F-35 vs Russian Air Defence

The F-35 Joint Strike Fighter—the jet that the Pentagon is counting on to be the stealthy future of its tactical aircraft—is having all sorts of shortcomings. But the most serious may be that the JSF is not, in fact, stealthy in the eyes of a growing number of Russian and Chinese radars. Nor is it particularly good at jamming enemy radar. Which means the Defense Department is committing hundreds of billions of dollars to a fighter that will need the help of specialized jamming aircraft that protect non-stealthy—“radar-shiny,” as some insiders call them—aircraft today.

These problems are not secret at all. The F-35 is susceptible to detection by radars operating in the VHF bands of the spectrum. The fighter’s jamming is mostly confined to the X-band, in the sector covered by its APG-81 radar. These are not criticisms of the program but the result of choices by the customer, the Pentagon.

To suggest that the F-35 is VHF-stealthy is like arguing that the sky is not blue—literally, because both involve the same phenomenon. The late-Victorian physicist Lord Rayleigh gave his name to the way that electromagnetic radiation is scattered by objects that are smaller than its wavelength. This applies to the particles in the air that scatter sunlight, and aircraft stabilizers and wingtips that are about the same meter-class size as VHF waves.

The counter-stealth attributes of VHF have been public knowledge for decades. They were known at the dawn of stealth, in 1983, when the MIT’s Lincoln Laboratory ordered a 150-foot-wide radar to emulate Russia’s P-14 Oborona VHF early-warning system. Lockheed Martin’s Fort Worth division—makers of the F-35—should know about that radar: they built it.

Making a plane VHF-stealthy starts with removing the target’s tails, as on the B-2 bombers. But we did not know how to do that on a supersonic, agile airplane (like the F-35 is supposed to be) when the JSF specifications were written.


Neither did the technology to add broadband-active jamming to a stealth aircraft exist in 1995. Not only did stealth advocates expect jamming to fade away, but there was an obvious and (at the time) insoluble problem: To use jamming you have to be certain that the radar has detected you. Otherwise, jamming is going to reveal your presence and identify you as a stealth aircraft, since the adversary can see a signal but not a reflection.

We can be sure that onboard jamming has not been added to the F-35 since. Had the JSF requirements been tightened by one iota since the program started, its advocates would be blaming that for the delays and overruns.


What the JSF does have is a jamming function—also known as “electronic attack,” or EA, in militaryese—in the radar. It also has an expendable radar decoy—BAE Systems’ ALE-70. Both are last-ditch measures to disrupt a missile engagement, not to prevent tracking.

JSF’s planners, in the mid-1990s, were close to correct when they calculated that low-band stealth and limited EA, combined with passive electronic surveillance for situational awareness, would be adequate at service entry. But they expected that the F-35 would reach squadrons in 2010, and China’s military modernization was barely imaginable.

The threats of the late 2010s will be qualitatively different. Old VHF radars could be dealt with by breaking the kill chain between detection and tracking: they did not provide good enough cueing to put analog, mechanically scanned tracking radars on to the target. Active electronically scanned array (AESA), high-power VHF radars and decimeter- and centimeter-wave trackers are more tenacious foes.

Last August, at an air show near Moscow, I talked to designers of a new, highly mobile counterstealth radar system, now being delivered to the Russian armed forces. Its centerpiece was a 100-foot-wide all-digital VHF AESA, but it also incorporated powerful higher-frequency radars that can track small targets once the VHF radar has detected them. More recently, however, it has emerged that the U.S. Navy is worried because new Chinese warships carry the Type 517M VHF search radar, which its maker says is an AESA.

None of this is to say that stealth is dead, but it is not reasonable to expect that the cat-and-mouse game of detection and evasion in air combat has stopped, or that it ever will. EA and stealth still do not coexist very comfortably on the same platform, but offboard EA and stealth are synergistic: the smaller the target, the less jamming power is needed to mask it.

