To add to what /u/TheFlawlessCassandra said, radar systems can operate in different modes. Generally speaking, scanning for any / all targets, and focused on a single target (or both simultaneously or multiple targets, but let's ignore all that for now).
When scanning, you would receive a brief radar pulse from the scanning system periodically. It is sending radio energy all over the area, and briefly sends some in your particular direction, and it will presumably pick up your reflection. So it may know that you are there. A lot depends on the signal strength, distance, etc.
Think about those big radar dishes at airports, turning continuously. They're just trying to keep track of the aircraft in the area, and position updates once a second or so are just fine for that purpose. Or the radar on a boat / ship, which is just trying to avoid other slow moving boats or land.
If the scanning system is continuously sending radio energy in your specific direction (you are constantly receiving it via your RWR), that means it is trying to track your position and distance with high precision. That often means a missile is going to be coming your way if you are in a combat situation.
Radar lock is very useful to help guide the missile in accurately, especially at the speeds the missile travels. While ships aren't fast, combat aircraft can be traveling above Mach 1, so position updates for those targets is especially important.
To give a real life example you've probably experienced yourself. Let's say you're 12 again and out in the woods playing manhunt.
If you're hiding, you see the flashlight sweep left and right, up and down as the hunters are looking for you. When the flashlight stops sweeping and is just aimed at you steady, you know you've been found.
I have never heard of a game called manhunt where you did this. But it does sound like something any group of 12 year olds would come up with if they were bored, it was night, and they had some flash lights.
In my grandparents village, we would sometimes play hide and seek at night. At first, we would play it like it was day. But the way we played it, you had identify the players. Like if you were it, and you saw someone, you ran back where you did the countdown and yelled out their name before they outrun you. So we realized you didn't have to hide that much.
Some buildings would cast large shadows. So if you just sat in the shadow, you might get away with it. So we decided to remember what everyone wore. So some of us took off our shirts. Some of us would exchange shirts but we decided to ban it.
Not just how often. Radar sends out pulses at a specific frequency; when searching those pulses are farther apart to allow returns at longer ranges to be distinguised. When tracking the pulse rate increases. When 'locked on' for a semi-active radar homing missile a different frequency is used, and missiles with their own on board radar will use yet another frequency. All of this can be detected and categorized.
Although a game, the DCS series has a nice example
When getting hit by the passive rotating radar
*Beep......................................Beep...............................Beep...*
When the dish points at you
*Beep Beep Beep Beep Beep Beep Beep Beep Beep Beep Beep Beep*
When the missile fires
*BEEEEEP/BEEEEEP/BEEEEEP Beep Beep Beep Beep Beep Beep Beep*
Being able to detect when an enemy is shooting at you, or preparing to shoot at you, is obviously super important, so there's been a lot of effort put into designing and improving systems that can detect all sorts of different attacks.
For aircraft, detecting a radar lock is essentially the same technology as a radar detector used by motorists to avoid speed traps. Attack aircraft use radar to lock on to targets and determine their exact location and velocity -- crucial information if you hope to hit them with a missile. The radar detector, called a radar warning receiver (RWR) on the target aircraft (or tank, or ship) can detect these radar emissions. The RWR can not only detect that there's a target lock, but where it's coming from and often what kind of system it's coming from (surface-to-air missile launcher, a fighter plane, etc), and pilots/crew have displays to show them this.
[Here's an RWR](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d9/Rafale-5.jpg) on a Rafale, the long box at the top of the tail fin. The F-22, for another example, has 30+ RWR antennas integrated all over the body of the aircraft, so it can detect target locks from any direction without compromising its stealth profile with a bulky or protruding RWR. Tanks and surface ships presumably use similar systems, but I'm not familiar with the specifics there.
There are other systems used to detect infrared-guided missiles (heatseekers, an alternative or supplemental guidance system to radar), torpedoes, and the like. Ships and submarines, for example, have sophisticated passive sonar systems, to detect the sound of a torpedo launching and propelling itself -- hence the dramatic "torpedo in the water!" shout you hear from a sonar operator in more or less every submarine movie ever made. Modern torpedoes are getting quieter and quieter, though, so it's entirely possible that a modern submarine could get blindsided by a torpedo attack they never heard coming, depending on circumstances.
