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These aircraft are certainly not built to only defeat air to air threats. They are also designed to survive and defeat ground to air threats. Stealth is a physics based technology. There is no way getting around physics. IR is a terrible air search and track system. This was obvious back in the 1930s when R.V. Jones’s work was put on the back burner and R.A. Watson Watt’s RDF given the priority. Nothing has changed since to counter these basic physical parameters: IR radiation dissipates in the atmosphere several significant degrees faster than radio waves, even if you detect an IR signature you just get a bearing and not a range and like any passive system immensely vulnerable to false positives. Even if you can network together a huge field of IR or other passive sensors in order to track LO aircraft you are simply creating a highly vulnerable system. Ordinarily a ground based air defence system that has large numbers of networked nodes is much harder to defeat than a single radar station working on its own. But when most of these anti-stealth *proposals* relay on all of these networked nodes working together in order to detect and track a LO aircraft it becomes much easier to defeat. Because you only have to knock out a few nodes and the rest becomes worthless in tracking the LO aircraft. How anyone is going to create a working air defence system against a threat sophisticated enough to field LO aircraft based on IR and other passive detection systems without a huge dose of wishful thinking is beyond me.
These aircraft are certainly not built to only defeat air to air threats. They are also designed to survive and defeat ground to air threats.
Stealth is a physics based technology. There is no way getting around physics. IR is a terrible air search and track system. This was obvious back in the 1930s when R.V. Jones’s work was put on the back burner and R.A. Watson Watt’s RDF given the priority. Nothing has changed since to counter these basic physical parameters: IR radiation dissipates in the atmosphere several significant degrees faster than radio waves, even if you detect an IR signature you just get a bearing and not a range and like any passive system immensely vulnerable to false positives.
Even if you can network together a huge field of IR or other passive sensors in order to track LO aircraft you are simply creating a highly vulnerable system. Ordinarily a ground based air defence system that has large numbers of networked nodes is much harder to defeat than a single radar station working on its own. But when most of these anti-stealth *proposals* relay on all of these networked nodes working together in order to detect and track a LO aircraft it becomes much easier to defeat. Because you only have to knock out a few nodes and the rest becomes worthless in tracking the LO aircraft.
How anyone is going to create a working air defence system against a threat sophisticated enough to field LO aircraft based on IR and other passive detection systems without a huge dose of wishful thinking is beyond me.
