What would a modern, technologically advanced and well funded military do to counter an enemy with competent stealth tech? I'm aware of the thirdie cope (muh S400s, muh AD, etc etc) but let's say that the US was facing an opponent of roughly the same size, technical sophistication and force composition as themselves. So F-22 equivalents, B-2 equivalents, F-35 equivalents, along with stealth missiles like storm shadow etc.
What is US doctrine for dealing with this sort of situation and would they be able to use it effectively?
2 ways to deal with stealth.
1. Go in hard and loud and make sure your defense is good.
2. Have the better stealth.
Eyeballs and speed.
the US has focused development efforts on what seems to be IR coatings, so heat-seeking missiles probably work. With that in mind, a distributed defense of manpads and fox-2-equipped drones may be a threat.
Imagine a cheap drone turret which can be placed on the roof of a building - it acts as a sonic early-warning station (networked with other drones to hear jet engines and roughly locate them), and it's equipped with an IR camera and one heat-seeking missile. The drones use AI to identify airspaces which likely contain enemy intruders, and if they see something on IR, they fire a missile at it.
Won't most stealth jets be flying at a significantly high altitude and launching mostly longer range weapons like glide bombs or cruise missiles? I doubt you'd be able to pinpoint much based on sound
well, if your traditional long-range sams and air cover can't keep stealth jets at low altitude, you're going to lose the war no matter what. But the idea is to have a very deep screen of networked low-value defenses which can shoot without radar, so hopefully you can at least stiff-arm them beyond the reach of glide bombs.
>well, if your traditional long-range sams and air cover can't keep stealth jets at low altitude, you're going to lose the war no matter what.
We're assuming a scenario where both sides have stealth aircraft which can't easily be countered by long range SAM systems.
saturate the skies above Pacific Ocean (or the entire Earth atmosphere) with weather balloons with microphones
SOSUS 2.0
A single starship launch can probably place enough starshield sats to cover a medium sized country with intense LEO recon observers who can catch upwards radar reflections and top-side IR, either silhouette against the ground or just hotter than the surrounding air. Probably down facing radar too.
They could give quite an accurate range and bearing to the rest of the battlenet and then BVR A2A missiles can head on an intercept, get mid-course correction to vector in to the target and when close enough, activate their own radar at close range and go pitbull.
Stealth is the answer to current generation air defences and early warning. Next gen air defences are going to have counters to stealth and then we go around again.
A really big telescope
None, atm it's just coping, seething and making bullshit propaganda that they "can be detected".
IRST systems can soft counter radar stealth but it's got far less range than radar.
Hit them on the ground.
This. Its public knowledge where stealth bombers are stored. Autistic planewatchers won't let the majority of them slip by.
Considering B2s specifically are deployed from stateside and have never actually landed in a combat theater, you could have a 12 hr warning if you're in the middle east from the time you get word of them taking off.
How do you
>hit them on the ground
when your info source is planespotters posting that they already took off? How do you even know they are coming for you specifically?
There are a 2 main options
>have your radar tuned to detect everything no matter how small and then use a computer to filter out all the birds based on speed and altitude
This takes a lot of processing power but any new system could easily have the capability.
>IR
This won't work though clouds but having an IR camera scan the sky looking of heat sources would work, you would again need to try to ID and filter birds.
I think IR detection is going to become the goto for small drones because you can filter birds with image recognition software, radar makes this hard because they are going to be at the same altitudes and speeds as birds.
> use a computer to filter out all the birds based on speed and altitude
>this fricking meme again
That’s not how it works you fricking maroon
>use a computer to filter out all the birds based on speed and altitude
It sort of is, filters I mean.
It's just going to filter out the stealth aircraft as well.
No, because that’s not how stealth works.
When they say “X has the radar signature of a bird” they don’t mean that it literally looks like a bird on radar. It means that the radar would only get a return at the same distance as it would get a return from a bird.
>When they say “X has the radar signature of a bird” they don’t mean that it literally looks like a bird on radar
I know that but weak, partial and vague readings on stealth aircraft are going to show up as intermittent and weak signals that could look like turbulence or birds flocking and separating or even insect swarms. Attempting to filter for the latter false positives is going to filter out the traces of stealth as well.
The radar won't be able to gauge speed if the plane is flying parallel to the radar. Likewise, some birds can fly above 20,000 feet. With a little skill a pilot can slip passed radar with the the operators none the wiser.
Surprise attack.
IR missiles.
Just knowing or guessing reliably where and when they will be flying. AI can predict flight paths with 99% accuracy.
Observe their entire flight path from space at all times and never lose track of them.
>IR missiles
I think future A2A missiles are going to be multi-sensor and collate IR, radar, optical and projected track to track hard to see targets and a bit of AI to attempt to filter out decoys.
Probably also linked to the overall battlenet as well, so that it can vector to the target using IR tracking satellites and other weird stuff.
Makes me wonder how wide a track you can scan with gravimetric sensors on a satellite. Gravimeters are sensitive enough to detect very small changes in surface altitude, a fighter at high altitude might be a strong enough signal to detect.
The stealth of 5th gens isn’t perfect. For example, the radars can’t be covered by stealth tech because that would interfere with their own operation. So to mitigate the risk they have the radars permenantly fixed in an upward angle so that ground radar won’t catch their reflection. So, knowing that you could potentially exploit that using HALE UAVs capable of near-space flight looking down on the airspace and once a stealth plane is detected it becomes trivial to shoot it with a optical-seeker interceptor. Stealth planes are strong against the traditional threats they were designed to counter, but that doesn’t preclude threats evolving to overcome them. Another option for example is to develop swarms of drones running a distributed sky-search using optics which would be a solution that’s vastly better than nothing. In fact I bet everything I own that China at least is pursuing multiple different countermeasure systems to deal with the proliferation of stealth planes.
Stuff naturally radiates at wavelengths of integer factors of its size, so they can be detected antennae tuned to such frequencies. However, such radars tend to be very large, unwieldy, and weak. They can probably also be tracked acoustically based on their engine noise profiles, but this is also pretty finicky and not particularly reliable for guidance systems.
AWACS in the air.
That’s about it.
Just get a couple of Serbs with obsolete AA systems to shoot it down again
AI guidance which can recognize enemy jets and target them without needing IR or Radar. The counter to that is flying at night or having optical illusion camo to trick AI which could make the planes less stealthy and AI could always get better.
What sensors is the AI going to be using? Radar and IR are already the best long range detectors to feed info to the AI.
AI isn't a magical macguffin that miraculously solves all your problems, it still needs sensors, and there are no other sensors for detecting aircraft other than radar or IRST. Do you even understand how AI works?
Just look harder. Worked for us when the Erusians were attacking Comona Air Base during Operation Countdown.
good and numerous ESM receivers to triangulate LPI radars and altimeters, lots of airborne platforms with narrow FOV IRST
ultra long range gps and computer vision guided artillary spam. probably just explosive payloads carried by drones that get shot out of a howitzer.
blow all the jets off the launchpad. hit just about any grounded target you want, anywhere any time. you could even start making the shells out of something cheap and stupid like compressed landfill garbage and resin to accelerate mass manufacture.
Your own fleet of stealth fighters. It levels the playing board and brings the combat into WVR ranges.
Alternatively you can dump tons of money into technological research hoping that your engineers will come across a technological breakthrough that will allow your MIC to build IRST pods capable of tracking targets up to 200km of distance.
AI target recognition will make conventional stealth technology obsolete once it's matured
a modern version of this. with microphones and ai automatic scanning