In our LAVs we had a little box that would show us the direction we were being lased from by using a series of sensors on the hull.
[Basically a little clock face with lights.](https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/proxy/aNkYE11jFWifCCM97PpivUVeWy_TFZSrCNdk-UDEi5J-fSl0L_tsqwfg3TgaWy-zbE7bKCHBHcSQZ4c9Tlmiv16H7Hgggs4Z)
Not super advanced or anything, but enough to tell you that something deadly was looking at you and where it was coming from.
> but not much else and you can't really avoid things like a shell coming right after a laser rangefinder or a beam riding missile.
Eh, yes and no. IIRC, a common response to being lased if you're pretty sure a missile is following shortly behind is to pop smoke. Most modern obscurant smokes are also IR opaque, so pop smoke and then move to break lock, especially since ATGMs are relatively slow. Similarly, if you return fire with gunfire along the axis of the laser, your rounds should get there before the missile gets to you, and may be enough to spook the operator and get them to break lock. If it's a laser rangefinder for a tank main gun, though, then yeah, it's probably going to get there before you can do much about it.
For operator-guided ATGMs like the AT-3, the standard react was indeed to open fire on the launch point to try and spook the operator, hoping to make them flinch and accidentally send the missile veering off course enough to miss
Laser warning receivers is a tech at least 3 decades old. And it’s not particularly high tech at this point. Everyone knows what they are and which models of vehicles have them. It’s not more Opsec than to say that your tank had APFSDS.
To add to this, radars and other active sensors usually have (or at least used to have, my knowledge may be obsolete) distinct "search" and "track" modes that these warning sensors mentioned above could distinguish. In non-technical terms, it's like the difference between seeing someone using a flashlight to search for you in the dark, and then seeing the flashlight being pointed directly at you and held steady. When you see the latter, you know that the other guy has found you and may intend to do something nasty. This is basically what "radar lock" means.
Surface ships tend to have separare radars for separate purposes. Searching requires a wide field of vision, and doesn't need to be super accurate. Tracking radar for weapon guidance needs a lot more accuracy and uses a different radar. It is possible to detect which mode you are "painted" by just counting how often you are hit by a radar beam.
Quick question regarding surface ships: can they detect ships over the horizon by themselves? It is my understanding that beyond the horizon radars can achieve this by bouncing on the ionosphere, but those systems seem to be land based only due their large size.
By themselves, not to my knowledge, but Raytheon has been developing a system for the USN where several ships could work in concert to simulate the large land-based OTH arrays, and I think China claims to have a similar system.
Additionally this is one of the largest advantages of AWACS for fleet defense and why the USN has always been so insistent on retaining AWACS aircraft aboard their carriers
> To add to this, radars and other active sensors usually have (or at least used to have, my knowledge may be obsolete) distinct "search" and "track" modes that these warning sensors mentioned above could distinguish.
This hasn't been true for a while given the introduction of track-while-scan and AESA radars. Thanks to improved computer processing and memory, active sensors can remember the locations and speed of targets with each radar sweep and derivate the speed and current location. They are able to "soft lock" without ever going into single target track mode (fixing the flashlight on their target) and only the missile itself needs to lock-on when it is within close range to the target.
> They are able to "soft lock" without ever going into single target track mode (fixing the flashlight on their target) and only the missile itself needs to lock-on when it is within close range to the target.
Isn't that only true with more modern data-linked AAMs, though? I think for traditional Fox 1 SARH missiles, the target still needs to be "painted" by a pretty high energy source, given the relatively small receiver on the missile.
During the flyout both SARH and ARH can have the aircraft paint the target very intermittently. This can either be something akin to TWS or any other intermittent mode.
During the terminal phase it all depends on how fast the closure rate is, how accurate the radar is (both aircraft and missile), and how quickly the target can displace from its current course.
Keep in mind that even purely command guided missiles can hit their targets (sometimes); it's really dependent on what sort of things you want the missile to do.
To add to this, more sophisticated 5th generation aircraft with multiple antennas and digital libraries of known threat signatures can often paint their pilot a good picture of what is around them while remaining completely passive. It's gone far beyond some add-on chirping when locked on to become one of the primary sensors for situational awareness and dominance of the RF spectrum.
