So Aurora programme has been one of those things that you know
appears every now and then. Nobody quite knows what it
means. Aurora could easily have been a
series of developmental programmes and ended up in an
aircraft with an RQ designation. We flat out don't know and
nobody is going to know for another 40 plus years.
So I would suggest that that when the SR-71 was retired,
there was probably, almost certainly a black research
programme on overflight type reconnaissance.
And then we don't know how it went, we don't know how it
branched, but we might very well have seen the products.
W Welcome back 10th century. You're looking really pensive.
That's a sort of far off gaze. It's almost as though you're
getting ready for for combat. I have no idea what I look for
when I'm getting ready for combat, but I'm probably not,
not like this. I was younger.
But no less handsome. Oh, absolutely true.
OK, for the audience at home, this is a new series that star
Baby and I conceived. I think I was going to say it
was a drunken conversation. I I think I was drunk.
We were having a conversation on the phone.
It was over Christmas this year and this idea came up that we
could actually there before that even I think we had discussed
the idea that we'd take things that were difficult for people
to get their head around or that were often misconceived or
misunderstood. So what's the difference between
Seed, What's Wild Weasel? You know, that's the, I think
that was probably the genesis for that conversation.
And we said what we should do is you should put together little
presentations that go through and explain those things from
the, from the operator's point of view.
And then I think that then turned into, in this
conversation where I was probably a bit drunk, the idea
that we would have you come on and just smash or debunk various
myths and legends and things that you hear said about
military aviation and, and that that would make for a good
episode or good series. So that's what we're trying to
do today. So we've already gone out and
spoken to the subscribers to Temp Century.
There's, that's the people who go to tempcentury.com and take
out a subscription, a monthly plan, a plan which I think is
fantastic value for money. And if for no other reason then
now they get the opportunity to ask you questions and then and
then hear you answer those questions for anybody who's
listening and thinking, well, what about the normal episodes?
So this is going to just be released when we record it as
and when we record them in terms of the scheduling, if this comes
out in the middle of a week or something like that, and I've
got another guest who's got another couple of episodes to
come out, don't worry about it. Those will still come out.
This is not going to debunk or it's not going to be displace,
displace the other guys or anything like that, but they'll
just think of these as little Easter eggs, even if it's called
Easter. So is there anything else that I
need to say? No, I did have this idea.
I did have this idea that while you were giving your debunking
discussion, I'd go on to ChatGPT and then get it to offer a
counter point of view. But I'm not set up to do that
tonight and I want to try and get these to an hour.
So I won't do that this time. Might try and do that next time.
Could be quite interesting. Because that would be stupid.
It would also require effort and we all know this is a very low
effort enterprise. So all right, all right, so
let's just ask the first question then.
So, so I did go out. I have got a bunch of questions.
So Star Baby for the transparency to the audience.
You've seen the first one or two of them, I think, but you
haven't seen any of the others for for technical reasons, not
because we try to hide it or keep it spicy or anything like
that, but just for various technical reasons.
I haven't been able to get that list to you, but the first
question was from Kinetic Sand and his starting question was in
fact his only question was super low frequency and passive radars
are the death knell for stealth aircraft.
OK, so no, they're not. Here's the the issue with low
frequency radar. So let's those are two different
things. So let's let's tackle them one
at a time. The 1st is that the lower the
frequency, the less effective our approaches at stealth can
be. And and so 90% of what we call
radio frequency low observability, commonly known as
stealth is shaping. You can talk about radar
absorbing materials all you like, but physics wise it's
shaping. And so the F117, for example,
was designed for the threat radars at the time, which tended
to be fairly high in frequency and it skated through lower
frequency radars because nobody knew it existed or how to deal
with it until Zoltan Dani shot 1 down with an essay three over
Serbia, having used a spoon rest, which is a VHF acquisition
radar to help him along. So the challenge with this is
even if you had a perfect black body and a black body is
something that absorbs all radiation.
So in this case, a perfect radio black body, if your wavelength
is longer than the body, you will get backscatter.
It's a it, it, it, this is a kind of scattering.
You know, we talk about, we talk about radar reflections, but
also the term is backscatter light does the same thing, light
scatters. And so a lot of the the
technology or the the physics going around light scattering
was discovered in the 1880s. This is not new.
