All Things Air Defence/AA (merged)

[12alfa]

From the info I read no part of the spectrum is safe, even turning on a veh can be detected to a certian degree.

 

[12alfa]

Actually all the ADATS in an area dont need to turn on their radars.   They can be slaved to a single ADATS and get the radar picture from that.   The missile is laser guided and tracked by FLIR/TV so no real radar is needed for that either.   Of course if it wants to operate by itself and detect targets beyond visual range then it needs to fire up the radar.   BTW, this info is all avail on Janes.

Is the sop for radar hunters to hunt down the source (radar) 1st, and them snif out others as well before sending in the a/c to there missions, protected by more anti/radar a/c within the packet?

Turning on any electromagnic equip in a given area while the hunters are around is very dangrous as the equipment in the air have a better los than ground units, or am i reading this wrong? From what I've read this has now (hunting) moved into the realm of drones/uav's now, making the task even harder to sort ot the a/c from the drones, can the adats keep up with this new tech?

 

[AmmoTech90]

The question is what type of threat does Canada face from electronic countermeasures such as HARM or ALARM type weapons.   Would we deploy against an enemy with those sort of assets if we didn't have air superiority?   Probably not.   Pretty much every SAM with a range of over 10km uses radar for tracking and/or guidance.   Air defence is a layered concept that uses aircraft, long range missiles, medium range missiles, and short/very short range missiles and guns.   Unless we are going to war against the US we will probably be going with them or another ally in which case our AD assets would be in intergrated with theirs.
Emission control is very difficult to implement in this day and age.   If we were to implement complete EMCON for a unit that would mean the unit in question would be operating at 1914 level.   Issue every section two tin cans and length of string and bicyles.   We would not be able to start any vehicles, GPS, PAQs, or coffee makers.   Bring back semaphore for the army.
So, basically, you have to be willing to take risks.   Is it an unreasonalbe risk to turn on all the ADATS as stand alone elements when they are the sole AD assets?   I would say yes.   Is turning on one and datalinking the rest as part of an intergrated air defense plan a reasonalble risk?   I would say yes.   One has to judge the vulnurabilities of a system or piece of equipment in a realistic scenario.   So making sure an APC can stand up against small arms fire is a reasonable scenario that you have to protect against.   Deploying ADATS as the sole AD defense asset against an enemy that has air superiority, drones, and radar seeking missiles is not.   Either that or tell the crew not to turn on the radar and depend on visual target acquisition.

Edit:spelling

 

[Ex-Dragoon]

From the info I read no part of the spectrum is safe, even turning on a veh can be detected to a certian degree.

Not all can...depends on your band width.

 

[12alfa]

The Us is not the only nation deploying anti-radar wpns.

 

[AmmoTech90]

The Us is not the only nation deploying anti-radar wpns.

I never said the US was the only nation with those weapons.  In fact the ALARM missile I mention is manufactured in the UK.  Russia uses the Zvezda Kh-31 (AS-17 Krypton) .  What I said about the US was that unless we were fighting them, we would be allied with them thus be intergrated into the overall Air Defence plan.  I have no idea where you got the idea that I said the US is the only nation with anti-radar weapons.

 

[IceHawk]

12Alfa I don't think you're understanding the whole picture people are trying to say here.  What they're saying is that yes, ADATS is vulnerable to anti-radiation missiles (HARM) as long as it's RADAR is active, any air defence system is, there is no invincible/undetectable anti-aircraft system.  There is nothing that can be done about RADAR being detectable as of yet.  However, to minimize the risk to ADATS from aircraft carrying HARM style missiles, we would need to have some form of air superiority.  That is where the Americans and our allies come in.  As long as our skys aren't flooded with enemy they stand a fighting chance.  Anyother way the ADATS system mitigates the risk is by networking as mentioned earlier.  One ADATS put's itself at risk by turning on it's RADAR to feed "dormant" ADATS nearby with targeting information.  The idea being that since RADAR can see farther than the missiles shoot, having sleeper ADATS spread out gives the site a larger area of missile coverage and POSSIBLY even the ability to shoot down a HARM carrying aircraft before it comes in range itself to shoot at the active RADAR site (however that ability is purely speculation on my part, ask an Air Defence gunner to be sure).  ADATS is equipped, also mentioned earlier, with Infra-Red and other optical eqipment, however optical targeting systems are by definition limited to visual range and depending on where the ADATS is located may be somewhat usless.  Go to this site: http://www.sfu.ca/casr/101.htm if you want to learn more about Canadian anti-aircraft capabilities and other cool stuff as well, it's an interesting read.

 

[MedCorps]

Right...  So I was (just) taught that the wartime AD Bty has 2 x SHORAD (read: ADATS )Tps and 1 x VSHORAD (read: Javlin) Tps.  This is incorrect? 

We talked about the end of Skyguard (is Canada going to sell it or war store it?) But is the VSHORAD troops for sure going to be a thing of the past?  The troop am talking about has 6 weapons dets each in a Grizzly.  Humm... what will the Res Force AD do if they get rid of Javlin?  It seemed like a good idea for point defence.... humm...