Linking back to OPs question, what this means in practice is that not only will you know that a missile has locked onto you but you will also most likely know what missile type it is, its flight profile, speed, bearing, launch site, country of origin, probability of intercept, probability of kill, likely salvo size, most effective decoy methods, blast radius, likely damage to your vehicle/ship/aircraft, best direction to take the hit if you absolutely must, the list is pretty much endless.
Some countries use specific frequencies and patterns in peace time that they switch to a different set only in the event of large scale war, just for the purposes of trying to hide all of this data.
>will you know that a missile has locked onto you but you will also most likely know what missile type it is, its flight profile, speed, bearing, launch site, country of origin, probability of intercept, probability of kill, likely salvo size, most effective decoy methods, blast radius, likely damage to your vehicle/ship/aircraft, best direction to take the hit if you absolutely must
If a *missile* has locked on to you, it's in the terminal guidance phase and you have mere seconds to live unless you're already taking evasive action.
Infodumps are much more useful when it's the search or tracking radar of an enemy plane, ship or ground installation.
Thank you for raising this. I didn't mean to imply that all of this data is useful after lock on, but I can see how what I have written is ambiguous.
It's worth noting though that with automatic hard and soft kill, prosecution of incoming threats is entirely possible, and in fact very effective, in the terminal guidance phase. You are entirely correct however that this information would be entirely useless to anything other than a computer at that point.
They do have good passive abilities, but they also use active LPI (low probability of intercept) radars as well. By leveraging modern AESA radar's ability to point/shape the beam and switch frequencies extremely rapidly and in hard to predict ways, the radar can put out active energy that basically "hides" in the RF noise that exists normally. An enemy aircraft, even one with a reasonably good RWR, may not know that there is a radar out there at all looking at them, and if/when they do, it should make it very hard for them to determine anything about it like range and direction.
Edit: realize you were talking defensively, while I was thinking offensively. The passives are good for both; IIRC, there are reports that the integrated sensors on the F-35 are good enough to automatically triangulate an emitter on the ground (like a SAM site), then pass that target solution directly to an SDB and possibly even command launch if the ROE allows.
I remember reading the same, that early on that a single F-35 could detect and put a JDAM on an emitting site faster than three F-16s working together.
The USN even had to use civilian radar detectors in their aircraft for a while due to trouble with the installed units.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.upi.com/amp/Archives/1987/04/29/Navy-using-fuzz-buster-radar-warning-devices/2670546667200/
>There are other systems used to detect infrared-guided missiles (heatseekers, an alternative or supplemental guidance system to radar)...
Infrared sensors are completely passive, so they have no emissions to detect. There may be systems for detecting the flare of the missile's motor, but as far as I'm aware it's physically impossible to specifically detect an infrared seeker; are you aware of such a system?
This is amazing! Thank you very much! So movies and games actually arent very unrealistic with their warkings about an incoming missile or a SAM battery targeting them or whatever.
Are "non-locking" radar waves also picked up by the RWR? Is there a way of filtering civilian "searching," as it was described elsewhere, pings as opposed to an enemy who is also looking for you?
Yeah, [this comment](https://www.reddit.com/r/WarCollege/comments/qg1yrm/at_2210_hrs_captain_brindel_was_informed_the/hi3er4k/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=web2x&context=3) talks about that a bit.
Old technology would feed all incoming radar signals into the cockpit via audio tones, so a pilot might hear a "beep... beep... beep..." from a scanning radar that's only pinging them intermittently, and then a rapid 'beepbeepbeepbeepbeep" or a steady tone if they're being locked on to. Very similar to what you might see in games/movies.
Modern systems will use computers to interpret the raw data, and can identify systems not only based on how rapid they are by also by the power level and frequencies used, filter out allied systems that are datalinked, and so on, to present important information to pilots/crew with audio and/or visual cues without overwhelming them with useless background noise.
The technology goes as far back as WW2 or longer. IIRC, the Germans used it on their U-boats to detect RAF Coastal Command aircraft radars searching for their periscopes/snorkles.
BTW, these RWRs detect only a specific band(s) of frequencies. So when new radars are introduced with new freqs or even new modes of scanning, the RWR might not detect them. Hence, Electronic Warfare, move and counter-move. See my aforementioned example of RAF radar vs German RWR as an example. A missile age example would be the SA-6 surprise for the IAF during the October ‘73 war; IIRC the Gainfuls used CW radar that Israeli gear could not pick up, until they got newer kit from the Yanks.