But the threat’s demonstrated agility drives home the lesson that there is no one winning move in the radar game. Excessive reliance on a single-point design is not a good idea, and using fictitious secrecy to quash the debate is an even worse one.

magnumcromagnon wrote:Just for laughs people, are the U.S. stronk crew actually this delusional lol??? There's F-35 Lightning II promotional videos demonstrating that they can defeat S-300V4/Antey-2500 easily lol...



...At the 2:42 mark. Can anyone spot all the inaccuracies in the F-35 vs S-300V4 scenario lol?

medo wrote:

magnumcromagnon wrote:Just for laughs people, are the U.S. stronk crew actually this delusional lol??? There's F-35 Lightning II promotional videos demonstrating that they can defeat S-300V4/Antey-2500 easily lol...



...At the 2:42 mark. Can anyone spot all the inaccuracies in the F-35 vs S-300V4 scenario lol?

Russia had an answer more than a decade ago. I remember, that I was reading at the end of the nineties or in the beginning of 2000, that Russian PVO made tests with Orion ELINT complex and Buk-M1-2, where Orion complex triangulate any source of aircraft emission in enough small box, that Buk-M1-2 could engage the target without using its own radars. Any emission from F-35, being radar, data ling, communications, IFF, TACAN, etc, could very precisely triangulate its position with Orion or other similar ELINT complexes without even noticing in F-35.

magnumcromagnon wrote:

medo wrote:

magnumcromagnon wrote:Just for laughs people, are the U.S. stronk crew actually this delusional lol??? There's F-35 Lightning II promotional videos demonstrating that they can defeat S-300V4/Antey-2500 easily lol...



...At the 2:42 mark. Can anyone spot all the inaccuracies in the F-35 vs S-300V4 scenario lol?

Russia had an answer more than a decade ago. I remember, that I was reading at the end of the nineties or in the beginning of 2000, that Russian PVO made tests with Orion ELINT complex and Buk-M1-2, where Orion complex triangulate any source of aircraft emission in enough small box, that Buk-M1-2 could engage the target without using its own radars. Any emission from F-35, being radar, data ling, communications, IFF, TACAN, etc, could very precisely triangulate its position with Orion or other similar ELINT complexes without even noticing in F-35.

Interesting point. The problems that I saw in the video was:

1.) The absence of effective SHORAD systems. No Tunguska, no Tor, no Pantsir.

2.) The absence of ground based electronic warfare systems.

3.) The max range of AN/APG-81 AESA of the F-35 is 150 km, while max missile engagement range of Antey-2500 (export) is 350 km, and the domestic S-300V4 is 400km, almost 3 times greater range than the F-35's AESA radar.

4.) The power emitted from the S-300V4 battery is probably several times greater than that of the AN/APG-81, so it's extremely unlikely that the F-35 could jam the S-300V4.

...That's just from the atop of my head.

VladimirSahin wrote:F-35 is not a joke guys... Russia doesn't have any programs near its design... Its one of the most capable VTOL 5th generation flying practice target for Russian anti air defense But seriously, To what targets and at what range is the F-35s jamming able?

moskit wrote:An F-35B just carried out a remarkable test where its sensors spotted an airborne target, sent the data to an Aegis Ballistic Missile Defense site, and had the land-based outpost fire a missile to defeat the target — thereby destroying an airborne adversary without firing a single shot of its own. This development simultaneously vindicates two of the US military’s most important developments: The F-35 and the Naval Integrated Fire Control Counterair Network (NIFC-CA).Essentially, the NIFC-CA revolutionizes naval targeting systems by combining data from a huge variety of sensors to generate targeting data that could be used to defeat incoming threats. So now with this development, an F-35 can pass targeting data to the world’s most advanced missile defense system, an Aegis site, that would fire it’s own missile, likely a SM-6, to take out threats in the air, on land, or at sea. This means that an F-35 can stealthily enter heavily contested enemy air space, detect threats, and have them destroyed by a missile fired from a remote site, like an Aegis land site or destroyer, without firing a shot and risking giving up it’s position. The SM-6, the munition of choice for Aegis destroyers, is a 22-foot long supersonic missile that can seek out, maneuver, and destroy airborne targets like enemy jets or incoming cruise or ballistic missiles. The SM-6’s massive size prohibits it from being equipped to fighter jets, but now, thanks to the integration of the F-35 with the NIFC-CA, it doesn’t have to.
Realistic? Or just another hoax from from the yanks? Please provide a convincing scenario. Thank u

