Can stealth be beaten...??

Many threads have been made about stealth during these last couple of weeks. and I thought that I would write my own post, about beating stealth. As we all know stealth is the new "must have" for modern fighters. The Russians have came up with their Su-47, the Americans the F-22. Of course many other planes also posess this great talent, only to name few the F-117, the B-2, the F-35 and a lot more unknown aircrafts. Now, I was wondering about this, is stealth really that good. If we think about this our first reaction would propably be "Yeah, it keeps away the enemies, do the fact that they can't see us". But when we think about it closer, at least in my opinion, stealth isn't that good. Of course it keeps the radar wawes away, but with wich cost... In my opinion stealth does take away many points from a planes maneuverability, just becasue the engineers have to design the plane always keeping the fact in their mind to keep the plane stealthy (and not maneuverable). but this thread isn't really about if stealth is good or bad, this thread is made to looka t different options how stealth can be beaten.

Stealt tecnology isn't that new, the first stealth planes that we know of (the F-117) flew its first comabt flight in 1989. And it had been on the drawing board for a while before that. The Americans wanted to keep this project very secret. It was planned in one of the most secret bases in whole America, the Area 51. After this more and more stealth planes saw daylight, the B-2, the, Su-47, the F-22, teh F-35... And many more...

Stealth soon became a "must have" in fighters. Now, I was just wondering how stealth can be beaten, if it can... I have heard of some "advanced" radars, and planes like the Tu-204... how do tehy actually work, and can they beat the Raptor...

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The RUssian Tu-204

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Stealth detection???

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Stealthy design

Of course stealth can be beaten.
Stealth only adds to mission effectiveness, lethality, and a better chance for survival.






seekerof

OK... So it can be beaten... HOW...????

By spotting the aircraft and sending some planes up to kill it.

Current stealth techniologies still absorb and deflect radar, I think to be totally stealthy, you'd somehow have to 'bend' the radar beams around an aircraft.
There is a lot of speculation about newer stealth technologies, like Plasma stealth. According to the Russians, they claim to have that technology. (Source: Russia Develops Stealth Aircraft Using Plasma Screen Technology).

The B-2 Stealth bomber's leading wing edge is charged with millions of volts (search the ATS forum for threads about this), some think this makes it more stealthy...

Anyway, here is an interesting article on how the Serbs managed to shoot down an F-117, back in '99:

www.strategypage.com...



[edit on 12-14-2005 by Zion Mainframe]

AWESOME ZION...

But Zanzibar... It can't be that easy... what if you can't see the plane...

Try this [linked below], read under 'Limitations':
Stealth Technology







seekerof

Stealth aircraft like the F-117 and the B-2 are not invisable to radar. What has been done is to reduce their Radar Cross Section (RCS) to allow them to get closer to the radar before they are detected. One of the ways that I know of to defeat stealth is to improve the filters on the radar. Right now military radars use computers to remove returns with certain characteristics. In the 1980's a German by the name of Mathias Rust flew a Cessna 152 from West Germany and landed in Red Square in Moscow. The main reason that he was able to do this was that Soviet defence radars in the area were programmed to ignore returns with a ground speed of under 140 miles per hour. Rust's plane never showed because his top speed was around 120 miles per hour. If the filters on radars could be improved to look for small returns moving at fairly high speeds it may be possible to track stealth aircraft. Let's face it there isn't a bird on the planet that can do 300 mph.

[edit on 14-12-2005 by JIMC5499]

Then the stealth has worked. It usually does anyways, most missions are done at night or at really high altitudes.

Of course stealth can be beaten - whether it can be beaten with current systems is a different story.

I would have phased the original question of this thread to "What can be done to reduce the effectiveness of stealth technology", because trying to "beat" stealth makes it seem as if this was a black & white problem, which it isn't.

Any aitcraft can be stealthly, depending on the variables. A B-52 is very stealthy....to an I-band radar over 500 miles away. Conversely, a B-2 can be easily seen.....to an L-band radar at 10 km. It is all a matter of perspective...and variables such as range, elevation, RCS, output power, frequency, waveform, SNR, etc.

Stealth is not perfect, and it will only be a matter of time before practical CLO radars will be readily available to most nations. However, that time is not now, nor is it likely to be soon. Thus, the US continues to develop LO aircraft (that do not substantially sacrifice performance) because, until further notice, wel will be able to continue to exploit our enemies lack of effective CLO systems.