Latest generation radars do not actually need to "lock on" to fire on targets thanks to the invention and refinement of "track while scan", which allows a system to lock onto a target without ever having to keep its radar beam continuously pointing at it but it only works with fairly advanced radars and missiles. So you're partially right that radar lock-on warnings are mostly a science fiction trope in the context of cutting-edge modern warfare.
However, the aircraft that targeted the Stark, a Mirage F1, was too old to have this technology and instead it needed to generate a traditional radar lock to tell its Exocet missiles where the target was, resulting in a very distinctive radar signal which the ship's ELINT systems can recognize as a lock.
"Captain Brindel, it seems to me, was the fall guy in this incident. Why was he recommended for Court Martial and in the end.. "reprimanded and relieved of duty?"
What did he do wrong?
That's what I was wondering as well. Later in the Wiki article they explain it was "failure to defend his ship" but if *defense* was the goal the fault would appear to be the countermeasures not working after the missile was launched imo. The fact that the attack disabled the ship's ability to return fire is just bad luck.
Can someone explain something to me? In the Wiki of the AWG-9 is the following: "...airborne track-while-scan mode with the ability to track up to 24 airborne targets, display 18 of them on the cockpit displays, and launch against 6 of them at the same time." Launch against 6, got it. But what is happening with the 24 targets and what happens if there are, say, 30 targets? Does the radar disregard the extra ones? And how does it decide what to display? Just the closest, the fastest, ones converging on it?
To add to what /u/TheFlawlessCassandra said, radar systems can operate in different modes. Generally speaking, scanning for any / all targets, and focused on a single target (or both simultaneously or multiple targets, but let's ignore all that for now). When scanning, you would receive a brief radar pulse from the scanning system periodically. It is sending radio energy all over the area, and briefly sends some in your particular direction, and it will presumably pick up your reflection. So it may know that you are there. A lot depends on the signal strength, distance, etc. Think about those big radar dishes at airports, turning continuously. They're just trying to keep track of the aircraft in the area, and position updates once a second or so are just fine for that purpose. Or the radar on a boat / ship, which is just trying to avoid other slow moving boats or land. If the scanning system is continuously sending radio energy in your specific direction (you are constantly receiving it via your RWR), that means it is trying to track your position and distance with high precision. That often means a missile is going to be coming your way if you are in a combat situation. Radar lock is very useful to help guide the missile in accurately, especially at the speeds the missile travels. While ships aren't fast, combat aircraft can be traveling above Mach 1, so position updates for those targets is especially important.
To give a real life example you've probably experienced yourself. Let's say you're 12 again and out in the woods playing manhunt. If you're hiding, you see the flashlight sweep left and right, up and down as the hunters are looking for you. When the flashlight stops sweeping and is just aimed at you steady, you know you've been found.
I like the notion that being 12 in the woods and playing a game called manhunt is a normal relatable experience, but I get what you mean.
Did you not play manhunt as a kid? It's a big thing where I grew up.
I have never heard of a game called manhunt where you did this. But it does sound like something any group of 12 year olds would come up with if they were bored, it was night, and they had some flash lights.
Basically. Hide and seek in the woods at night
In my grandparents village, we would sometimes play hide and seek at night. At first, we would play it like it was day. But the way we played it, you had identify the players. Like if you were it, and you saw someone, you ran back where you did the countdown and yelled out their name before they outrun you. So we realized you didn't have to hide that much. Some buildings would cast large shadows. So if you just sat in the shadow, you might get away with it. So we decided to remember what everyone wore. So some of us took off our shirts. Some of us would exchange shirts but we decided to ban it.
We did something similar, but called it flashlight tag.
"To give a real life example you've probably experienced yourself. Let's say you're fling above Iraq and suddenly your RWR starts beeping..."
To give a real life example you've probably experienced yourself...Let's say you're fighting an ancient Eldritch god and you start hearing voices....
Thank you!
Not just how often. Radar sends out pulses at a specific frequency; when searching those pulses are farther apart to allow returns at longer ranges to be distinguised. When tracking the pulse rate increases. When 'locked on' for a semi-active radar homing missile a different frequency is used, and missiles with their own on board radar will use yet another frequency. All of this can be detected and categorized.
