Lesson 1 Flashcards#
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1. What are the five links of the air-threat kill chain, in order?
Detect → Track → Identify → Engage → Kill. The chain is sequential: breaking any one link defeats the engagement.
2. What happens at the Detect link?
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.
3. What is the difference between Track and Identify?
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.
4. Define Electronic Support (ES).
Sensing, intercepting, and characterizing emissions to build situational awareness — e.g., a radar warning receiver detecting and classifying a threat radar. ES listens.
5. Define Electronic Protection (EP).
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 defends.
6. Define Electronic Attack (EA).
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 attacks.
7. How does ES relate to EA?
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.
8. State the fourth-power law for radar detection range.
\(R_\text{max} = K\,\sigma^{1/4}\): detection range scales as the fourth root of the target's radar cross section, with \(K\) bundling everything the radar controls.
9. How much does a 12 dB RCS reduction change detection range?
12 dB is a factor of ~16 in power; \(16^{1/4} = 2\), so detection range is halved. Large RCS cuts give only modest range cuts — the fourth root at work.
10. If RCS reduction has diminishing returns in dB, why does stealth matter?
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.
11. What is the operational thread for the whole course?
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.
12. When you meet a new EW technique, what two questions should you ask?
(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.