"Exceptional" American combat performance against Soviet equipment - worthless cold-war propaganda?

[removeduser_4536284751384]

Well, could you short-down future articles? Not everbody has time to read 4000 words essays. Anyway, if I read it correctly, the Indians got some Mig-29s during the 80's. Those were early models, and thus they suffered some inadequacies. However, why didn't the German article mention anything about poor maintenance? Maybe because the Indians had worse mechanics? Or perhaps the Germans were used to high-maintenance planes?

And, in the USSR's defence, I'm pretty sure the F-15, F-22 and pretty much every other military endeavour has had some minor hiccups in the early models.

[torongill]

Dunno if its the same article, this one is from 2009, but it basically sums up what the F-22 will do, and to be fair, I don't know if its worth the cost. It was designed to be a frontline fighter to do all of the grunt work, now its going to be sort of a glorified spy plane that can selectively hit targets. The F-15 will still be doing most of the work.

http://www.airforce-magazine.com/Mag...9playbook.aspx

I've been reading more this morning about how the F-22 will be employed, some former Secretary of the AF actually thinks we should scrap the 707 platforms altogether and only have F-22 and F-35s. This is totally retarded and puts us at the mercy of our technology. Computers can never decipher what a person can, they can't make gut calls and they can be just as wrong and have been in the past.

Also there are no studies showing what the F-22 can do in a radar saturated environment (although there are plenty of wildly optimistic forum posts out there that talk about not just the F-22 but the Typhoon, Gripen and Rafale being able to basically walk up to an AWACS). Here's what it seems the future would look like and there's only like 2 countries that would even warrant the use of the full strategy and we won't be tangling with China or Russia sooo...........whatever we already bought the things:

AWACS, JSTARS and RIVETJOINT all do their thing in the back of the battle. The F-22 deploys on the forward edge as a scout using only passive sensors and rarely engaging. The F-15 and F-16 (maybe F-35) form the layered defenses and attacking platforms. Wild Weasels are waiting for enemy radar to turn on. The F-15s engage any enemy fighters that pop up. Then if the enemy turns on their radars, they get blown up and their planes shot down, then the strike packages roll in and the war is over in an afternoon. The F-22 isn't really pivotal to any of this, its merely an addition to a system that has worked for decades. Essentially a glorified scout/spy plane.

Again, F-22 or any stealth plane is in theory (since they aren't really proven since the tech for defense is also constantly evolving) the wet dream for Russia or any enemy of NATO since they simply cannot compete with the system NATO has in place.

Well to be fair initial projections(back in the 90s) called for a force of no less than 700 F-22 to be MiG killers and more than 2200 JSF (F-35) for strike missions. And if the US hadn't gone in Afghanistan and Iraq, these projections seemed realistic and payable.

P.S. I just read a few articles, which state that German Eurofighters have managed to more than hold their own against F-22 in close combat at least. The article doesn's say how difficult it is to get to visual range, but that it would involve IRST sensor suites.

[Col. Tartleton]

Here's what I don't get about stealth fighters. Even if you can reduce your signature to look like a large bird or something, wouldn't your velocity and position give you away assuming they've got a system that is passively or actively trying to detect everything bird or larger? Especially given that stealth aircraft are fairly publicized. No one who needs to know doesn't know they exist. I'm not going to assume it's a malfunction, I'm going to assume that's a Raptor about to knock my pigeons out of the sky. I'm putting every gun and missile I can on that object. It's like in Halo you might not get a good look at the stealthed elite with a sword coming for you, but you're aware they exist so you keep yourself alert to the danger. You see that blur and you're putting a magazine into him.

I would imagine it's more work for the computers and operators but isn't it fairly obvious that the "bird" moving at it's very slowest (to keep the plane in the air) is going faster than any bird can fly. You see a "bird" zooming on your radar at over a hundred knots and you're going to have to ask yourself if that isn't a stealth fighter. Then you put active radar on it and you can guide your own fighters or SAMs to the kill. As said by others, I can obviously see that a regular fighter isn't going to have that kind of capability, and in a 1v1 duel the G5 kills the G4 every time, but that's not how wars work.

