Why isn't Eurofighter getting stealth?

Originally posted by roniii259
since the retirement of the ef-111 advark, the usaf does not have any jamming aircraft. Ehy dont they buy ea-18g's like the us navy?

I heard, in future some JSF versions will be used as jamming aircraft is this true?

Originally posted by longbow


I heard, in future some JSF versions will be used as jamming aircraft is this true?

They would need to make them bigger, or the jamming equipment a lot smaller.

'Stealth', be it via shaping, materials, or 'black boxes', simply reduces RCS, it doesn't eliminate it. Against older, lower resolution, slow scan radars this would have been enough (the Mosquito from the 40's, the Blackbird from the 60's) So today, an F-22 has the RCS of a vulture (or less), but radar and detection technologies can - and are - advancing faster than new aircraft programmes these days...

Soon, advanced radars and intelligent signal processors will be able to filter down to detect that particular 'vulture' supercruising at 1.4M, and thus all that expensive Cold War-geared effort will have been wasted. Even right now, a pop-up radar aimed in the right direction, or several operating in unison can spot any 'stealth' plane, as demonstrated by Serbia during Allied Force. F-22 / F-117 etc are optimised toward certain radar threat directions, and have weak RCS spots. Mission planners know it, and try to route accordingly, even against the aging radars of Iraq.

But then there's other detection efforts too, like China's to develop systems to detect 'holes' in the backround noise in the sky. Counter-noise EW gear might help, but shaped stealth alone will offer no camouflage to such technologies.

The conclusion has to be that some stealth helps to some degree, but that shaped stealth must be weighed between cost-effectiveness of implementation and warload / dynamic compromise versus speed of obscelesence and greater development cost. The future of stealth may one day not be in trying to hide at all, but simply to be a black-box to hinder the terminal phase of radar-guided AAMs' / SAM's.

To every measure there will be a counter-measure, and so it goes...

The Raptor will be at high alttitude, so the effects are negated