Mitigating stealth comes down to 3 basic physics problems:

1) Output Power. If you put enough watts of RF into the sky - you will get a return. Radars with peak output powers of over 500kW can detect stealth targets at appreciable ranges. The problem is that these systems are really, really big. If it is a land site, well then, say good-bye thanks to EW and ARH attacks. The basic weakness of big land sites - they cannot move quickly, if at all, and therefore can be planned against and countered. To make these tranmitters mobile, you must have state-of-the-art solid state transmit amplifiers and cooling, which most countries currently do not possess. High amounts of output power also produce alot of noise and ground clutter, which must be identified, filtered and rejected, which leads to.....

2) Signal Processing Power. In order to pick a stealth target out of the background noise and clutter at medium and long ranges, you must have a signal processor that has double and triple-digit GFLOPS horsepower. And that is just the start. To effectively run that processor, you will need precise and effective noise reduction and clutter rejection algorithms that can sort the wheat from the chaff. Again, not a problem for large land sites, and maybe ships, but its hard to put a CPU (and its associated power and cooling) in an aircraft or mobile system, unless you are a world leader in miniaturized electronic systems.

3) Bistatic Arrays. Radar signals bouncing of your target and away from your receiver? Then move your receiver away from your transmitter. Bistatic arrays help defeat the problem of runaway radar returns, but...bistatic arrays are usually big and fixed systems that are vulnerable to countermeasures. The question is: who can produce a radar that is both bistatic and highly mobile?

The effectiveness of stealth can be reduced. I have personal knowledge of two different systems that utilize one or more of these concepts, and both are effective in their CLO mission. As far as I know, no other country has come close to replicating these systems and/or their effectiveness. Not yet, anyways......

Ok, sounds good... But do you agree with me that stealth takes away "points" from maneuverability...??

I would say 'sure,' but not in all cases.
The Raptor may be an exception, IMHO.





seekerof

Well im not sure if stealth can be beaten by technology, though I remember the First Gulf War when I beleive that some of the stealth aircraft were used. Apparently Weather affects the effectiveness and if its raining there is readable if very patchy return for a good operator with normal radar. (Assuming that the plane is below the clouds and in the rain)

Regards

Elf

OK... But how could tehn USA repell a wave of stealth fighters...???

They would probably scramble their stealth fighters.

But I doubt they would even make it to US airspace, they would be taken down by ships or maybe another nation way before.

Though, I guess some stealth aircraft could 'sneak' through Canada and into the USA, but, considering there are no good tactical targets there, it would be hopeless.

The US (at the moment) are practically unbeatable without nuclear weapons.

Conventional radars will pick up stealth aircraft. However, the key is the distance that the radars will pick it up at. That is the key to its effectivness. Instead of say overlaping radar bubbles in an air defence system a stealth aircraft detection range means that there are gaps in those bubbles and the aircraft can fly around them or get close enough to destroy the radar and continue on its mission.

In responce to a stealth fighter attack on the US.

Assuming that a country had a signifigant stealth force, the US would face the same issues as any other country in repelling such an attack. However, a country would have to have signifigant assests in close to the US to acomplish this and even the B-2's require foreward based tankers when staging from the CONUS.

One of the main facets of the AESA radars is to pick up a far more likely target that faces the US, that of stealthy cruise missiles.

Stealth probably is not the most “must have” technology today; network centric combat technologies are.

The strength of radar stealth is that even as anti-stealth technology develops, it will take years before the advantages of stealth can be negated by most of the worlds air forces. You can’t just buy anti-stealth weapons and deploy them over night.

It’s not just its ability to reduce detection by long range surveillance radars, it’s its relative immunity to most operational fighters basic targeting radars and the radars used in missile seekers –it doesn’t matter if you know the stealth is there, if your active radar missiles (AMRAAM et al) can’t lock on, and your missile’s proximity fuses don’t work, it makes actually fighting the stealth much harder. Even when countries get general stealth detecting technologies, it’ll still take them years to develop such technologies to the point of deploying operational missile seeker heads which can see stealth (short range IR aside). Stealth is worth it.

A single F-117 was defeated by an old long-wave radar. But who really knows if that would defeat other stealth aircraft. And F-117s might have been improved since then. There has been some chatter by Russian members of low-frequency radar being able to detect even the best stealth. But the fact is there has been absolutely no proof of that happening.

The F-22 for example isn't that stealthy when view by radar from above, below, and maybe behind. But from head-on, and from the side, its very stealthy.

[edit on 15-12-2005 by NWguy83]

OK... But what makes a plane stealthy then... What kind of shapes does it require...??

[edit on 15-12-2005 by Figher Master FIN]