Russian-Made Tech Vs. America's Stealth Warplanes
For the past 30 years stealth technology has helped
American warplanes maintain air dominance around the
globe. Now Russian firms are designing and selling
weapons they claim can shoot down the most
sophisticated aircraft ever built.
BY JOE PAPPALARDO
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There is something unnerving about watching Iranians
browse weapons built to hunt down and destroy
American warplanes.
The International Salon of Weapons and Military
Equipment—2010, held at the famed Zhukovsky
airfield outside Moscow, outwardly resembles U.S.
defense industry shows. Exhibits stand in rows inside
a cavernous hangar converted into a convention hall.
Engineers and sales flacks talk up their wares.
Employees hand out pens tattooed with company
names and logos. Clusters of visitors—on the first day
of the show, mostly potential international customers
—gather at the displays. Here, a couple of Eastern
Europeans peer through the scopes of unloaded
sniper rifles. There, a group of Asians gawk at a demo
of small radio-controlled quadrotors.
This is all pretty standard defense industry fare. But
some differences become more apparent when I reach
the booth of the Russian firm Almaz-Antey, one of
the world's leaders in antiaircraft weaponry and the
nation's largest arms dealer. A promotional animation
on a large screen hanging over the display shows an
Almaz missile streaking toward an airplane that looks
a lot like a carrier-launched F-35C Lightning II. The
missile closes and the airplane disappears in an
orange explosion.
The image is shocking—I'm used to seeing American
stealth warplanes prevail, in combat as well as in
corporate promotional animations. The U.S.
government has invested 16 years and $396 billion to
ensure that F-35s can fly undetected through well-
defended airspace. And the Russians are selling
defense systems that can knock them out of the sky?
I notice a trio of men in nearly identical gray suits and
close-cropped beards examining toy-train-size
models of mobile radar and missile launchers. They
are from the Sharif University of Technology in
Tehran, a civilian institution that has ties to the
military. Late last year, a scientist from Sharif visiting
the United States was arrested for purchasing
unspecified equipment that could be used in military
programs.
Almaz engineer Ivan Shalaev sidles next to them and
they settle into a conversation in English. It's a
perfect opportunity to eavesdrop. The Iranians ask
Shalaev questions about infrared sensors that can
detect an airplane by the heat of its engines and the
air friction against its skin. But Shalaev tells the
Iranians that infrared is just one tracking method the
company offers to customers.
Behind him are seekers that use enhanced radar to
chase down warplanes. Several are cut open to show
a gimballed disc studded with a forest of tiny T-
shaped transmit/receive modules. Under the disc is a
small computer that can quickly process even the
most subtle radar returns. This makes the missile
responsive and difficult to outwit. Almaz-Antey is
selling these upgraded warheads to fit on existing
antiaircraft missiles, including ones it sold to Syria,
Venezuela, China, and Iran.
The Iranians don't answer any direct questions,
beyond stating their university affiliation, when I
introduce myself as an American journalist. But
Shalaev is open, even friendly. He's a hometown boy;
his father was an engineer, too, who worked on
advanced Russian aerospace programs here at the
Zhukovsky.
The young engineer is not shy about which airplanes
are in his company's crosshairs. Asked if the new
seekers could track and destroy an F-35, Shalaev grins
and says, "Well, we're going to try."
Two years after the Zhukovsky Arms show, sales of
Russian antiaircraft equipment are surging, and
Almaz-Antey is at the head of the effort. Company
officials, quoted in Russian media, say that the
nation's new defense plants—the first built in 20
years—will make antiaircraft weapons.
That's not good news for U.S. pilots and American
allies. The Pentagon strives to hold any place in the
world, no matter how well defended, under threat of
air attack. Modern U.S. warplanes are designed to
evade enemy radar, electromagnetic snoopers, and
heat-seeking missiles. The Pentagon calls this low
observable (LO); the rest of the world calls it stealth.
"Russia still believes it has an important role to play
in the world," says Travis Sharp, an analyst with the
Center for a New American Security. "Producing and
selling advanced military equipment is one way to
signal to other states that you are not someone to
mess with, nor are your allies someone they should
mess with."
Selling these weapons is also lucrative. In a recent $2
billion deal, Almaz-Antey delivered 15 batteries of
S-300PMU-2 mobile antiaircraft missile systems to
China. Each battery has two or three radar units and
four missile launchers. The radar can simultaneously
track 100 targets; each launcher can shoot four
missiles that speed toward targets at Mach 6. That's
about 60 missile-launching vehicles for the price of
four F-22 Raptors. The S-300's keen radar and fast-
moving missiles guard the Taiwan Strait and form an
umbrella that would protect a Chinese invasion of
Taiwan.