[removeduser_4536284751384]

You're right, a savvy radar operator could deduce an F-22 is present. But good luck hitting it with a missile. Thanks to its stealth that's ridiculously hard.

[Col. Tartleton]

You don't have to hit it with "A missile."

Flak the out of it.

[I WUB PUGS]

Tarleton, you would be right to assume that, except you would have to have it on active radar all the time, not "switch to it".

The point of stealth is to be invisible to the active radar, but its all about calculating what energy "comes back" to the radar. Nothing is invisible unless its actually invisible and that's impossible. All aircraft, stealth or not give off something when they are hit with active radar. The trick is to only give off a minimal amount so the automated features of the radar don't give off any bells or whistles, and to remain unseen to anyone that may be looking at the scope, so just be a minor insignificant blip.

The whole bird or mosquito comparison the stealth proponents like to throw around is stupid. If a couple radars all see a mosquito at 30,000 feet in the same place, they're going to identify that as a bogey, the point of the mosquito or bird analogy is to make it seem like the radar guys won't even notice it.

But again, we've been talking about energy. The further away from the emitter you are, the weaker the energy, the closer these stealth planes get to the emitter, the more likely they are to being seen and they are never unseen.

The reality is that radars can be tuned down very low and adjusted to make birds look like blimps. The F-117 that was shot down has a bunch of quasi BS around it, with the only source being the officer in charge musing about how awesome he was. I personally didn't buy it. At the time it was rumored that the Russians or Chinese were using Kosovo to test new stuff (hello S400?). I think this is far more probable, but in the event that the Serbian officer is correct, you can tune your equipment. This may not be possible for a plane, indeed this may actually only be possible by manually playing with the actual electronics.

Simply put, and I'll use the transmit and receive path of a sat comm terminal to describe it: You've got amplifiers on both ends. The transmission amplifier is probably already running at max. There are radars that put out thousands of watts of energy so this isn't a problem. What you want to focus on is the noise floor of your receiving equipment and your low noise amplifiers. So you want to clean up your noise floor and amplify your receive signal while lowering your noise floor substantially.

For example lets say an F-15 returns -10dB and an F-22 returns -40dB and your floor is set to -20dB. Your equipment won't even register the F-22, it literally won't show up because you haven't calibrated for it. The thing is the lower you get, the more clutter there is, there's gonna be noise all over the place and only a skilled technician would be able to pick out an actual target that low on the spectrum, but by no means does it mean the aircraft isn't there. If you can center on that noise you're radar is returning, you've found the target and you can kill it and the reality is the F-22 probably wouldn't even know its being targeted because its already been blanketed by radiation for so long and the system thinks its invisible that it would know that a missile is headed its way. It would physically have to detect an incoming missile with its onboard senors and then evade..........possibly too late.

Now I've just given what sounds really simple, but is not at all.

Here's a picture.

Now, ideally you'd be centered on that big hump in the middle, but imagine if your whole display was just that crap you see on the sides, just empty noise and you had to pick one of those spikes and work to isolate it.

You're right, a savvy radar operator could deduce an F-22 is present. But good luck hitting it with a missile. Thanks to its stealth that's ridiculously hard.

Deb, it wouldn't be that hard if you used an old school "fly down the beam" missile. These fire and forgets have their own algorithms and thresholds and wouldn't be tuned the same way the human eye would be so they'd lose the target. The ones that fly down the beam are actually pretty dumb, but a Sparrow can hit just as hard as an AMRAAM, it just needs that active guidance. If you can see it, you can hit it.

Edit: You would also have to modify the missiles to detect these lower reflected emissions.

[torongill]

Here's what I don't get about stealth fighters. Even if you can reduce your signature to look like a large bird or something, wouldn't your velocity and position give you away assuming they've got a system that is passively or actively trying to detect everything bird or larger? Especially given that stealth aircraft are fairly publicized. No one who needs to know doesn't know they exist. I'm not going to assume it's a malfunction, I'm going to assume that's a Raptor about to knock my pigeons out of the sky. I'm putting every gun and missile I can on that object.

I would imagine it's more work for the computers and operators but isn't it fairly obvious that the "bird" moving at it's very slowest (to keep the plane in the air) is going faster than any bird can fly.

