The Bizarre Way Radar Was Invented | Secrets Of War | Timeline

one of the great privileges of working at history here and making films together with our team at timeline is the access we get to extraordinary historical locations like this one stonehenge i'm right in the middle of the stone circle now it is an absolutely extraordinary place to visit if you want to watch the documentary like the one we're producing here go to history hit tv it's like netflix for history and if you use the code timeline when you check out you'll get a special introductory offer see you there [Music] thank you the modern day battlefield is not composed solely of soil nor is it limited to the airspace over land today the battlefield is extended over airwaves the ether the precious electromagnetic spectrum in a remote controlled war this vital territory must be controlled this is no computer game entire nations and continents are at stake it's a deadly serious form of battle it's called electronic warfare in its simplest form electronic warfare is anything done to interfere with an adversary's electronic systems and all the things done to prevent an enemy from causing similar interference electronic frequencies control everything from an intercom radio communication between a pilot and his back seater to radar to a computerized star wars type satellite the systems that use the electronic warfare spectrum and the jammers that counter them have been developed in the tightest secrecy and have often turned the tide of war in a world where virtually all weapons systems are now controlled by electronics electronic warfare officers have perhaps the most at stake in battle people liken this form of warfare to a game of chess where one side makes a move and the other side makes a counter move i would liken this to a lion tamer going into the cage you'd better have the chair with you when you go and the whip because if you don't handle it right that lion will have you and you're a long time dead [Music] in the united states the best and brightest from rotc schools prestigious universities and the air force academy come to randolph air force base to train for this invisible battle they are given a lot of technical background they'll be taught how radars work how chaff works how in pretty much detail how a lot of the jammers work flares uh a lot of the other systems that are coming on speed and velocity propagation period it's three months of intensive training requiring an understanding in engineering physics mathematics and basic military strategy the teachers don't have to manufacture high expectations the students already ask more of themselves than any teacher possibly could i expect to be a fully qualified electronic warfare officer use any part of the electromagnetic spectrum to defend and jam against radar signals and also against missiles surface-to-air missiles coming up to attack my aircraft the training may be rigorous but the consequences of not knowing the job could cost an officer's life the lives of fellow airmen or even worse threaten national defense electronic warfare has developed into an essential component of american security [Music] it's deadly it is fast it is dangerous and it is always changing it's not something that that lives in a fixed place in space the first case of documented radio jamming occurred not during wartime but during an america's cup yacht race back in 1901 newspaper reporters wanted to get the results of the race out as quickly as possible so they could scoop their competitors they used spark transmitters capable of sending morse code to broadcast the position of boats from the race back to their offices knowing that two spark transmitters could not send a message simultaneously one wire service came up with a plan to beat the competition a single dash meant that the american boat columbus was in the lead two ten-second dashes meant the british boat shamrock was in the lead on it went until the rogue company got all its information through then the operator planted his morse key down and sent a morse dash lasting one and a half hours preventing the competitors from getting their information out certainly one of the longest and most underhanded morse dashes in history although the success of cryptanalysis proved to have far greater intelligence value than jamming enemy signals in the first world war electronic hijinks still played a role the british erected a chain of direction finding stations along the east coast of england whose bearings could establish the position of any ship or aircraft using radio in the north sea area the stations each sent out radio beams that when broken by a passing ship or aircraft would alert an operator that something was traveling nearby at that time air defense early warning systems were less sophisticated they depended on acoustical sound detection huge dishes were connected to headsets and men would listen for enemy airplane engine noise it would take the revolutionary discovery of radar to bring electronic warfare to the forefront of the battlefield throughout the 1930s the british air ministry had a standing reward of a thousand pounds to anyone who could develop a ray gun that could kill a sheep at a hundred yards [Music] robert watson watt in his attempts to discover the first death ray found instead that he could actually detect reflected microwaves off of metal objects like ships and aircraft it didn't take long for the british military to take notice the wad is often credited with being the inventor of radar other scientists in several different countries serendipitously discovered it around the same time during the 1930s we get radar being developed quite independently in the usa in france in great britain the netherlands germany japan and the soviet union and each one of these nations thought that it alone had discovered the secret of radar and was trying to exploit it of all these countries great britain was the most concerned of an attack from the air and the british military accelerated its research on radar it also looked for a means to outsmart the technology both to disable an enemy's radar and to learn ways to protect its own but the only people who understood radar and how to jam it were the inventors themselves it was rather like asking a mother to bear a child and then have to do a vivisection operation on it people just aren't like that but the military insisted on trying to find means to disable radar so watt and his crew put a spark transmitter capable of disabling the radar frequency being used in an old vintage world war one fighter they flew it up and down the east coast of england past