Scary as the missiles might be, it's the radar systems
that pose the gravest threat to stealth airplanes. Post
—Cold War engineers in Russia breathed new, deadly
life into VHF radars that have been around since the
1970s by digitizing their signals. Increasing computing
power has improved the system's ability to glean
coherent information from a jumble of data. Faint
VHF radar returns that once would have been
construed as random background noise can now be
detected and identified.
"These VHF radars can detect aircraft constructed
using stealth technology," Viktor Ozherelev, a division
head at Almaz-Antey, claimed at a 2007 arms show.
"The Americans know their stealth program has
failed." Most experts say this is an exaggeration, but
it's not unfounded.
The interplay between radar and airplanes is a physical
one. Stealth airplanes are shaped to deflect radar
waves away from the receivers—but not every radar
scans at the same wavelength. Increasing the
frequency of a wave decreases its wavelength (the
distance between its peaks). The shorter the
wavelength, the more detailed the return and the
better the resolution.
Aerospace engineers designed stealth airplanes
primarily to beat the detection equipment that poses
the greatest threat—X-band radar. Surface-to-air
batteries use this band because it operates at
wavelengths that give the optimal compromise
between the range and resolution needed to identify
and track a target. But when stealth airplanes are
exposed to radar waves longer than this wavelength
range, they generate stronger radar returns.
For this reason, well-equipped defenders have more
than one kind of radar protecting the same airspace,
set up at different angles. For example, a defender
protecting a fixed target (like a uranium-enrichment
facility) could share data from a network of several
radars to get enough information to accurately launch
a missile. A VHF radar could detect incoming aircraft
while lower-frequency S-band or L-band radars on
the flanks could paint the target from the sides.
Russia sells such counterstealth radar combinations as
package deals.
These integrated-air-defense systems, as the Pentagon
calls them, complicate any war plan. Pilots of stealth
aircraft are expected to dismantle these networks—as
B-2 Spirit bombers have done over Iraq, Serbia, and
Libya.
The upper echelons of the military warn that there
are limits to stealth in these networked environments.
"The rapid expansion of computing power ushers in
new sensors and methods that will make stealth and
its advantages increasingly difficult to maintain," Adm.
Jonathan Greenert, chief of naval operations, wrote in
the July 2012 issue of Proceedings magazine,
published by the U.S. Naval Institute. "Maintaining
stealth in the face of new and diverse counter-
detection methods would require significantly higher
fiscal investments in our next generation of
platforms." merica's newest stealth aircraft, the F-35 Lightning
II, is the most advanced warplane ever built. It's set to
enter service in 2016, and at least eight nations are
buying it, making this stealth warplane the most likely
one to face Russian radar and missiles.
The F-35 diminishes its visibility to radar with internal
weapons bays, carefully aligned edges, and embedded
antennas. Yet the airplane is accused of being more
vulnerable to detection than earlier stealth aircraft,
such as the F-22 Raptor, due to its more conventional
airplane shape. Air Force Association president, retired
Lt. Gen. Mike Dunn, slighted the F-35 when he stated
that "only the F-22 can survive in airspace defended
by increasingly capable surface-to-air missiles."
The F-35 is a multirole aircraft; it must fight other
airplanes, bomb targets, and conduct recon; and each
mission requires specific payloads. For that reason, its
design has tradeoffs that make it less stealthy and less
maneuverable than the Raptor, which was designed
first and foremost to win air superiority over other
fighters.
The F-35 does not have the radar-shunting curves of
the Raptor that help mask it from radar at all angles.
Engineers designed the F-22 and the B-2 to be unseen
at many wavelengths and directions. The Lightning II
does not offer many radar returns when the waves
strike it from the front, but when they come from the
side, the returns are stronger.
Persistent F-35 critic Carlo Kopp, an analyst with the
group Air Power Australia, has written that the
Lightning II is "demonstrably not a true stealth
aircraft." He also claims radar waves will bounce
between the juncture of wing and fuselage in a way
that can be detected if the airplane is scanned from
any direction but the front. He is not the only one
who has pointed out possible sources of trouble. For
example, rival airplane-makers in Europe claim that
powerful aircraft radar can spot an F-35 coming, even
head-on, if multiple opposing aircraft are
cooperatively scanning.
Radar waves do not just reflect off objects, they also
flow across surfaces, scattering only when they hit a
rivet, gun barrel, or other feature that breaks the
smoothness of the skin. Aviation Week reporter Bill
Sweetman notes that the F-35A's gun is located
internally, but it is housed in a "hideous wart" on the
airplane's surface—one of several features he says
could betray the aircraft's position.