And in the 60s a lot more attention was being take.
It was being paid to signature reduction or enhancement
depending on what you needed in the radio frequency ranges.
So any time you have a wavelength that is longer than
your object, you're going to get some degree of backscatter.
That's why perversely when you're dealing with low
frequency radars cause lower frequency the longer the
wavelength. It's an inverse relationship.
The IT is easier to make AB2 stealthy than it is to make an
F35 stealthy. It's just physics.
And what you worry about is not so much just the airframe, but
all the features on the airframe.
And that's why the B2 is such a marvel of shaping, because it
doesn't have a lot of smaller features.
If you look at the 117, there were a lot of techniques used to
to reduce the effect of their smaller features.
That's still a marvellous stealth aircraft even today.
But the lower your frequency, the less your positional
accuracy is because the pulse width and the the radar, what we
call the radar resolution cell, which is defined by the width of
the beam and the length of the pulse, it's a 3 dimensional.
As you get lower in frequency, those cells get bigger.
So if I have a radar resolution cell that is 3 miles long and
three miles wide and, you know, 3 miles deep or high, that's
great. So I get a, a return out of the
middle of that. What am I going to do about it?
And so that's one of the challenges is that we know from
1:17 because Sultan Donnie has debriefed everybody in their dog
that he used a VHF radar to detect the 117.
Also they were operating, he claims in somewhat of a
predictive fashion. So that's low frequency it's and
my answer, I keep returning to this, low altitude always works.
It doesn't matter how big your radar cross section is if the
radar does not have line of sight to the target.
And that's what we've seen consistently in Ukraine since
2022 is extreme low altitude operations by both sides in
terms of passive, passive coherent location, right?
So passive detection systems need to have something to
detect. So your normal passive detection
system, stealth aircraft, if it's not emitting, you're not
detecting it. When you talk about passive
coherent location or something like that, what you're really
looking at is 1 transmitter. That is not the same place as
your receiver. And you can even use ad hoc
transmitters. There's, there's been plenty of
university papers that say you can use TV towers, radio towers
and those broadcasts and you just collect them passively.
And in fact, there have been experiments done at
international airports and major airports just setting up a
billboard size receiver and looking for air traffic.
The problem with that is one of the problems is when you get to
that low of frequency and you're using ad hoc signals instead of
signals on purpose, is that those are ground hugging
signals. Cell phone signals, radio
towers, TV's, they're relatively ground hugging.
You get up to altitude and the signals aren't propagating that
way. They're propagating along the
ground, so you just stay above that particular threat zone.
And they are not a threat to stealth aircraft either.
So if we look at low observable aircraft, I think we
consistently see that they're not invisible, but they don't
need to be. So they just need to be low
enough observable that they are hard to detect, or that they can
only be detected too late for it to matter, or they can only be
detected by systems that cannot localise them.
Any one of a number of things, and it still does its job.
So there is no Romulan cloaking device.
And that's Romulan by the way, not Klingon.
Romulan sold it to the Klingons in the Original series, but the
there is no method of doing that.
You just make something low observable, and you can make
things very low observable indeed with shaping.
And so like anything else in aviation and military aviation,
there's a counter and there is another counter to the counter,
and there's another counter to the counter to the counter, and
that goes on endlessly. But there are no easy answers
one way on one side or the other.
So his question was specifically then around the radar side of
things, obviously from the way he phrased it.
But could you talk a little bit about other dimensions of labs
of ability then? I'm thinking you have visual
labs of ability. You have, you know, it's a
multi, it's a multi spectral domain.
So you have visual, you have infrared, you have ultraviolet.
I think that those are different, aren't they?
So, or they're different parts of it, But, but those are all
things that you could also use. And I, and I know that if you're
talking about and intercepting A strategic bomber like AB2, you
know, by the time you've got, you can see it visually.
If you're a, a surface to air missile system or whatever, then
that probably it's too late. But if you were looking at the
application of fighter to fighter combat, let's say you're
looking at an F35. There is that video, I know you,
you're not going to talk about Iran, but there's that video
that purports to show an F35 being hit by a, a, a missile by
an Iranian infrared surface to missile some description and it
has a big IR plume coming out of it.