several radar stations the story goes that these scientists didn't try too hard to jam their babies if the fighter was successful in jamming the ground stations the british government would have had a very good excuse for cancelling the entire radar program instead the british government made the decision to build a fence of radar sites called the chain home stations around the perimeter of great britain it took years to build the system but by april 7 1939 chain home stations stretched from the isle of wight in the english channel to the firth of tay in scotland in effect chain home allowed the british to blanket the english channel with radar coverage creating a wall of radar using multiple frequencies this gave the british the first radar barrier ever built one that would soon prove invaluable the saviors of great britain were people like watt and his radar stations as well as the fighters and the men who flew them the survival of great britain was insured starting about 1935-36 when they began to take defense seriously the vital importance of radar as an air defense system was not yet known but as the nazi threat and the winds of war blew across europe and towards the english coastline radar would very soon be put to the test in september of 1940 stood alone against the nazi menace hitler had overrun europe with relative ease and now set his sights on england the british war machine was just beginning to build the kind of air force that could fight off an attack but troops in england were still greatly outnumbered and out-gunned no secret to the germans or the british the gamesmanship for control of the ether began with the journey by edward taffy bowen a young civilian scientist working for the british air ministry on a blustery day in september 1940 bowen paced the platform at london's houston station gripping an innocuous black suitcase about the size of a bread box he was understandably nervous because he carried not only papers describing the british military's latest advances in radar technology but also a working magnetron radar a magnetron was a small advanced radar system that could be installed in fighter planes no other country possessed this technology if it were to fall into the wrong hands it could tip the balance of the war although the magnetron technology worked it contained glitches and the british didn't have the manpower and resources to work out all the problems but if they didn't get this radar in the nation's night fighters planes that were outfitted to counter germany's knight attacks great britain may have succumbed to the luftwaffe's relentless bombings winston churchill in a bold move to get this technology online quickly decided to share all of britain's technological secrets with scientists in the united states but nothing hastened the development of u.s radar more than the events at pearl harbor at 6 30 a.m on december 7th 1941 private joseph lockhart's cathode ray screen came alive with so much clutter that he thought it had gone haywire he was manning the radar station at upana on the northern tip of oahu after a systems check indicated all was well he decided that 130 miles offshore lay the biggest aircraft formation he had ever seen on radar a lieutenant tyler at the information center listened to lockhart's report and a bell went off in his head the army paid a local radio station to broadcast a specific musical number whenever aircraft were headed towards the island base this was a way of furnishing aircraft with a friendly homing signal by chance the song was playing tyler concluded lockhart's radar clutter must have been a flight of friendly bombers approaching and told lockhart to disregard the signal [Music] this was nothing conscious that the japanese did it was a failure in an american system but the thing was you hadn't learned to trust your radar as the british had been forced to do and i had great sympathy for the for the commander there on that day despite british and american work to perfect jamming techniques and countermeasures the first large-scale use of electronic warfare came during a german operation called cervios better known as the channel dash february 1942 three german warships the battle cruisers scharnhorst and gizenal along with the heavy cruiser prince eugene were trapped by the royal navy and breast off the brittany coast of france german naval gross admiral eric rader wanted his ships home he was afraid that if he took them out into the atlantic they would be hunted down by the royal navy as the bismarck was in 1942 instead of taking a long trip around great britain past greenland and iceland and then home the germans decided to take an extremely risky six-hour shortcut through the english channel audi calais in france and the cliffs of dover in great britain becomes the most surveilled piece of earth on the planet you have radars looking at airplanes radars looking at ships this area literally becomes a place where you cannot go and row a boat without getting noticed i interviewed the navigating officer on the scharnhorst and he told me that uh they the crew really were very frightened at having to do this operation he'd written his last letter to his wife because he really didn't think that they were going to succeed in getting through to germany the germans root plan included fighter cover escorting destroyers and torpedo boats but at its core was deception through radar jamming including fixed jammers along the french coast a heavily utilized system well known to the allies as these german ships passed the british radar sites the shore based jammers turned on their equipment at the time many of the best british radar operators had transferred to north africa those now manning the channel radar hadn't experienced this type of jamming before by the time they they got the whole thing sorted out the german ships were through the channel and they managed to make it back to germany this very bold operation was very successful it had always been clear that the germans had some sort of radar capability but allied code breakers and spies had yet to discover what that was rv jones a 28-year-old british scientist had been given the task of not only discovering the german radar grid but also of countering and eventually overwhelming it he was if you will a fantastic generalist and one of the things he had a particular skill for was understanding what the dangers of an enemy having radar technology was going to do to great britain in 1939 a mysterious package was found just outside the british embassy in oslo norway it was forwarded to jones since it contained top secret documents that appeared to