Lockheed Martin won't confirm or deny these alleged
flaws, saying the information is classified. Still, the
criticisms are plausible, even if they come from known
F-35 skeptics using only public information. But
Lockheed vice president and former F/A-18 pilot Steve
O'Bryan pointedly notes that there is more to being
low observable than just shape. "I reject the notion
that the F-35 is an inferior stealth airplane," he says.
The F-35's approach to radar-absorbent material
(RAM) is more reliable than that of any earlier
warplane. The F-22's surfaces are made of aluminum,
which are covered in RAM that must constantly be
reapplied. This is, of course, a nightmare for
maintenance crews. But the F-35 is made of carbon-
fiber composite; Lockheed engineers bake RAM into
the airplane's edges in an effort to soak up inbound
radar.
But the Lightning II's key to survival is its own radar,
the Active Electronically Scanned Array (AESA)
installed in its nose. Conventional radar systems turn
their gaze mechanically—imagine a dish spinning or a
flat surface tilting to aim radar beams. Electronically
steered radar does not move, but its beams can
broadcast in different directions, thousands of times a
second and across many frequencies. This agility
allows AESA to map terrain and track hundreds of
targets.
AESA is built to do more than scan—it can reach out
to enemy radars and scramble their signals. A
combination of radar and electromagnetic warning
sensors alert an F-35 pilot to the threat of enemy
radar; he can then dodge the threat or use the AESA
to jam the signal, no matter what frequency the radar
is transmitting.
And, if a missile is launched, the F-35 can track it
with 360-degree infrared-sensor coverage and then,
in some cases, overwhelm the missile's guidance
system with the AESA. "Stealth works in conjunction
with all those other techniques to make the F-35 what
is probably the most survivable airplane of all time,"
O'Bryan says.
But there's a double edge to this sword. AESA radar is
great at protecting stealth aircraft, but it can also
detect them. Foreign military engineers are placing
electronically steered radar arrays in their own
warplanes and advertising them as stealth hunters.
Putin's radarmen are building several AESA radars for
existing and future warplanes. Last year, Yury Bely,
director of the Tikhomirov research institute, said in
Takeoff, a Russian aerospace magazine, that the L-
band AESA radar his staff is developing is "as good as
any foreign radar of its type." This year, flights of an
X-band AESA radar began in prototypes of the
Russian—Indian PAK-FA stealth airplane.
Air dominance is now being fought in a greater swath
of the electromagnetic spectrum. The critical part of
any 21st-century air combat will be the first invisible
duel of flickering AESA beams dancing across each
other hundreds of miles ahead of any airplane. It's
the same old dogfight rules: The first airplane to spot
the other shoots, and quite likely whoever is in the
other airplane dies.
Improving defenses are already influencing Pentagon
attack strategy. No one is saying stealth designs
should be abandoned, but military planners must
reckon with the advances of opponents. This is
another part of the game—one wonks call the cost—
exchange ratio.
"There's a real risk that a lot of the high-tech
investments are going toward things our adversaries
want us to invest in, because they can neutralize them
—and spend far less money to do so," Sharp says.
In his essay in Proceedings, Greenert suggests the way
to keep U.S. aircraft safe is to make smarter choices in
equipping them. Instead of investing massive amounts
of money in airplanes that can defeat every new
threat, he advocates purchasing weapons that existing
aircraft can fire from longer ranges, safely away from
radar. He also suggests adopting UAVs and missiles
that can jam enemy radar before manned aircraft even
arrive. "We need more numerous electronic warfare
and cyber payloads to thwart detection and targeting,"
he wrote. "U.S. forces can... employ long-range
sensor, weapon, and unmanned vehicle payloads
instead of using only stealth platforms to reach
targets."
The drones, cruise missiles, and decoys may lead an
attack, spewing radar beams and flooding computer
networks with viruses. But they will have to be built
to defeat powerful radar networks and fast missiles
with can't-miss seekers.
Years of fighting low-tech insurgencies have increased
military reliance on UAVs that are easily spotted on
radar. "We've got to start planning to build systems
and to field capabilities to fight in a contested
environment again," the Air Force's new military
deputy for acquisition, Lt. Gen. Charles Davis, said in
a recent interview with the Air Force Times . So, in one
form or another, the duel will continue.
As of now, no S-300 surface-to-air weapon has ever
been fired at a target in anger. The Lightning II is still
in testing, and the debut of its style of networked
warfare is years away. Their matchup awaits. Only
then will the war of words between detractors,
engineers, salesmen, and journalists be settled—in
combat, with lives at stake and history in the balance.