You see a "bird" zooming on your radar at over a hundred knots and you're going to have to ask yourself if that isn't a stealth fighter. Then you put active radar on it and you can guide your own fighters or SAMs to the kill.

As said by others, I can obviously see that a regular fighter isn't going to have that kind of capability, and in a 1v1 duel the G5 kills the G4 every time, but that's not how wars work.

If you have to face stealth aircraft, that means the might of the USAF as well. In such a scenario the static radars(the big ground stations) are toast in the first hours(at best) of the conflict. Even if they don't switch the radars and sing out "Come kill me!" to the dozens of HARM-equipped EW birds(Weasels and Growlers), they will be taken out by cruise missile strikes. Detection could be possible, but it would require well-trained crews of highly mobile complexes(like the modern Russian SAMs), that could deploy, detect the enemy, shoot/share the data to a shooter and then pack up and move before the dozens of HARMs can arrive. This and also AWACS aircraft, like the Russian A-50, which could in theory stay the back! At the same time friendly fighters would have to take out the enemy AWACS to give advantage to friendly fighters. Then, if you manage to survive getting within 50 km of the Raptors and the dozens of F-15 and F-16 supporting them AND you have an alternative means to detect the raptors(like IR sensors) and provide guidance to the missiles, then you might begin to have a chance of survival. But even if you manage to even the odds, it will be a battle of attrition.

edit: damn, I WUB PUGS, I give up

In reality I suppose you will have to use a combination of systems, like Low frequency radar, IR sensors and normal radar and if it's daytime optical systems as well, and a special algorithm to be able to distinguish the stealths from the background clutter. It would probably involve lots of computing power and probably time. And time is everything on the battlefield.

[I WUB PUGS]

Which is why even in my scenario of the "super radar guy" picking out a stealth plane and being able to track and target is absurd. The amount of care and time needed while pumping out all those emissions means you're going to get blown the up by a wild weasel.

The USAF is going to rape you if you think you can just light up the sky with radar, that's what they want you to do so they can blind/kill you.

Which is why I am completely convinced that something other than the BS "long wave radar" from Kosovo took out the F-117. I am completely convinced the Russians or Chinese had something in theater that was able to track and kill that bird and no, the Serbs were not in control of it. And I think the USAF knows about it and that's why the F-117 was pulled ASAP after the incident.

Really, there's more than one way to cook a goose right? We've already discussed the superb Russian IRST. Who knows what they have in the way of magnetics too.

[torongill]

There was a lo-o-ong article in a Bulgarian aviation magazine at that time. Essentially the author claimed the result was a combination of a number of factors:

1. The F-117 used the same route and arrived at the same time every night.
2. The Serbians had a back-up optical sensors to their radars(with limited range) and managed to detect it one night at the moment of opening its bomb bay.
3. The next night, they put a SAM complex in the corridor the F-117 used, underneath the trajectory and when they detected it, they beamed it to give a rough path and then they bracketed the course with multiple SAMs. The F-117 pilot said the explosion created a negative 5G and he shot up from his seat, which made it impossible to reach the handle and eject immediately.

Or they just shot with everything they had in the general direction of the enemy and got lucky. But I believe it was a SAM. AA doesn't have enough of a punch to create such a shockwave.

But you might be right.

[removeduser_4536284751384]

Why is manual command line-of-sight guidance out of the question?

[I WUB PUGS]

Why is manual command line-of-sight guidance out of the question?

I don't see how it ever could be........

Yes, the F-117 stories are all unverified claims by the Serbs. They either got really lucky or something else was in the mix. It's utter crap that an F-117 used the same in and out every night. It certainly wasn't AA.

Some sources say it was AA. Some say it was long-wave radar which is even less believable since finding anything in that clutter is impossible. Some say the Serbs did what the Bulgarian article said. All of it is unsubstantiated and based off of one Serbian Officer who has added or subtracted from his story depending on the outlet. No other source has come forward.

Which is why I feel something far more effective was in play.

[Col. Tartleton]

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

Tarleton, you would be right to assume that, except you would have to have it on active radar all the time, not "switch to it".