Is there? So even if you were said to say,
OK, from a from an RF point of view, LO is great.
Do are the strengths in those other parts of the multi
spectral domain equally as good or do they somewhat let the side
down? So here's your problem.
And again, it gets down to physics.
You're dealing with jet engines. Jet engines produce heat.
The heat has to go somewhere. They expel hot air out the back
end. There's not a lot you can do
about that, but there are things that you can do to make you less
targetable. So the original infrared guided
missiles were plume trackers because different parts of your
hot jet show up in different portions of the spectrum.
So your hot air shows up in one portion of the spectrum, hot
metal from like on your leading edges as you're tearing through
the airframe and friction heats you up, that's another portion.
And so there are ways to to kind of try and reduce your signature
by like distributing heat in a different way.
And the, the example I can give you is that, you know, if you
looked at the 1:17 and you look at the exhaust, those are flat,
narrow exhausts. There is no afterburner.
It's designed to mix with turbulent aeroplane or air, air
flow behind the aircraft. So you're dealing with hot air
mixing with cold air. And the exhausts are on the top
of the aeroplane, so you couldn't see them from below.
So all those were means of reducing the infrared signature.
Practical. There is still an infrared
signature. There is still a visual
signature. So I talk thermal infrared
because that's in emitter, right?
Something gets hot and it emits infrared energy.
But if you're looking in the visual spectrum, that's
reflected energy, right? If the sun's not out, you don't
see AB two, OK. If the sun is out, you see this
big black Batwing, which looks great at air shows, but you
don't see AB2 going to the target area at daytime because
it's going to be relatively easy to pick up.
The Royal Air Force's Hawk T2 Mark Twos, the trainers that fly
at a valley in Wales, they're painted gloss black.
Why is that? Because it's a high visibility
paint scream. And I can tell you from flying
low level in Wales and seeing one of those guys, you know,
suddenly appear, that black moving dot against the Welsh
countryside shows up like a champ.
So you can't make everything perfect, but you can use you.
Just know your physics and tantrum.
Manage your signature if your threat is coming primarily from
the ground, and try and reduce it when somebody's looking up at
you. OK.
Just one quick follow up then and we'll move on to the next
question then. So you did reference this.
So the question originally was, is, is it the death knell for
for loves over aeroplanes? You said no, it's not.
And you kind of intimated about the fact that you might be able
to find out that something is there, but you can't do anything
with that information. You can't target anything off of
it. But tell us a bit about
collapsing the kill chain then. So if you now know there's
something in this bit of airspace, you can now presumably
direct some other types of radar or some other type type types of
assets to go and investigate what might be there.
Does it collapse the kill chain at least?
Maybe or. Shorten it.
So I I don't know if it shortens it.
OK, I think it actually introduces additional steps and
lengthens it regardless if you if you can't.
I mean, in the bad old days, if you were just, you know, say AB
52 flying up and you're silver, I might add in you're flying
your B52 up in the Bozos sphere and an old Russian radar can see
you coming for ages and they send up interceptors against
you. That's a fairly simple set of
steps. If interceptors are taken off as
an option because you can't be localised well enough, you need
to find somebody else. You're adding steps into that.
Low observability efforts always pay off in some fashion.
OK. Right.
Next question then. I love this one said Hello,
thanks so much for putting this in.
I think that years ago, years ago, this came up and I don't
know if we talked about it directly or if it was tangential
and we were you were indirect in your discussion of this.
But this is a quote from a book which was very sold extremely
well. I don't know if it was a New
York Times bestseller, but it was very, very hyped and very,
it's all very well and it's a quote for it.
So how, how difficult can it be to have this conversation?
So here is the quote. Harms were used to maybe make
the Iraqis duck a bit, but the threats were killed with
precision munitions and cluster bombs, not suppressed.
So if we'd succumb to the HARM suppression only mindset
advocated by some, how many friendly aircraft might have
been lost? Amazingly, there were several CJ
units that hadn't embraced the concept of destruction of enemy
air defence. They largely spent their war 30
miles from the action at 30,000 feet and brought their HARM
missiles home each day. No thanks.