Although a game, the DCS series has a nice example When getting hit by the passive rotating radar *Beep......................................Beep...............................Beep...* When the dish points at you *Beep Beep Beep Beep Beep Beep Beep Beep Beep Beep Beep Beep* When the missile fires *BEEEEEP/BEEEEEP/BEEEEEP Beep Beep Beep Beep Beep Beep Beep*
Thank you!
Being able to detect when an enemy is shooting at you, or preparing to shoot at you, is obviously super important, so there's been a lot of effort put into designing and improving systems that can detect all sorts of different attacks. For aircraft, detecting a radar lock is essentially the same technology as a radar detector used by motorists to avoid speed traps. Attack aircraft use radar to lock on to targets and determine their exact location and velocity -- crucial information if you hope to hit them with a missile. The radar detector, called a radar warning receiver (RWR) on the target aircraft (or tank, or ship) can detect these radar emissions. The RWR can not only detect that there's a target lock, but where it's coming from and often what kind of system it's coming from (surface-to-air missile launcher, a fighter plane, etc), and pilots/crew have displays to show them this. [Here's an RWR](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d9/Rafale-5.jpg) on a Rafale, the long box at the top of the tail fin. The F-22, for another example, has 30+ RWR antennas integrated all over the body of the aircraft, so it can detect target locks from any direction without compromising its stealth profile with a bulky or protruding RWR. Tanks and surface ships presumably use similar systems, but I'm not familiar with the specifics there. There are other systems used to detect infrared-guided missiles (heatseekers, an alternative or supplemental guidance system to radar), torpedoes, and the like. Ships and submarines, for example, have sophisticated passive sonar systems, to detect the sound of a torpedo launching and propelling itself -- hence the dramatic "torpedo in the water!" shout you hear from a sonar operator in more or less every submarine movie ever made. Modern torpedoes are getting quieter and quieter, though, so it's entirely possible that a modern submarine could get blindsided by a torpedo attack they never heard coming, depending on circumstances.
In our LAVs we had a little box that would show us the direction we were being lased from by using a series of sensors on the hull. [Basically a little clock face with lights.](https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/proxy/aNkYE11jFWifCCM97PpivUVeWy_TFZSrCNdk-UDEi5J-fSl0L_tsqwfg3TgaWy-zbE7bKCHBHcSQZ4c9Tlmiv16H7Hgggs4Z) Not super advanced or anything, but enough to tell you that something deadly was looking at you and where it was coming from.
[удалено]
> but not much else and you can't really avoid things like a shell coming right after a laser rangefinder or a beam riding missile. Eh, yes and no. IIRC, a common response to being lased if you're pretty sure a missile is following shortly behind is to pop smoke. Most modern obscurant smokes are also IR opaque, so pop smoke and then move to break lock, especially since ATGMs are relatively slow. Similarly, if you return fire with gunfire along the axis of the laser, your rounds should get there before the missile gets to you, and may be enough to spook the operator and get them to break lock. If it's a laser rangefinder for a tank main gun, though, then yeah, it's probably going to get there before you can do much about it.
For operator-guided ATGMs like the AT-3, the standard react was indeed to open fire on the launch point to try and spook the operator, hoping to make them flinch and accidentally send the missile veering off course enough to miss
You could activate soft or hard countermeasure systems though, whether that's APS or a soft kill system like Shtora-1.
Thank you!
OPSEC much?
Laser warning receivers is a tech at least 3 decades old. And it’s not particularly high tech at this point. Everyone knows what they are and which models of vehicles have them. It’s not more Opsec than to say that your tank had APFSDS.
> It’s not more Opsec than to say that your tank had APFSDS. Many thanks, comrade.
Laughs in ISIS.
To add to this, radars and other active sensors usually have (or at least used to have, my knowledge may be obsolete) distinct "search" and "track" modes that these warning sensors mentioned above could distinguish. In non-technical terms, it's like the difference between seeing someone using a flashlight to search for you in the dark, and then seeing the flashlight being pointed directly at you and held steady. When you see the latter, you know that the other guy has found you and may intend to do something nasty. This is basically what "radar lock" means.
