Fading Signal: The Neglect of Electronic Warfare.

On Feb 17, 12:57 pm, Jim Wilkins wrote:
On Feb 17, 11:07 am, wrote:
...



Even better - how did we map out the Soviet's Tall King air defence
radar network without direct photo coverage, and the Sovs going silent
whenever the ELINT airplanes were flying around?

--
Pete Stickney

OTH?

Nice writeup. Thanks.

Jim Wilkins

http://www.tbp.org/pages/Publication.../F99Poteat.pdf

The Oxcart mission planners were especially concerned
about just how widespread the Soviet's early-warning
radar was and where it was located. It seemed impossible,
however, to determine the number, exact location,
or any other technical information on those installations.
I recalled a story from my Cape Canaveral days in the
early 1950s, when the signal from a ground-based radar
located nearly a thousand miles beyond our horizon
was picked up at the Cape -- the signal was reflected
off a Thor missile during a test flight. The suggestion
was then made that this same phenomenon (later called
bi-static intercept) could be used to intercept Soviet
high-powered radar located well over the horizon by pointing
the ELINT antennas at the Soviet ballistic missiles
during their flight testing, by using the missile's radio beacon
for pointing, or simply programming the ELINT antennas
to follow the missile's predicted trajectory.
The idea to gain greater knowledge of Soviet air
defense capabilities through bi-static interception was
approved by CIA management, and project Melody was
born. There were no computers in those days, so our
feasibility studies and engineering calculations involved
solving spherical trigonometry equations using slide
rules, tables of logarithms, and hand-cranked calculators.
Melody was installed at a CIA monitoring site on
the shores of the Caspian Sea in northern Iran. Over
the ensuing years, Melody produced bi-static intercepts
of virtually all the ground-based Soviet missile tracking
radar, including all their anti-ballistic missile tracking
sites located at a test range nearly a thousand miles
away. The fixed location of Melody and limited trajectories
of the Soviet missiles being tracked, however,
still did not provide the locations of all the air defense
radar installations throughout the Soviet Union that
were needed by the Oxcart mission planners.
A new Soviet early-warning radar, called the Tall King,
began to appear about this time, which if deployed
widely, appeared to improve significantly the Soviets'
air defenses. The new, very large, and obviously powerful
Tall King radar quickly became the Oxcart's nemesis


Melody's success with the high-powered, missile related
radar led to the idea of using the moon as a distant
bi-static reflector to intercept and locate the Tall
King radar systems deployed in the Soviet Union.
At the same time, the Lincoln Laboratory, America's
premier radar-development house, had been engaged
in a "radar astronomy race" with its Soviet counterpart
to see which side would be first to detect and characterize
the moon's surface using radar. Lincoln won
handily. I visited Dr. John Evans at the labs and discussed
the moon radar results and the bi-static moon
idea. Drawing on the labs' understanding of the moon
as a reflector of radar signals, sensitive ELINT receivers,
tuned to the Tall King frequency, were attached to
the giant 60-foot RCA radar antenna just off the New
Jersey Turnpike near Moorestown and pointed at the
moon. (The labs' giant radar antenna was preoccupied
with further radar astronomy experiments.) The
ELINT receivers were also optimized for the effects
of the moon as a reflector, that is, using the lab's
"matched filter" techniques. Over time, as the Earth
and moon revolved and rotated, all the Soviet radar
sites came into view one at a time, and their precise
geographic locations were plotted. The extremely large
number of installations that were found, and the rather
complete coverage of the Soviet Union, were not good
news for the Oxcart program office -- or for the U.S.
Air Force Strategic Air Command, which had to plot
wartime bomber penetration routes.

Jack Linthicum ha scritto:

EW test question: How did Halsey know to send Air Force P-38s to knock
Admiral Yamamoto out of the sky in the South Pacific during WWII?
Cryptography and signals intelligence - which aren't usually
considered forms of EW at all AFAIK.
I was to write the same.... I have only to add that in the EW & Crypto
environment is easy to steal merits... Even very high brasses don't have
necessarly all the various "need to know" clearances to effectively
adjudge merits and esp. the following promotions & increase in resources....

Best regards from Italy,
Dott. Piergiorgio.

It is the "decision-making" that is the key to the primacy of the
brass, IIRC the decision was made to hit Yamamoto despite the belief
that the act would reveal the Allies ability to read Naval codes.
JN-25D the latest.

meh... I can understand Vince's misunderstanding, but you, Jack, really
surprise me... I was saying not about Yamamoto, but in larger and
broader terms, and not only the spook/black gizmo people of the US of
A... I wonder how you haven't get the point...

Best regards from Italy,
Dott. Piergiorgio.

On Sun, 6 Apr 2008 20:13:12 +0000 (UTC), W. D. Allen
wrote:


"...the Navy may be the only service with enough expertise and imagination
to keep it (electronic warfare) alive.

That was definitely the case during the Vietnam war!

WDA
Former NAVAIR program manager for EW

end
_________________________

Kept it alive, arguably so. But if we want to address bringing it into
robust vigor during the Vietnam years, I think there were some joint
force partners in the effort. (EB-66, EC-121, EB-47, EC-47, F-100F,
F-105F & G, F-4C, ALQ-67, 72, 87, 94, 101, OV-1 Mohawk, QU-22B, Igloo
White, Teaball, AGM-45, AGM-78, ....etc. etc.) Some systems orginated
from USN programs, some from Army, some from AF. Lots of stuff went
on.


Ed Rasimus
Fighter Pilot (USAF-Ret)
"When Thunder Rolled"
www.thunderchief.org
www.thundertales.blogspot.com

On Apr 6, 1:29 pm, Ed Rasimus wrote:
On Sun, 6 Apr 2008 20:13:12 +0000 (UTC), W. D. Allen

wrote:

"...the Navy may be the only service with enough expertise and imagination
to keep it (electronic warfare) alive.