I'm going to have to read more about this modern warfare stuff.

The point of stealth is to be invisible to the active radar, but its all about calculating what energy "comes back" to the radar. Nothing is invisible unless its actually invisible and that's impossible. All aircraft, stealth or not give off something when they are hit with active radar. The trick is to only give off a minimal amount so the automated features of the radar don't give off any bells or whistles, and to remain unseen to anyone that may be looking at the scope, so just be a minor insignificant blip.

Right.

The whole bird or mosquito comparison the stealth proponents like to throw around is stupid. If a couple radars all see a mosquito at 30,000 feet in the same place, they're going to identify that as a bogey, the point of the mosquito or bird analogy is to make it seem like the radar guys won't even notice it.

But again, we've been talking about energy. The further away from the emitter you are, the weaker the energy, the closer these stealth planes get to the emitter, the more likely they are to being seen and they are never unseen.

Right.

The reality is that radars can be tuned down very low and adjusted to make birds look like blimps. The F-117 that was shot down has a bunch of quasi BS around it, with the only source being the officer in charge musing about how awesome he was. I personally didn't buy it. At the time it was rumored that the Russians or Chinese were using Kosovo to test new stuff (hello S400?). I think this is far more probable, but in the event that the Serbian officer is correct, you can tune your equipment. This may not be possible for a plane, indeed this may actually only be possible by manually playing with the actual electronics.

That's basically what I figured. If you look hard enough you'll see it. I mean we can detect faint signals from deep space probes.

Simply put, and I'll use the transmit and receive path of a sat comm terminal to describe it: You've got amplifiers on both ends. The transmission amplifier is probably already running at max. There are radars that put out thousands of watts of energy so this isn't a problem. What you want to focus on is the noise floor of your receiving equipment and your low noise amplifiers. So you want to clean up your noise floor and amplify your receive signal while lowering your noise floor substantially.

Right.

For example lets say an F-15 returns -10dB and an F-22 returns -40dB and your floor is set to -20dB. Your equipment won't even register the F-22, it literally won't show up because you haven't calibrated for it. The thing is the lower you get, the more clutter there is, there's gonna be noise all over the place and only a skilled technician would be able to pick out an actual target that low on the spectrum, but by no means does it mean the aircraft isn't there. If you can center on that noise you're radar is returning, you've found the target and you can kill it and the reality is the F-22 probably wouldn't even know its being targeted because its already been blanketed by radiation for so long and the system thinks its invisible that it would know that a missile is headed its way. It would physically have to detect an incoming missile with its onboard senors and then evade..........possibly too late.

Right.

Now I've just given what sounds really simple, but is not at all.

Here's a picture.

Now, ideally you'd be centered on that big hump in the middle, but imagine if your whole display was just that crap you see on the sides, just empty noise and you had to pick one of those spikes and work to isolate it.

See that's where my not knowing what I'm talking about comes into play. Is that what they're looking at?

Deb, it wouldn't be that hard if you used an old school "fly down the beam" missile. These fire and forgets have their own algorithms and thresholds and wouldn't be tuned the same way the human eye would be so they'd lose the target. The ones that fly down the beam are actually pretty dumb, but a Sparrow can hit just as hard as an AMRAAM, it just needs that active guidance. If you can see it, you can hit it.

Edit: You would also have to modify the missiles to detect these lower reflected emissions.

Sounds like a return to traditional Dog fighting.

If you have to face stealth aircraft, that means the might of the USAF as well. In such a scenario the static radars(the big ground stations) are toast in the first hours(at best) of the conflict. Even if they don't switch the radars and sing out "Come kill me!" to the dozens of HARM-equipped EW birds(Weasels and Growlers), they will be taken out by cruise missile strikes. Detection could be possible, but it would require well-trained crews of highly mobile complexes(like the modern Russian SAMs), that could deploy, detect the enemy, shoot/share the data to a shooter and then pack up and move before the dozens of HARMs can arrive. This and also AWACS aircraft, like the Russian A-50, which could in theory stay the back! At the same time friendly fighters would have to take out the enemy AWACS to give advantage to friendly fighters. Then, if you manage to survive getting within 50 km of the Raptors and the dozens of F-15 and F-16 supporting them AND you have an alternative means to detect the raptors(like IR sensors) and provide guidance to the missiles, then you might begin to have a chance of survival. But even if you manage to even the odds, it will be a battle of attrition.