Cheers,

MC 

 

[twohig]

The Javelin system has it's uses for point defence, covering dead zones, placed in a temp kill zone, etc...  I don't necessarily agree on the reasons that it is on it's way out, but I'm just an AD gunner, what do I know.
The ADATS does give off a lot of EM emissions, but to be able to "see" farther than your optics LOS, you still need radar.  The radar is able to give you a target that may not yet have a LOS with you, and if your in C3 mode, only one ADATS is burning while the others are sitting silently scanning waiting for a target.  Our radar is also a passive radar, not a tracking radar, it doesn't lock on to a target, thats the gunners job to do it manually.  That is also why chaff or flares don't confuse the missile, because the missile is guided all the way in to the target by the operator.
The operators aren't just sitting there waiting for the radar to pick something up, they are constantly scanning the sky and the ground for possible targets.

 

[IceHawk]

Actually, that's a pretty clever way to defeat chaff, thanks for the info!!  I've heard rumblings from someone I know at Shirley's Bay in Ottawa that the CF is working on a true passive radar system that has no emissions and simply listens for echos off aircraft from other EM sources such as FM radio stations, TV signals and other transmissions that invisibly flood our air.  The exactly working are undoubtedly classified and I wounldn't even want to guess at how it works but I think it's an interesting concept nonetheless.

 

[Petard]

Interesting article, and food for thought considering Canada divested it's ground based air defence capability a few years ago, but the need for all arms air defence sure didn't go away
http://groundedcuriosity.com/a-shared-responsibility-growing-our-understanding-of-air-defence/

 

[Colin Parkinson]

Sadly we won't have the capacity to build 3 positions and our guys upon seeing drones will have to resort to rifle fire to bring it down, 1939 ADA for sure.

 

[MilEME09]

There is a project to get us new shoulder fired AA weapons but its still in its infancy and mot expected to have anything delivered till the mid 20s

Sent from my LG-D852 using Tapatalk

 

[Old Sweat]

Essentially we are accepting going into battle with an open flank, exposing our troops to observation and attack from above.

 

[GK .Dundas]

We are once again expecting someone else  to do the heavy lifting . what  will we do (aside from die in job lots? ) when they can not arrive in time to do something we should already be doing. Apparently aircraft are a product of someone  else's  vivid imagination Aircraft do not exist  or least that seems to be the official position.

 

[Cdn Blackshirt]

Who made the determination to eliminate our air defense and self-propelled artillery capability?

 

 

[Colin Parkinson]

Likely the same people who felt we didn't need tanks, ATGM, pioneers or heavy weapons in Infantry battalions.

 

[dapaterson]

The same ones who, in the 1990s, decided to keep bands and eliminate fitness instructors in the CAF.

Priorities...

 

[Loachman]

Who made the determination to eliminate our air defense and self-propelled artillery capability?

This can be traced to the latter days of WWII, when the Allies had air supremacy and the Canadian Army re-roled many Air Defence troops into Infantry.

The Great Awakening in the mid-eighties saw us acquire ADATS, but the threat was once more assumed to have evaporated once the Soviet Union and Warsaw Pact collapsed.

Now it's Tradition.

 

[Bird_Gunner45]

The same ones who, in the 1990s, decided to keep bands and eliminate fitness instructors in the CAF.

Priorities...

Incorrect. The demise of the Ground Based Air Defence is almost entirely a self inflicted wound by the artillery branch. The decision to divest the Javelin and 35mm was driven by the desire of the branch to re-roll reserve AD units and focus resources on the ADATS, as the intent (2005/2006) was to have the ADATS moved to the direct fire squadron. Once the DFS met its fate, the intent for the ADATs changed to use the system as a low level air defence radar and integrate it into the Local Air picture via Link 16 and the ADSI for use in Afghanistan.  However, the technology used for this (which was from the MMEV project) couldn't push the local radar feed to the ADSI due to issues with the ADATS radar.

At the same time, 4 AD started to focus on ASCC and UAS deployments (Sperwer and Scan Eagle) as a means of deploying soldiers. The addition of the UAS started the move towards the transition to the "GS" regiment as the resident UAS expertise became a product of 4 AD.

So, this left the GBAD with only 1 system which was basically undeployable, mechanically unreliable, costly to run, and logistically heavy and a regiment full of SME's in STA. The cancellation of the MMEV also left no clear way forward. There was, at one time (2006) and intent to take Phalynx off of the Frigates to give them to 4 AD as a C-RAM capability, which fell through, and to have the regiment kitted with avengers for the Olympics (2010) which fell through. Moreover, the artillery branch wanted to get into HIMARs, so there was a project at getting HIMARs to fire both SS and SA missiles, which clearly also fell through. Thus, the GBAD was left with no weapon systems once the ADATS was divested in 2012/2013 and no real plan for replacement.

From discussions with many pers in Ottawa it was clearly laid out that the army was concerned about GBAD but the artillery branch was more interested in divesting the capability IOT clear PYs and money for things it deemed more important, such as STA and HIMARs.

On a side note- the RCAS GBAD cell was discussing the inherent issue with defending against a MUAS and came to the AAAD conclusion. The inherent problem with C-MUAS is that you can detect the systems but they would be extremely difficult to target the system directly. The easy solution would be to jam the video feed, rendering the system useless, but requiring some sort of jamming capability. The second option was to engage the system via AAAD, which would be extremely difficult to say the least. The third option would be to engage the control station.

The proposed SOP was that once a launch was detected the main effort would be in identifying where the control system was (since they would need a LOS and would need to be relatively in the open and within 3-5 km of the unit being targetted) based on where the detections were spotted and engaging the control system via artillery or other effect. For those being targeted, the SOP would be to adopt a posture akin to the old "actions on air attack" where the units attempts to hide or disperse before the MUAS can target it and call in their own effects.