Electronic counter counter measures are really neat when you start learning about them. It’s like a big invisible cat and mouse game.
Its like playing chess 12 moves ahead, but if you accidentally play 13 moves ahead you lose.
Electronic warfare is wizard shit. It’s part of the reason SAM payloads tend to not arm until some minimum altitude; wouldn’t want it to blow up when some plane a few hundred km away can instantly recognize the launch, hijack the command uplink to the seekerhead of the missile, and convince it to fly into the ground based radar ostensibly controlling it rather than the air based radar hijacking control of it. It’s hard to believe because its actual deus ex machina shit
Since the first caveman realized that not standing quite so straight up made it harder to be seen, we’ve been in a nonstop armsrace between the badguy wanting to know where you are, and you working hard to prevent that.
EW is just the natural evolution of that principle, and we’ve gone from “Ogg look like gras!” to “can’t hit me if I blind you first” to “if we broadcast the signals we normally emit with a slight modification, it will look like we’re slightly over there and they will miss us”.
It’s more along the lines of modifying and amplifying the signal from the radar searching for you. As a very basic rundown, a radar finds things by shooting energy at them and then measuring the minute differences in that energy after it strikes the target and reflects back to the radar. Modern DRFM jamming will see the signal from the hostile radar as it strikes the aircraft, and then nearly instantaneously calculate what the return signal would look like if the aircraft had a different position/heading, then transmit that modified return at a slightly higher power back to the hostile radar. That or like, repeat that process with a few hundred different positions/headings and try to convince the hostile radar that it’s watching a swarm of you. That doesnt even touch on jamming that attacks individual hardware components like IF amplifiers or attacks software bugs/flaws known to exist in specific radars. Theres a weirdly huge overlap between the skillsets of electronic warfare and people who hunt for speed running bugs in video games
Children love to talk about individual weapons.
Amateurs talk about strategy.
Real world military leaders obsess over logistics.
two words: Pete Hegseth
Technically, ‘asshole’ is one word.