The thing is that even assuming Russia has the tactical edge, America wins the strategic attrition battle because our standing air power is far larger than anyone else's and on top of that our capacity to make war is greater.

edit: damn, I WUB PUGS, I give up

In reality I suppose you will have to use a combination of systems, like Low frequency radar, IR sensors and normal radar and if it's daytime optical systems as well, and a special algorithm to be able to distinguish the stealths from the background clutter. It would probably involve lots of computing power and probably time. And time is everything on the battlefield.

Yeah, but this is the sort of area where we need to dedicate resources. With good enough ground work you eliminate the advantages of the new aircraft over the old ones.

[I WUB PUGS]

No, someone at a radar scope is not looking at that picture. That is a spectrum analyzer that is measuring noise on a certain frequency (in the shot it's centered at 1 GHz). Some modifier on the ground would have to use a spectrum analyzer to tune their receive equipment such that the noise floor drops low enough and they clean it up enough to be able to pick up the noise returned by an F-22.

Problem is, now look at the picture again I think he's got a floor around -90, but lets say that the F-22 can be found around -120 (total BS example right now btw since I have no idea what the F-22 would return), when you drop the floor down to -120, those -90 "spikes" are now 30dB in height so tons of clutter that will have to be rejected.

How are you going to filter out all of that noise that is the standard floor for your equipment while isolating an F-22 if you can at all, because there is no guarantee that the F-22 is going to send back enough noise anyway? Most of it should slip off of the airplane, the bit that does return may not return even at your new noise floor. It's a guessing game, and I think nearly impossible with your standard equipment that would have to be modified to a specification that is dictated by unknown parameters.

There would need to be a new system that is already built to be ultra sensitive with tons of filtration. See the blip on the screen is just returned noise that is measurable (like on the Spectrum Analyzer) by the equipment and put in a graphic format for some to see.

It's not at all impossible to find an F-22, that's absurd, nothing is impossible. It is just really really hard and given the different parts of the plane return different values, you may not be able to continue tracking. So maybe you get a return off of the engines, but then the plane turns and your equipment doesn't even register the new, lower return if there is one at all.

What you need is something that can consistently track ultra-low observable noise levels with accuracy, and that will be very expensive and may not even be that effective. When you start getting down that low, you're basically chasing ghosts and that's the point of stealth.

That's why I don't think our friends in Moscow or Beijing are bothering with conventional radar. The amount of power you would need to put out and the amount of filtering and receive amplification you would need to put in to even hope to pick up these aircraft would be incredibly expensive and not at all full proof. I think they'd be better served looking at other options and I think they are. Not to mention as I've stated before, you don't want to turn on your radar anymore, its the fastest way of getting that radar blown up. Russians have spent more money on making their planes into passive killers than anything, I see no reason why they would sink more money into active platforms without having a very good passive system they can then slave to the active to get a quick shot off, which would actually be in tune with their history. (the Shilka and Three Fingers of Death I brought up earlier)

This is why I don't buy the Serbian "low frequency radar" bit. They're trying to tell us that somehow radar that gets cluttered by clouds and dust particles is going to pick up an F-117. If you're radar scope is already covered in crap that is well below what an airplane would return how is it going to return something that is supposed to be like the size of grapefruit? Also this long wave radar crap is the oldest of the old and we don't even use it for whether anymore because it can only really see clouds. We use doppler because it can actually show us 3D models of the rain, not just a giant mass.

The Serbs had help, I'm positive.

[Col. Tartleton]

How do you track something you can't see?

Logically you look at it's effect on it's surroundings.

Could they detect the air disturbed by an aircraft? Even a stealth aircraft has to have an effect on the air around it to fly.

Although this might very well be harder than using RADAR, I'm not sure.

[motiv-8]

Not to mention as I've stated before, you don't want to turn on your radar anymore, its the fastest way of getting that radar blown up.