That was definitely the case during the Vietnam war!

WDA
Former NAVAIR program manager for EW

end
_________________________

Kept it alive, arguably so. But if we want to address bringing it into
robust vigor during the Vietnam years, I think there were some joint
force partners in the effort. (EB-66, EC-121, EB-47, EC-47, F-100F,
F-105F & G, F-4C, ALQ-67, 72, 87, 94, 101, OV-1 Mohawk, QU-22B, Igloo
White, Teaball, AGM-45, AGM-78, ....etc. etc.) Some systems orginated
from USN programs, some from Army, some from AF. Lots of stuff went
on.

Ed Rasimus
Fighter Pilot (USAF-Ret)
"When Thunder Rolled"www.thunderchief.orgwww.thundertales.blogsp ot.com

Add Black Crow

W. D. Allen wrote in
:


"...the Navy may be the only service with enough expertise and
imagination to keep it (electronic warfare) alive.

Cheer up. Maybe every enemy we face in future will be (in the charming
phrase of a former colleague of mine from Fort Halstead) "armed with the
electronic equivalent of a sharpened mango".

:-(

All the best,

John.

On Apr 6, 2:17 pm, John D Salt jdsalt_AT_gotadsl.co.uk wrote:
W. D. Allen wrote :



"...the Navy may be the only service with enough expertise and
imagination to keep it (electronic warfare) alive.

Cheer up. Maybe every enemy we face in future will be (in the charming
phrase of a former colleague of mine from Fort Halstead) "armed with the
electronic equivalent of a sharpened mango".

:-(

All the best,

John.

The digital ones are damned hard to record and break out

On Feb 16, 7:37 am, Mike wrote:
Fading Signal: The Neglect of Electronic Warfare.
Lexington Institute.http://lexingtoninstitute.org/1223.shtml

When you consider how much money Americans spend on defense -- about
$4 trillion so far in this decade alone -- it's amazing what a poor
job we do of maintaining our military arsenal. In the years since the
cold war ended, the Navy's fleet has shrunk by half to fewer than 300
ships, the Air Force's planes have "matured" to twice the age of the
commercial airline fleet, and the Army has largely abandoned the
production of heavy armored vehicles. There's a simple reason for all
these signs of military decay: the threat went away. No peer
adversary has taken the place of the Red Army or the Imperial Navy.


I note that the USN Grumman EA-6B is being used to create a jammed
space around ground US patrols in Iraq.

The jamming prevents the detonation of improvised explosive devices.
Presumably highly directional
electronically shaped antenna create temporal grace around the patrol.

The USAF apparently can't do this mission due to the degradation of
this type of aircraft.

The money is going into the occupation of Iraq. Eventually advanced
tech will be needed, maybe to
protect Taiwan for a little longer from a rapidly empowering China.

On Apr 8, 6:36 am, Eunometic wrote:
On Feb 16, 7:37 am, Mike wrote:

Fading Signal: The Neglect of Electronic Warfare.
Lexington Institute.http://lexingtoninstitute.org/1223.shtml

When you consider how much money Americans spend on defense -- about
$4 trillion so far in this decade alone -- it's amazing what a poor
job we do of maintaining our military arsenal. In the years since the
cold war ended, the Navy's fleet has shrunk by half to fewer than 300
ships, the Air Force's planes have "matured" to twice the age of the
commercial airline fleet, and the Army has largely abandoned the
production of heavy armored vehicles. There's a simple reason for all
these signs of military decay: the threat went away. No peer
adversary has taken the place of the Red Army or the Imperial Navy.

I note that the USN Grumman EA-6B is being used to create a jammed
space around ground US patrols in Iraq.

The jamming prevents the detonation of improvised explosive devices.
Presumably highly directional
electronically shaped antenna create temporal grace around the patrol.

The USAF apparently can't do this mission due to the degradation of
this type of aircraft.

The money is going into the occupation of Iraq. Eventually advanced
tech will be needed, maybe to
protect Taiwan for a little longer from a rapidly empowering China.

Cite, on the jamming being successful?

"Eunometic" wrote in message
...

I note that the USN Grumman EA-6B is being used to create a jammed
space around ground US patrols in Iraq.

The jamming prevents the detonation of improvised explosive devices.
Presumably highly directional
electronically shaped antenna create temporal grace around the patrol.

The British did something similar in Northern Ireland.

The IRA switched to command detonated devices.

After the British started looking for the wires after the bang they moved on
to more sophisticated radio equipment such as that found on the dead IRA
people shot in Gibraltar which required a series of thumb wheels to be set
to the correct number to transmit the firing signal.

The stuff is 'Radio Amateur' technology and can be picked up in any major
city.

It is reasonable to assume that the Iraqi bad guys have access to all this
sort of thing at that technical escalation will happen in exactly the same
way...

--
William Black


I've seen things you people wouldn't believe.
Barbeques on fire by the chalets past the castle headland
I watched the gift shops glitter in the darkness off the Newborough gate
All these moments will be lost in time, like icecream on the beach
Time for tea.


..

"Juergen Nieveler" wrote in message
. ..
"William Black" wrote:

It is reasonable to assume that the Iraqi bad guys have access to all
this sort of thing at that technical escalation will happen in exactly
the same way...

Or they'll stick to line-of-sight stuff like IR or lasers, or they'll
switch to using mobile phones and planting the bombs in areas where
people will complain abou too frequent mobile phone outages.

Or they'll shift to using something that detects a jam of the radio-
command-link and then activates a motion sensor... after all, jamming
means "the patrol is coming, get ready".


The more sophisticated jammers only switch on when a signal is detected,
hopefully quickly enough to stop a detonation.

Jeff