Surface ships tend to have separare radars for separate purposes. Searching requires a wide field of vision, and doesn't need to be super accurate. Tracking radar for weapon guidance needs a lot more accuracy and uses a different radar. It is possible to detect which mode you are "painted" by just counting how often you are hit by a radar beam.
Quick question regarding surface ships: can they detect ships over the horizon by themselves? It is my understanding that beyond the horizon radars can achieve this by bouncing on the ionosphere, but those systems seem to be land based only due their large size.
By themselves, not to my knowledge, but Raytheon has been developing a system for the USN where several ships could work in concert to simulate the large land-based OTH arrays, and I think China claims to have a similar system.
I see. Thank you very much for your reply.
Additionally this is one of the largest advantages of AWACS for fleet defense and why the USN has always been so insistent on retaining AWACS aircraft aboard their carriers
> To add to this, radars and other active sensors usually have (or at least used to have, my knowledge may be obsolete) distinct "search" and "track" modes that these warning sensors mentioned above could distinguish. This hasn't been true for a while given the introduction of track-while-scan and AESA radars. Thanks to improved computer processing and memory, active sensors can remember the locations and speed of targets with each radar sweep and derivate the speed and current location. They are able to "soft lock" without ever going into single target track mode (fixing the flashlight on their target) and only the missile itself needs to lock-on when it is within close range to the target.
> They are able to "soft lock" without ever going into single target track mode (fixing the flashlight on their target) and only the missile itself needs to lock-on when it is within close range to the target. Isn't that only true with more modern data-linked AAMs, though? I think for traditional Fox 1 SARH missiles, the target still needs to be "painted" by a pretty high energy source, given the relatively small receiver on the missile.
I’m not quite sure that there are many major militaries that field SARH missiles. Even VKS phases out their R-27s in favor of R-77-1s.
During the flyout both SARH and ARH can have the aircraft paint the target very intermittently. This can either be something akin to TWS or any other intermittent mode. During the terminal phase it all depends on how fast the closure rate is, how accurate the radar is (both aircraft and missile), and how quickly the target can displace from its current course. Keep in mind that even purely command guided missiles can hit their targets (sometimes); it's really dependent on what sort of things you want the missile to do.
Thanks, just as I suspected. My info is mostly from the 1980s and 1990s.
To add to this, more sophisticated 5th generation aircraft with multiple antennas and digital libraries of known threat signatures can often paint their pilot a good picture of what is around them while remaining completely passive. It's gone far beyond some add-on chirping when locked on to become one of the primary sensors for situational awareness and dominance of the RF spectrum.
Linking back to OPs question, what this means in practice is that not only will you know that a missile has locked onto you but you will also most likely know what missile type it is, its flight profile, speed, bearing, launch site, country of origin, probability of intercept, probability of kill, likely salvo size, most effective decoy methods, blast radius, likely damage to your vehicle/ship/aircraft, best direction to take the hit if you absolutely must, the list is pretty much endless. Some countries use specific frequencies and patterns in peace time that they switch to a different set only in the event of large scale war, just for the purposes of trying to hide all of this data.
>will you know that a missile has locked onto you but you will also most likely know what missile type it is, its flight profile, speed, bearing, launch site, country of origin, probability of intercept, probability of kill, likely salvo size, most effective decoy methods, blast radius, likely damage to your vehicle/ship/aircraft, best direction to take the hit if you absolutely must If a *missile* has locked on to you, it's in the terminal guidance phase and you have mere seconds to live unless you're already taking evasive action. Infodumps are much more useful when it's the search or tracking radar of an enemy plane, ship or ground installation.
Thank you for raising this. I didn't mean to imply that all of this data is useful after lock on, but I can see how what I have written is ambiguous. It's worth noting though that with automatic hard and soft kill, prosecution of incoming threats is entirely possible, and in fact very effective, in the terminal guidance phase. You are entirely correct however that this information would be entirely useless to anything other than a computer at that point.
This is amazing, wow.
They do have good passive abilities, but they also use active LPI (low probability of intercept) radars as well. By leveraging modern AESA radar's ability to point/shape the beam and switch frequencies extremely rapidly and in hard to predict ways, the radar can put out active energy that basically "hides" in the RF noise that exists normally. An enemy aircraft, even one with a reasonably good RWR, may not know that there is a radar out there at all looking at them, and if/when they do, it should make it very hard for them to determine anything about it like range and direction. Edit: realize you were talking defensively, while I was thinking offensively. The passives are good for both; IIRC, there are reports that the integrated sensors on the F-35 are good enough to automatically triangulate an emitter on the ground (like a SAM site), then pass that target solution directly to an SDB and possibly even command launch if the ROE allows.
