I was just watching this documentary on Gulf War v1:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fegFGllS3w8&feature=youtu.be&t=12m56s
It's a pretty interesting program even with the shit animations. It did make me question
I know the vast majority of a2a kills in the First Gulf War were beyond visual range. 75% or so If i recall. Still, in the program you see the F-15 pilots give testimony where they hesitated to fire missiles and instead preferred to get closer to the enemy to positively ID them as hostile.
Was radar ID really that bad in 1990? What has changed since then?
I always imagined modern air superiority operations to be meticulous and well-coordinated, whereas this program made it seem like it was more certain squadrons randomly engaging enemy airplanes with little or no knowledge of where friendly planes were.
Fog of war and all that hasn't changed, so can we expect the next proper A2A engagement to be as hectic as this program made it seem?
>>29769022
>Was radar ID really that bad in 1990? What has changed since then?
Yes.
IFF has gotten a lot better.
>>29769039
What stops enemies from using our IFF to designate targets?
I'd assume its on a small identifying band, but to be received by friendly receivers it still needs to be a relatively strong signal
>>29769061
IFF gets recoded in the battlefield, at least thats what they told us during Stinger school where the unit can detect current and old IFF.
>>29769061
The only best IFF is flight plan that is being followed.
>>29769039
>IFF
Identification friend or foe for people that aren't smart planefags.
>The United States and other NATO countries started using a system called Mark XII in the late twentieth century
Was this what they were using in the Persian Gulf War? How has it been updated?
What about IFF for air-to-ground? I know that was a problem in the Gulf too. Are ground units now linked into whatever system for friendly pilots to see?
>>29769061
My question is more along the lines of what prevents IFF signals from being used to assist enemy targeting.
I'm assuming that ground units have iff markers, what stops enemy aircraft from being able to identify camouflaged units, via wide band searches looking for any return
>>29769193
IFF systems don't just broadcast a friendly squawk in all directions without proper prompting.
>>29769193
In order for an IFF to function it needs to get the proper IFF challenge, otherwise it stays silent as >>29769548 said. While it's certainly possible for someone to break anothers IFF codes and use it, it would require serious OPSEC problems for someone to get a hold of the current codes in use at any given time.
>>29769022
>Was radar ID really that bad in 1990? What has changed since then?
People who get their knowledge from Lockheed Brochures and Wikipedia would make you believe that technology is so far superior but the reality is that war is chaotic, sensors rarely work as designed, you're still flying around in the dark bouncing radio from metal tin cans in the air. Software has become more efficient at interpretation and the resolutions have increased, but if you believe that A2A warfare is clean and precise and flawless, you're badly mistaken.
>>29769586
Ok i didn't know that one, continuing the same line of logic, is a friendly craft challenged, what stops enemy sigint locating the response if they're in range?
How much has computers & displays improved since 91?
Theres been massive improvements
>>29769737
>using metal on airplanes in 2016
no
>>29769022
Yep. Case in point, during the Red Flag where the USAF invited the Indian air force over, the Indians suffered from an extremely high friendly fire rate because they were using crappy old Soviet systems that weren't compatible with Western datalinks, so every time they got a radar contact, they had to manually ask the AWACs whether it was friendly or not, and eventually they stopped giving a shit and fired first asked questions never.
There is also Non-Cooperative Target Recognition to identify aircraft types. How effective this truly is is unknown, but it does exist.
I would imagine that control and tracking methods have also improved a lot as well. AWACS or ground control should generally know what aircraft should be where when, and when something is unaccounted, it can be assumed to be enemy.
Wasn't there an F-15 pilot who got a medal for NOT shooting down a special ops helicopter that didn't file a flight plan after he was instructed to by AWACS?
