Stealth is a Scam

“The first thing to know about stealth is, it’s a scam. It simply does not work. Radars that were built in 1942 could detect every stealth airplane in the world today. The Battle of Britain radars—not because there was anything great about them—but because they happen to have very long wavelengths. Every Battle of Britain radar would see the F-35, and the F-22 and the B-2. Now, I’m not talking as an antiquarian here because, unfortunately, the Russians picked up on this and have been building exactly those radars since World War II. They never stopped building low frequency, long wavelength radars and they have modernized them to an extraordinary extent. They sell ‘em to anybody who has cash.”– Pierre Sprey, designer of the F-16 Fighting Falcon and the A-10 Thunderbolt II, In an interview with The Fifth Estate

Introduction

Electronic Warfare is a broad subject. I’ve thought about how to write a series of articles about it. The only approach is the way one eats an 18-inch pizza—one bite at a time. So I’m going to break the topic into a number of smaller subjects. In my last article, available here, https://sofrep.com/news/electronic-warfare-101-irans-drone-strategy-against-israel-explained/, I introduced the basics of radar in the context of Iran’s April 13 attack on Israel. I showed that the media narrative, that Israel “humiliated” Iran because its air defense shot down 99% of Iran’s attack vehicles, was superficial. The reality was that Iran sacrificed its drones so Russia could map Israel’s entire air defense radar network in one night. I talked about the detailed metadata that permitted such mapping.

In this post, I will talk about WHY such mapping is important and how it is used. I will begin with certain aspects of stealth, proceed to certain aspects of radar, and then combine the two.

Pierre Sprey’s quote above is correct. Let’s talk about stealth and radar. Both topics are nuanced. Sales people and the media AVOID nuance in pursuit of a sound bite. If we want to appreciate what’s going on, we need to embrace the nuance.

Two Ways to Achieve Stealth

There are two ways to achieve stealth:

  1. Structural stealth – stealth achieved through the physical design of an aircraft
  2. Digital stealth – stealth achieved through electronic countermeasures

In this article, we will ONLY discuss structural stealth.

In 1962, Pyotr Ufimtsev, a Russian mathematician, developed a series of equations that allowed one to calculate the radar cross section (RCS) of an object based on its shape. An object’s RCS can be thought of as how big an object appears to a radar at a given distance. An F-16, for example, may have an RCS the size of a limo while an F-117 has an RCS the size of a marble.

The point is that both are visible to radar, but the F-16 is much more visible than the F-117. The F-117 can approach the radar much more closely before it is detected.