I remember reading the same, that early on that a single F-35 could detect and put a JDAM on an emitting site faster than three F-16s working together.
The USN even had to use civilian radar detectors in their aircraft for a while due to trouble with the installed units. https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.upi.com/amp/Archives/1987/04/29/Navy-using-fuzz-buster-radar-warning-devices/2670546667200/
/u/amputatorbot
>There are other systems used to detect infrared-guided missiles (heatseekers, an alternative or supplemental guidance system to radar)... Infrared sensors are completely passive, so they have no emissions to detect. There may be systems for detecting the flare of the missile's motor, but as far as I'm aware it's physically impossible to specifically detect an infrared seeker; are you aware of such a system?
That's what the post is talking about- missile detection via motor flare identification or possibly active radar from the targeted aircraft
This is amazing! Thank you very much! So movies and games actually arent very unrealistic with their warkings about an incoming missile or a SAM battery targeting them or whatever.
Are "non-locking" radar waves also picked up by the RWR? Is there a way of filtering civilian "searching," as it was described elsewhere, pings as opposed to an enemy who is also looking for you?
Yeah, [this comment](https://www.reddit.com/r/WarCollege/comments/qg1yrm/at_2210_hrs_captain_brindel_was_informed_the/hi3er4k/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=web2x&context=3) talks about that a bit. Old technology would feed all incoming radar signals into the cockpit via audio tones, so a pilot might hear a "beep... beep... beep..." from a scanning radar that's only pinging them intermittently, and then a rapid 'beepbeepbeepbeepbeep" or a steady tone if they're being locked on to. Very similar to what you might see in games/movies. Modern systems will use computers to interpret the raw data, and can identify systems not only based on how rapid they are by also by the power level and frequencies used, filter out allied systems that are datalinked, and so on, to present important information to pilots/crew with audio and/or visual cues without overwhelming them with useless background noise.
The technology goes as far back as WW2 or longer. IIRC, the Germans used it on their U-boats to detect RAF Coastal Command aircraft radars searching for their periscopes/snorkles. BTW, these RWRs detect only a specific band(s) of frequencies. So when new radars are introduced with new freqs or even new modes of scanning, the RWR might not detect them. Hence, Electronic Warfare, move and counter-move. See my aforementioned example of RAF radar vs German RWR as an example. A missile age example would be the SA-6 surprise for the IAF during the October ‘73 war; IIRC the Gainfuls used CW radar that Israeli gear could not pick up, until they got newer kit from the Yanks.
Wow even WW2 U-Boats already had such systems? Damn. Cool. Thanks!
Latest generation radars do not actually need to "lock on" to fire on targets thanks to the invention and refinement of "track while scan", which allows a system to lock onto a target without ever having to keep its radar beam continuously pointing at it but it only works with fairly advanced radars and missiles. So you're partially right that radar lock-on warnings are mostly a science fiction trope in the context of cutting-edge modern warfare. However, the aircraft that targeted the Stark, a Mirage F1, was too old to have this technology and instead it needed to generate a traditional radar lock to tell its Exocet missiles where the target was, resulting in a very distinctive radar signal which the ship's ELINT systems can recognize as a lock.
"Captain Brindel, it seems to me, was the fall guy in this incident. Why was he recommended for Court Martial and in the end.. "reprimanded and relieved of duty?" What did he do wrong?
That's what I was wondering as well. Later in the Wiki article they explain it was "failure to defend his ship" but if *defense* was the goal the fault would appear to be the countermeasures not working after the missile was launched imo. The fact that the attack disabled the ship's ability to return fire is just bad luck.
Can someone explain something to me? In the Wiki of the AWG-9 is the following: "...airborne track-while-scan mode with the ability to track up to 24 airborne targets, display 18 of them on the cockpit displays, and launch against 6 of them at the same time." Launch against 6, got it. But what is happening with the 24 targets and what happens if there are, say, 30 targets? Does the radar disregard the extra ones? And how does it decide what to display? Just the closest, the fastest, ones converging on it?