outline germany's amazing advances in radar and rocket technology many in the british intelligence community thought the report was a hoax but jones believed its authenticity this became known as the oslo report and jones would often refer to its contents jones learned that the germans were beaming very high radio frequencies at britain from cleve on the german dutch border and from schleischwick holstein near denmark he presented these findings to churchill who gave him the go-ahead to carry out countermeasures this led in fact to several actual uses of armed force by the british to actually reach out and grab pieces of german radar technology so they could evaluate it and see where it was going british intelligence discovered that freyja the norse goddess of beauty was the german code name for a certain type of radar freya was used to search the ether for long-range threats another model called wurzburg could detect threats at short range and direct searchlights to expose raf bombers in the night sky jones and his team had a reasonable understanding of freyja technology but the wurzburg was still a mystery counter measures had to be found to neutralize the system if the allies hoped to recapture the european continent around 1am on february 27 1942 100 119 scottish paratroopers were dropped behind enemy lines in northern france near san brunova one group held the beach another secured the villa and the third stormed the radar facility a technician cwh cox a movie projectionist before the war was chosen to dismantle the wurzburg radar cox was supposed to have half an hour to dismantle the orchestra but mortar fire forced major john d frost the commander of the mission to order an early retreat cox still managed to remove the german contraption in half the time the wurzburg was loaded on a cart and pulled down to the beachhead with mortar rounds exploding everywhere the paratroopers were able to find the beach and help their comrades escape onto a waiting navy landing craft by 2 30 a.m one of the most daring operations of the war was over it was a decisive blow german air defenses along the coast were now partially blind allowing our af bombers easier access to the european continent [Music] during the second half of 1942 wynn salisbury an american scientist working on the harvard university campus discovered that the wurzburg radar could be jammed by dropping strips of aluminum foil over the target filling german radar screens with false echoes the foil was nicknamed chaff it took nearly a year before the allies agreed to use chaff in the field one of the worries was that the germans would realize its effectiveness and use it on bombing runs over london with no counter-counter-measure the english capital could become an inferno but allied commanders gambled on the theory that if they hit hard and early the germans would be back in their heels long enough for the allied scientists to come up with a defense for their own invention on a july night in 1943 bombers were instructed to dump chaff over the port of hamburg they had a box like a shoebox and in there was the right number of strips so that when they were pushed out the flare shoot they would give an echo the size of an aircraft and you can imagine that if you had 25 flying fortress bombers in a formation each of them putting out one of these shoebox sized amounts of chaff once every 30 seconds or so as they went through the flak defenses that put a lot of echoes in the sky for the enemy guns to shoot at jamming radar during bombing runs is one thing but to confuse an enemy into believing a fictitious army is ready to invade is quite another this is exactly what a series of electronic spoofs intended to do just prior to and during the most important operation of the war the d-day invasion one of the first priorities of this operation known as overlord was to knock out as many of the german radar stations in france as possible but it was just as important not to give a hint of where the invasion would take place for every target attacked in the area of the intended invasion two more were to be attacked elsewhere to keep the germans guessing for this deception dr robert cockburn head of british countermeasures at the telecommunications research establishment and his team of scientists were putting the finishing touches on the most elaborate piece of electronic wizardry ever to support a military operation the simulation on radar of two huge ghost fleets of ships and supporting aircraft to divert attention away from the main allied landings cockburn worked out a method of producing a huge radar echo by dropping lengths of metal foil from aircraft flying carefully arranged routes it was like building a huge radar reflector covering an area of 256 square miles the echo patterns appeared far to the north of the actual invading force just imagine the scene on that night there will be a half-trained conscript radar operator frightened sitting at a radar screen on the coast of france and suddenly he sees the huge radar echo in front of him and he telephones through to his headquarters and tells them what he's seen so does somebody to the left of him so does somebody to the right of him german commanders still feared another landing and failed to move divisions to normandy for weeks the allies had their foothold on the continent by the end of world war ii it was clear that electronics would be an integral part of any future war as the conventional war cooled down the struggle for superiority in the electronic war would continue to heat up [Music] the end of the 1940s brought peace and prosperity to much of the world but it was a fragile piece delineated by strict ideological borders russian and chinese communism versus western capitalism led by the united states the war in korea pitted one side against the other in a battle of north versus south and the war in the ether continued to play a vital role the russian-built radars that are being deployed in that country are very similar to the equipments that were in use in world war ii and indeed the b-29s carried exactly the same jamming equipment by and large that they had carried in world war ii u.s air force b-26s conducted raids to suppress flack and supportive b-29 bombing raids against north korea by actually bombing searchlights the radar or sound guided searchlights were used by communist gunners to illuminate the bombers overhead the lights proved to be a difficult target but the overall results of u.s electronic countermeasures chaff and b-26 searchlight suppression reduced losses from fighters and flack still in general the electronic warfare techniques