Drones for future air combat

In order to avoid incidents of fratricide, U.S. aircrew preferred to positively establish the identity of any aircraft they attacked, and for all practical purposes, this meant closing to within visual range of their targets where their superior radar and missile ranges were of little value.

By the late 1960s, U.S. forces were taking steps to solve the BVR IFF problem.

The first was enabled by covert exploitation of Soviet SRO-2 IFF transponder equipment recovered by the Israelis from MiGs shot down during the 1967 Six-Day War. In 1968 the USAF started a program known as Combat Tree to build and incorporate a suitable SRO-02 interrogator into U.S. fighters. By 1971 a suitable system had been designed, tested, and fitted to a number of USAF F-4D aircraft. Known officially as the AN/APX-81, the system could be used in a passive mode where it received and processed IFF replies sent from MiGs in response to their own Ground Controlled Intercept (GCI) radar interrogations, or it could be used in active mode to trigger the MiGs response. A Combat Tree-equipped F-4 could positively identify enemy aircraft at up to 60 nm, three times farther than the F-4 could detect, but not identify, them with its radar alone.

A second USAF initiative to enhance long-range target identification was the inclusion of the AN/ASX-1 Target Identification System Electro-Optical (TISEO) system on upgraded versions of the F-4E. TISEO was a stabilized telescope integrated with a TV camera attached to the inboard section of the F-4E’s left wing (see Figure 9) that displayed images on the back-seater’s radar scope. It had several operating modes, including one where the camera was slaved to the radar, allowing the crew to identify a target the radar was tracking, and another where the camera searched a volume of sky for possible targets. It could also automatically track targets once they were located. TISEO gave F-4E crews the ability to identify large aircraft at 50 to 80 nm and fighter-size aircraft at 10 nm or more.

F-4E crews equipped with Combat Tree and TISEO were much more likely to detect and identify enemy aircraft at long range where they could effectively employ their BVR weapons than were U.S. pilots through most of the Vietnam War. The USAF also incorporated a host of lessons from aerial combat over Vietnam into the requirements for their new dedicated, as opposed to the multirole F-4, air-to-air fighter: the F-15.

One of the many innovations the F-15 introduced was Non-Cooperative Target Recognition (NCTR). NCTR compares prominent features from radar returns (e.g., engine compressor or turbine blades—if visible) with data on friendly and enemy aircraft features and automatically categorizes target returns.

The ability to carry a deep magazine of long-range air-to-air weapons with multiple seeker options will almost certainly be vital to success in future air combat. Many of these attributes are much easier to integrate into large aircraft that have greater space and payload available for sensors, cooling, electrical power, and large, long-range weapons compared to small aircraft the size of traditional fighters.

The prospect that supersonic speed and high maneuverability have much reduced tactical utility suggests it could be possible to build effective combat aircraft with no large vertical tails to facilitate B2/A2 radar low observability. The increased importance of electronic sensors, signature reduction, RF and IR countermeasures and robust LOS networks in building dominant SA, and the potential reduced tactical utility of high speed and maneuverability could mean that, for the first time, the aerial combat lethality of large combat aircraft may be competitive or even superior to more traditional fighter aircraft designs emphasizing speed and maneuverability.

http://issuu.com/csbaonline/docs/csba6110_air_to_air_report?e=15123547/11484803