Yup, I read some blog articles from a Syrian air defense officer who served from the 90s and he said that their radar station bordering Golan was never operational, because they all knew if they flipped on the Israelis would bomb them to absolute oblivion with the swiftness.

[I WUB PUGS]

How do you track something you can't see?

Logically you look at it's effect on it's surroundings.

Could they detect the air disturbed by an aircraft? Even a stealth aircraft has to have an effect on the air around it to fly.

Although this might very well be harder than using RADAR, I'm not sure.

I dunno, I deal with RF.

Yeah, Motiv-8, I can't imagine the Israelis allowing the Syrians to paint any of their aircraft........ever.........lord knows how the Jews respond to "aggressive behavior".

[torongill]

How do you track something you can't see?

Logically you look at its effect on it's surroundings.

Could they detect the air disturbed by an aircraft? Even a stealth aircraft has to have an effect on the air around it to fly.

Although this might very well be harder than using RADAR, I'm not sure.

It's not that it can't be seen. In fact at close enough distance(something like 20 km or so) the Raptor can be seenn by a radar station. But it will first have to come to these 20 clicks(and as trials have shown, a Raptor flying high enough can hit a ground target with a JDAM bomb from 30 km away).
As IWUBPUGS said, it is seen, but the image is so small it will be lost in the multitude of other radar dots. One way it could be detected, at least theoretically, is if your radar is slaved to a very powerful processing system. In essence the idea is you see ALL images, but then after the second and third times the processing system filters away the blips that haven't moved. The problem is this - how do you know this sensor ghost you're following is the stealth fighter and not just some leaf or bird that wasn't seen until this moment? So if this system is to be effective, it will have to be trained to see and distinguish the Raptor and I don't suppose the USAF will be obliging enough to lend one

Now, detection at range of stealth fighters that aren't actively using their radar could theoretically be done in the following way: Multiple Long-range radar stations in the meter-wavelength with overlapping detection ranges. While stealth technology is not very effective against this wavelength, the wavelength cannot provide you with a definite data. This is why the multiple stations, to refine the search by triangulation. That data is sent to a normal wavelength radar and basically telling where to look and which blips to ignore(after all, very few insects and birds are traveling at 1.3 Mach and at 14+ km altitude ). PUGS will say if that is possible, but if a modern radar can narrow its angle of search, I suppose it could be possible to ping that area with a much more powerful beam. This data could be sent to other systems, optical and IR, to acquire a definite lock. It can't be done by one system alone, it has to be done by a number of systems acting in concert.

The way I see it, from the PoV of the Russians(and Chinese and Indian, etc) the way to go for the stealth fighters involves a series of steps.

Step 1: Kill the AWACS(by that term I don't mean just aircraft like the E-3 Sentry, but also the E-8). I cannot stress this enough. The AWACS is the all-seeying eye and brain in the sky. It is the most important part of the air-superiority operation of USAF. Without the AWACS individual aircraft will have to use their much weaker on-board radars to look for targets, which could result in overlapping of targets or entirely missing some of them. And this would result in those fighters being detected at much longer ranges. Right now, a modern 4th generation fighter can ambush another by approaching from the flank for example. Remove the AWACS from the equation and a lot of things become much more equal.

Step 2: this branches out depending on a few factors.

1. Can a modern Anti-Radiation Missile(ARM) manage to acquire and keep a lock on the frequency-hopping radar of the F-22/F-35? If so, then the current Russian long-range missiles with ARM seekers become very much more effective. The first a Raptor pilot will learn that he is targeted will be when the missile gives him a french kiss. Of course, this could be countered by switching off the Raptor radar or by turning away from the missile, but first you would need to know you're targeted.
2. IR passive sensors. At long range this is the least stealthy feature of the Raptor. The Russians lead in that aspect and they routinely develop missiles with heat-seeking sensors both for short and long range. Right now the problem is this - the IRST has a limied range, up to 40-50 km. With modern Beyond Visual Range missiles having range of up to hundred miles, that's close and it may be too close.
3. Active-homing radar guided missiles. If the Raptor is forced to operate in radar-heavy environment, it may be detected by powerful mobile radars like AWACS. the data from the AWACS can be transferred to the fighter tasked with interception. The missile is shot and when it reaches a range where its own radar can see the target, it turns it on. That's the fire and forget type of missile
4. Any combination of the three. Standard Russian practice is to shoot missiles in pairs, each with a different kind of sensor.

