Huh? I'd like to meet the "specialist" that didn't understand the difference between Frontal Aviation and the PVO.
Actually I think they mean specialist as in someone professionally involved in aviation in the west... not someone like yourself who is a specialist in Soviet Forces.
A friend of mines father in law used to serve on British air craft carriers in the 70s and earlier and used to work with Phantoms, and he wasn't familiar with the structure of the PVO and Frontal Aviation and Long Range Aviation etc etc that is known collectively as the Russian Air Force.
I'd like to see someone try some sort of optical seeker. Try hiding from that!
Very early model Soviet anti ship missiles came with a huge radar or an IR seeker as options for guidance for the export models. The domestic models had IR and Radar seekers fitted.
With rather more modern QWIP based IIR seekers and the sort of lock on after launch electronics needed for missiles like Morfei such designs are very likely... and with the sensor being passive it has enormous advantages over active radar homing options.
As you well know an ARH R-77 is launched on a flight path to a projected intercept point with the target. A datalink ensures if the target changes course or speed the new intercept point is calculated and if outside the detection box of the missiles ARH seeker a new intercept path is transmitted to the missile which will change course slightly to allow for the new interception point. When the missile reaches the new interception point it will activate its onboard radar seeker which will scan an area in front of the missile... acquire the target and lock on and then the missile will manouver to intercept the tracked target.
With IIR seekers the seeker can be active all the way constantly looking for targets in the IR spectrum... if the target deviates a lot from its previous course then new course data can be sent and the missile can change course to get closer to the target but with the seeker active all the way it can look for other targets the radar of the launch platform might not have detected. As it flys along it might detect the IR signature of an F-22 and compare that with the 3D IR images in its threat library and realise the F-22 is a very high priority target and override the original target and attack the new target with a two way datalink sending back information about the F-22 and where it is.
Now imagine such a seeker on a 300km range RVV-BD for export...
Newer radars created with stealth in mind could even easier see stealth planes and with much better ECCM capabilities track and shoot on stealth planes.
Indeed older radars work because stealth is designed to work against high frequency radar in the terminal seekers of missiles and high resolution tracking and search radars on small platforms.
New radars designed after stealth planes were a known entity have their designs changed to improve their performance against such threats... and will only be better because of that.
Not sure why they did that but i can think of any aircraft be a bomber or a fighter would have low level flight mode built into it , if B-2 really flies low then it runs much higher risk of being shot down by Ack Ack or Low Level SAM as its a Huge Aircraft and it is subsonic.
But that doesn't make sense... flying low reduces performance and brings you into range of smaller lighter air defence systems that are harder to detect and therefore harder to fly around.
If its stealth worked then making the B-2 fly low would be as dumb as making the U-2 fly low, or the SR-71 fly low... it takes away all the supposed benefits of the design.
The only benefit from making the B-2 fly low is to reduce the effective range of large powerful long range Ground based radar due to the curvature of the earth... now why would that be a concern?
It should also be noted that flying low requires terrain avoidance radar to be used to prevent 2 billion dollar holes being dug into the ground... such radar can be detected despite its low power.
Ben Rich , the leader of the Lockheed team that designed the F 117 had once stated that there are 6 disciplines in which an aircraft has to be stealthy in order to be considered a Stealth Aircraft : acoustic, contrail, infrared, radar, visual , smoke .
I would add emission control... no point spending lots of money making a plane stealthy and then having it talk on its network all the time... datalink emissions and terrain avoidance radar emissions can be detected and used to locate the source.
A radar that illuminates the B 2 from anywhere in the front quadrant would produce only 2 strong glint reflections , one from each wing and generating these 2 spikes concurrently is impossible.
Except with an IADS where some radar are transmitting scans while others are just listening... data could be collected and shared with a bit of processing... especially with coded radar beams so its signal can be distinguished and isolated you can easily isolate the target... with GLONASS improving in accuracy and every ground unit using it a single 360 degree scan from one large radar with a dozen radars just listening for returns in what appears to be otherwise empty air space... you could be a piece of paper and plot the positions of the radars and the angles of the returns and locate targets all over the place... a computer could do it in miliseconds... there is probably already an App for mobile phones to do it...
of most respectable air defense portals. I dont think they find stealth as particular problem given
- the type of SAM systems developed
- type of design and integration
- whole concept of VKO
Indeed you could also say that they have added passive channels for guidance for their SAMs and also added capability to engage any weapons the stealth aircraft might use against the air defence forces like HARM, in addition to introducing long wave radar and integrating them into their SAM sites... as well as the obvious decoys and jammers and defensive systems of their own like Pantsir-S1 and Tor.
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