And that's from the book by Damhampton, which I think might
be called Bar Weasel. Yeah, so you've got to be
careful about mixing your wars and talking about who's shooting
your Harms. The HARM is a very smart
missile. But as you pointed out in your
early Wild Weasel episodes, especially when you've got that
guys like T Bear Larson and ET on, you know, and they explain
how smart the HARM is, but how much smarter the APR 47 was in
the F-4G. So in the first Gulf War, the
majority of Sam's killed were killed with Harms, not precision
munitions, although the one seventeens did good work,
particularly against systems that that were architected in
such a way that that the harm was not the best option.
The When we go to the second Gulf War, let me step back
before the 2nd Gulf War, the F15 ES were raging from late 1998
till Operation Iraqi Freedom kicked off and they had been
using precision munitions to dismantle the reconstituted
Iraqi air defence. So that's an accurate statement.
If you open up your aperture wide enough, by the time you get
to Iraqi Freedom, the number of operational Sam systems is very
low and the motivation of the operators is very low.
That doesn't mean that guys were not engaged.
OK, Hacker can tell you about being engaged in the second time
around and you know that was a full up, end to end, I'm trying
to kill you engagement. That was not a couple guys just
throwing missiles your way and shutting down.
But I haven't seen a detailed breakdown on who did what to
whom. But you had a mix of a much less
capable sensor system on the F16 CJS and a much lower number of
Sam's and a Sam, an air defence enterprise that had been beaten
down by Strike Eagles for years. So yes, the harm might be less
effective at actually exploding on a radar antenna.
That does not mean it was ineffective in suppressing the
threat. And it does not mean that the
Viper guys did a bad job despite the fact that they they had
limited sensors, they went where they needed to go.
They put Harms in the air when they needed to be put in the
air. And I'll tell you, if you look
at the Mosel Sam kill, remember as F16 CJS and EA6 Prowlers are
shooting Harms in ahead of the strike Eels in order to keep
that threat and the adjacent threats suppressed.
So in any case, I the, the quote is not necessarily untrue, but I
think it's over simplistic, unnecessarily disparages the CJ
guys. And I'm no, I'm not shy about
disparaging CJ guys just on general principles, but they do
good work and they do hang it out.
So let's let's not mistake that. And so I think the author maybe
has an axe to grind, but does not.
I I I would not consider the author in any way to be an
expert in defence suppression. I don't have any follow up
questions. We'll leave.
It noted. Can we put the clown icon up
now? I'll do it in post.
OK. OK, Matthew, God love him.
He has asked. It's not the plane, but the man
in the box. And of course, you know, we're
not. I don't want to be accused of
being gendered. So or use gendered language.
The the person man or the woman in the box.
Yeah. Yeah, that's right.
That's not a myth. That's key.
So one of the questions that that I found myself answering in
a different fashion after I stopped flying fighters was what
is the purpose of the fighter aeroplane?
And you know, the reality is most fighters are fighter
bombers now. I mean, if you're going to be
worth anything, you pretty much need to be able to move mud and
put iron on target as opposed to flying around with your white
scarf on trumpeting your superiority in one mission.
So the purpose of a fighter aircraft is to put a fighter
aviator in the right time or the right place at the right time,
with the right equipment and training to rage, destruction
and mayhem upon the adversary. That is the purpose of the
fighter. It is to get the aircrew there,
have them do the mission, and get them out.
Because like all elements of warfare are human endeavours.
And so, with that in mind, that's how fighter aviation has
been employed since the very beginning.
It's getting a person there. I got to challenge you.
OK, If we look at the origins of or the origins of aviation, look
at World War One where there wasn't really much technical
overmatch, you know, you might have your Focker one versus A
top with pop or whatever. I'm not an expert on these.
And maybe 1 can turn a bit tighter than the other.
Maybe 1 can climb a bit faster than the other.
But broadly speaking, you're those two kites, you know,
hooting around at 50 miles an hour and probably is down to the
individual flying them, right? But then you take generations of
fighter aircraft. I mean you, that's why we have
generations to categorise these things.
Those generations broadly describe characteristics and
capabilities. 6th Gen is the latest 1.