I've probably missed a lot, but I suppose you get the general point
You see why the Russians are so intent on making "AWACS killer" missiles.

P.S. Can a radar see the "black hole" its waves create when contacting the radio-absorbing paint of a stealth fighter?

[Adar]

As IWUBPUGS said, it is seen, but the image is so small it will be lost in the multitude of other radar dots. One way it could be detected, at least theoretically, is if your radar is slaved to a very powerful processing system. In essence the idea is you see ALL images, but then after the second and third times the processing system filters away the blips that haven't moved. The problem is this - how do you know this sensor ghost you're following is the stealth fighter and not just some leaf or bird that wasn't seen until this moment? So if this system is to be effective, it will have to be trained to see and distinguish the Raptor and I don't suppose the USAF will be obliging enough to lend one

I am far from a radar expert but I do learn enough to get general understanding of how SAAB (Swedish weapons manufacturer) is solving the issue with what they call "WISCOM" (wide spectrum combat).

A stealth fighter doesn't send out a single radar signature similar to a leaf or a bird. Rather it is the total energy reflection that they like to compare to a steel marble or similar object.

With an AESA radar you transmit at a huge number of different wave lengths. A bird or other reflector would be invisible at some of them and more visible at other wave lengths. A fighter jet is however so large that you will discover reflections at a far greater number of wave lengths than you would by random chance or when encountering a smaller object.

Passive detection is also getting more and more important. IRST got a huge potential and modern data fusion and imageing techniques makes it possible to estimate range by cross referencing the angles to target from two aircrafts or guessing by the size of the detected target.

So I think your absolutely correct when comparing it to combining several views into one.

P.S. Can a radar see the "black hole" its waves create when contacting the radio-absorbing paint of a stealth fighter?

Put this link into Google translate and you'll get a rather old update on that subject: http://www.nyteknik.se/nyheter/it_te...icle233841.ece

Well, could you short-down future articles? Not everbody has time to read 4000 words essays. Anyway, if I read it correctly, the Indians got some Mig-29s during the 80's. Those were early models, and thus they suffered some inadequacies. However, why didn't the German article mention anything about poor maintenance? Maybe because the Indians had worse mechanics? Or perhaps the Germans were used to high-maintenance planes?

Actually it is 978 words which should take a reader of even mediocre ability less than a minute to read.

Furthermore the Bundeswehr also had issues with their aircrafts and had to service them a lot and at a high cost.

A 12-year service period was planned for the Luftwaffe MiG-29 aircraft. Their analysis of the aircraft concluded that it is very dependable, but the dependability was achieved at the expense of requiring short overhaul intervals. The frequent overhaul costs were high because they included failures and repairs, manpower, limited spares, and operating money. Therefore, the logistics support effort of the MiG-29's become significant for just 24 aircraft.

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The Luftwaffe inherited 30 x RD-33 engines which were all due for major overhaul. The initial aircraft servicing contract was let to the Dresden based Elbe-Flugzeugwerke Ltd. by the German MoD. 13 x additional RD-33 engines were also procured and short term recoup programs were devised. By making modifications to the turbine section to reduce operating temperatures in peacetime (equates to reduced thrust for the pilots) the Luftwaffe hoped to extend the life of the engines, reduce their support costs, as well as increase the overhaul interval from their original 350 hour prediction to 700-750 hours, depending on engine age. This innovation did not address combat demands upon the engine. Consequently, one may infer that a combat engine setting will be incorporated in the engine modification kit to facilitate higher performance under wartime conditions. For peacetime training, this lower thrust setting was be used, but it still gave the Fulcrum respectable performance.

Airframe special inspections are usually required at 800 hours. Innovations are being made by the Luftwaffe to extend the inspection interval by 300 hours and to reduce the intensity of the inspection. The Luftwaffe had to overhaul all aircraft within 4 years even with the extended interval and revised inspection work package. The result of these overhauls has been an extension of the service life to the year 2003.