moskit wrote:An F-35B just carried out a remarkable test where its sensors spotted an airborne target, sent the data to an Aegis Ballistic Missile Defense site, and had the land-based outpost fire a missile to defeat the target — thereby destroying an airborne adversary without firing a single shot of its own. This development simultaneously vindicates two of the US military’s most important developments: The F-35 and the Naval Integrated Fire Control Counterair Network (NIFC-CA).Essentially, the NIFC-CA revolutionizes naval targeting systems by combining data from a huge variety of sensors to generate targeting data that could be used to defeat incoming threats. So now with this development, an F-35 can pass targeting data to the world’s most advanced missile defense system, an Aegis site, that would fire it’s own missile, likely a SM-6, to take out threats in the air, on land, or at sea. This means that an F-35 can stealthily enter heavily contested enemy air space, detect threats, and have them destroyed by a missile fired from a remote site, like an Aegis land site or destroyer, without firing a shot and risking giving up it’s position. The SM-6, the munition of choice for Aegis destroyers, is a 22-foot long supersonic missile that can seek out, maneuver, and destroy airborne targets like enemy jets or incoming cruise or ballistic missiles. The SM-6’s massive size prohibits it from being equipped to fighter jets, but now, thanks to the integration of the F-35 with the NIFC-CA, it doesn’t have to.
Realistic? Or just another hoax from from the yanks? Please provide a convincing scenario. Thank u

moskit wrote:An F-35B just carried out a remarkable test where its sensors spotted an airborne target, sent the data to an Aegis Ballistic Missile Defense site, and had the land-based outpost fire a missile to defeat the target — thereby destroying an airborne adversary without firing a single shot of its own. This development simultaneously vindicates two of the US military’s most important developments: The F-35 and the Naval Integrated Fire Control Counterair Network (NIFC-CA).Essentially, the NIFC-CA revolutionizes naval targeting systems by combining data from a huge variety of sensors to generate targeting data that could be used to defeat incoming threats. So now with this development, an F-35 can pass targeting data to the world’s most advanced missile defense system, an Aegis site, that would fire it’s own missile, likely a SM-6, to take out threats in the air, on land, or at sea. This means that an F-35 can stealthily enter heavily contested enemy air space, detect threats, and have them destroyed by a missile fired from a remote site, like an Aegis land site or destroyer, without firing a shot and risking giving up it’s position. The SM-6, the munition of choice for Aegis destroyers, is a 22-foot long supersonic missile that can seek out, maneuver, and destroy airborne targets like enemy jets or incoming cruise or ballistic missiles. The SM-6’s massive size prohibits it from being equipped to fighter jets, but now, thanks to the integration of the F-35 with the NIFC-CA, it doesn’t have to.
Realistic? Or just another hoax from from the yanks? Please provide a convincing scenario. Thank u

hoom wrote:Cool, re-found the report I was looking for via a link off that article
https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/3035572-DOT-amp-E-AF-IOC-Memo.html
Worth a read.

a gun that couldn't hit the broad side of a barn

In addition, flight sciences testing of the F-35A recently revealed that the small doors that open when the gun shoots induce a yaw (i.e. sideslip), resulting in gun aiming errors that exceed accuracy specifications.
As a result, additional software changes to the flight control laws, very late in the flight test program, may be needed to cancel out the yaw when the gun doors are open.
...
The most recent program office schedule estimates that gun modifications will not be completed on the OT&E aircraft until 2020.