I don't know what the definition of that is, but fifth is all
about sense of fusion and the observable characteristics that
say, if you take the most recent conflict that we can talk about
then and, and again, I know you're not going to go into,
into detail, it's not something that you're, you're here to do.
But taking an F35 up against an Iranian F4 E that is all about
the aeroplane. That's got nothing to do with
the person in it, presumably. Because the.
F4 E But the F1 won't even get to the merge if if, if
everything works as it's supposed to, it won't even get
to the merge. So that the the old days of BFM
and which is the most skilled? Who blinks first?
Who makes the first mistake? Presumably that's all out the
window. Yeah.
So you're repeating a line that was said in the 60s with the
advent of missile armament in Vietnam.
Turned out to be completely wrong.
The purpose of sensor fusion in the F35 is to get the pilots the
best set of information. And the purpose of the F35
stealth is to allow that pilot to go into airspace where it is
contested so that the person in that aeroplane can accomplish
the mission. Yes, there is a technological
overmatch between a third generation aircraft and a fifth
generation aircraft. I mean, we're talking something
that flew in 1954 versus something that I don't know, it
took 25 years to develop to its, you know, not quite complete
stage as it is right now. But but the technological
advancements, I would argue, are mostly about improving the
information and the tools available to the aircrew, OK.
OK, let's move on to the next one.
All right, So Norby asks and his, so his myth is there's no
100% defence against Shahid 136 or Duran low cost cruise
missiles. They will always slip through or
some will always slip through. So you can't shoot 100% of them
down. True, that's true.
That's because you can't shoot 100% of anything down.
So the the Ukrainian success rate.
So in terms of air defences, the Ukrainians operate the most
effective air defence network ever.
In terms of raw numbers, typically you see kill rates on
she heads between 85 and 95% all the time.
And one of the reasons why you can't get to 100 is there's
always something that doesn't work or there's a gap in
coverage or it's out in the middle of nowhere where there
are no air defences. So you cannot completely blank
at a country the size of Ukraine with air defences.
The Ukrainians do awfully well with with various degrees of
success. One of the challenges with the
Shahed 136 in the Goran. And don't believe anybody that
tells you those are only $50,000 around.
They are substantially more than that.
And thanks to Ukrainian hacktivists, we sometimes know
exactly how much substantially more is.
That's a totally different, different episode.
But and they have relatively small warheads, but it this is
low cost mass and something at the US Department of Defence is
well behind on NATO is well behind on it is the ability to
put a lot of things up and some of them are going to get
through. So it's almost akin to the 1000
bomber raids against Cologne to use something from Royal Air
Force history. But I will point out, I looked
at those 1000 bombers were launched 1000 bombers did not
make it over Cologne fact 1000 bombers didn't even make it to
Germany. There were large numbers that
that aborted prior to take off because they were pulling every
bomber even out of training squadrons, even things that were
only notionally bombers. So you know, there there is a
saying that the bomber will always get through.
It's often misattributed, but it was a pre World War thought.
And if you have enough of them, something will always get
through. It's like firing 1000 rounds
down range. You're going to hit something.
Maybe not what you're aiming at, but there is some value.
And this is maybe we do another discussion of low cost mass at
some point in the future, but this is one of those things
where the Western powers have gone to exquisite and precision
and everything else and those have its place.
But the Shahed 136 and its forerunner the Shahed 131, those
were somebody else that did that.
And that was the first real matching of some degree of
precision using satellite navigation and a low cost
manufacturing method. That is the Iranian aerospace
industry. That is something that was built
for them by the US in the 60s and 70s.
But the Iranians have had an aerospace industry since the
1920s. So they took what they had and
some element of what they needed to do and they added precision.
They kept low cost and because it's something easy for their
industrial base to do, they could produce them in large
numbers. The Russians produce them in the
larger numbers because again, it is something within the
capability of their industrial base, completely supported by
China. China provides a lot of the
electronics, but if you look at the she had 136, the Goran 2,
the majority electronics in that are Western and the majority of
the Western electronics are American because they are civil
use components. There's a conflict.
Armament Research is the name of the website and the think tank
that does this kind of thing and they're amazing.
But in any case, the the you throw enough of something, it
will always get through. It's a large salvo size.