# Lesson 1 Flashcards

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<summary><strong>1. What are the five links of the air-threat kill chain, in order?</strong></summary>
<div class="card-answer"><p>Detect → Track → Identify → Engage → Kill. The chain is sequential: breaking any one link defeats the engagement.</p></div>
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<summary><strong>2. What happens at the Detect link?</strong></summary>
<div class="card-answer"><p>A sensor returns enough energy to declare that something is present. Nothing downstream can happen until detection occurs, which makes it the highest-leverage link to attack.</p></div>
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<summary><strong>3. What is the difference between Track and Identify?</strong></summary>
<div class="card-answer"><p>Track associates successive detections into a trajectory (position, heading, speed). Identify classifies that track as friend, foe, or neutral. A radar can hold a track without correctly identifying it.</p></div>
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<summary><strong>4. Define Electronic Support (ES).</strong></summary>
<div class="card-answer"><p>Sensing, intercepting, and characterizing emissions to build situational awareness — e.g., a radar warning receiver detecting and classifying a threat radar. ES <em>listens</em>.</p></div>
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<summary><strong>5. Define Electronic Protection (EP).</strong></summary>
<div class="card-answer"><p>Protecting your own use of the spectrum from enemy EW and from your own interference — e.g., frequency agility, sidelobe blanking, anti-jam waveforms. EP <em>defends</em>.</p></div>
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<summary><strong>6. Define Electronic Attack (EA).</strong></summary>
<div class="card-answer"><p>Using EM energy to degrade, deny, or deceive the enemy's use of the spectrum — e.g., noise jamming a search radar or spoofing a false target into a tracker. EA <em>attacks</em>.</p></div>
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<summary><strong>7. How does ES relate to EA?</strong></summary>
<div class="card-answer"><p>ES feeds EA: you cannot jam intelligently a signal you have not first intercepted and characterized. The RWR-cues-jammer pairing is the canonical ES→EA chain.</p></div>
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<summary><strong>8. State the fourth-power law for radar detection range.</strong></summary>
<div class="card-answer"><p><span class="math notranslate nohighlight">\(R_\text{max} = K\,\sigma^{1/4}\)</span>: detection range scales as the fourth root of the target's radar cross section, with <span class="math notranslate nohighlight">\(K\)</span> bundling everything the radar controls.</p></div>
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<summary><strong>9. How much does a 12 dB RCS reduction change detection range?</strong></summary>
<div class="card-answer"><p>12 dB is a factor of ~16 in power; <span class="math notranslate nohighlight">\(16^{1/4} = 2\)</span>, so detection range is <strong>halved</strong>. Large RCS cuts give only modest range cuts — the fourth root at work.</p></div>
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<summary><strong>10. If RCS reduction has diminishing returns in dB, why does stealth matter?</strong></summary>
<div class="card-answer"><p>Halving detection range forces the threat radar twice as close, collapsing the defended area, opening gaps in the IADS, and shrinking the missile-commit window. The operational value compounds even as the dB returns shrink.</p></div>
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<summary><strong>11. What is the operational thread for the whole course?</strong></summary>
<div class="card-answer"><p>The B-21 Raider penetrating a modern integrated air-defense system (IADS). Block 1 is the threat (radar); later blocks build the toolkit to break each kill-chain link.</p></div>
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<summary><strong>12. When you meet a new EW technique, what two questions should you ask?</strong></summary>
<div class="card-answer"><p>(1) Which division is it — ES, EP, or EA? (2) Which kill-chain link does it attack? The classification describes the function, not the hardware.</p></div>
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