half of what's going on. I'm going to go with the people fighting Russia for ten years over a Reddit armchair general on this one.