used in korea were merely an extension of tactics used in world war ii as a tenuous ceasefire took effect between north and south korea the nuclear buildup between the soviet union and the united states began in earnest learning which electronic measures and countermeasures each side possessed was a primary objective in the deadly game of cat and mouse espionage that would be waged for years during the late 50s a new deadly electronic weapon emerged the surface-to-air guided missile or sand which depended on two-way communication from a ground radar station to continually maneuver the missile towards its target both the soviets and nato used sams but the trick was to know the exact radio frequency the missiles were using for guidance and obviously where the small mobile sam sites were located we had a passenger airplane and we had windows on the side in which we were able to hold this little device that was about probably 15 inches long and had a handle on it and we would point it in the direction of where we thought a sam site would be and we had a headset and we would hear the tones of the radar that was going on it was a game in which both sides knew what the rules were and we both played it but the game became deadly on may 1 1960. an american u2 spy plane took off from pakistan for an overflight of the ussr there was nothing unusual about the flight nothing that hadn't been done before and nothing the soviets hadn't seen before [Music] there were times when the soviets would send migs up but again we knew that only if somebody got a wild bug that he would try to shoot us down but for whatever reason the soviets suddenly shot down the u2 what really made u.s intelligence nervous was what the soviets might learn from the downed plane it carried a granger box containing some of the latest u.s countermeasure electronics including sophisticated jamming devices to help protect the plane from sam technology had the soviets recovered this equipment intact u.s planes might have become more vulnerable to attack to this day it's not clear what they learned if anything from pilot francis gary powers down due to in vietnam more sophisticated surface-to-air missiles added a new and lethal dimension to aerial warfare vietnam really was the turning point for electronic warfare you now have anti-aircraft guns fighters radars control centers and surface-to-air missiles all tied together in a large defensive network although the germans had dabbled in crude guided missiles toward the end of the second world war nothing as lethal and accurate as the sam had been used in wartime the downing of the occasional reconnaissance plane was one thing but bringing down scores of fighter bombers was quite another the north vietnamese had a sophisticated and integrated air defense system developed with the latest soviet technology it included fansong radar numerous sa2 surface-to-air missiles as well as radar-directed anti-aircraft artillery guns known as aaa of course the triple-a just tore up the airplanes it was hitting us very badly then they moved up in altitude so that they could stay out of the range of the aaa and of course the sams came up they began to get hit by the sams it was clear that the fighter bombers couldn't survive down low against the aaa so a method had to be devised to defeat the sams the north vietnamese missile system included several elements the first of which was named spoonrest which was a circular scanning surveillance radar this generally indicated where the targets were the other radar was the fansong and it had a very narrow angle allowing it to track targets at close range the wide and narrow band radars had to work in tandem to be effective supposing there were flies in the room and you had a flashlight to try and illuminate them it would be very difficult to find where they were on the ceiling if you didn't if you didn't have the light on in the room to give you a rough idea where to look if you had to search with your flashlight it would take you a long time to find them these integrated sams were highly effective destroying eight percent of u.s fighters in vietnam and forcing planes to fly lower making them vulnerable to ground fire eventually american pilots learned that it was possible to evade sans if the skies were clear when a missile was launched pilots could actually see the puff of smoke from the ground as well as get a signal on their radar they'd turn their aircraft on either side so they could see the missile clearly from their cockpits the first thing they wanted to know is can i see the side of the missile or is it pointing straight towards me obviously if it's pointing straight towards you then that's the time you've got to do something about it pilots were told to push the nose of the plane into a full dive when the missile got within one mile and then pull up so they could get inside its angle of maneuverability sams had limited steering ability so this type of evasion usually worked the problem was sometimes that coming behind the first missile was the second missile and perhaps even the third missile and you might do a magnificent job of avoiding the first two but the third one gets you so that was always a problem the day i was shot down there was another pilot shot down and captured as well and one of the challenges that you have is when there are multiple sams multiple surface-to-air missiles in the air picking out which one is aimed at you and dodging it complicates the the problem rather significantly a man named inky halgen working at eglin test center in florida found the answer it was simple but extremely effective because it took advantage of the flaws in vietnam's radar system halgon developed a flight of four aircraft equally spaced in a jamming pod formation aircraft were to fly exactly 1500 feet apart so the ground radar operators would only see a series of jamming strobes on the screen but they couldn't pick out exactly where the aircraft were provided you were to sit there and hold your formation you could see the missile streaking through the jamming formation and going off way past you perfectly harmlessly after the countermeasures effort had been running smoothly for about nine months the north vietnamese radar operators became very adept at seeing through the jamming if american pilots wavered in the formation by even a few feet the missiles found their mark north vietnamese were very good because they saw jamming every day as they got better they were able to see through and they would get aircraft that's straight outside this 1500 foot box so to speak and they could hit those aircraft the u.s air force and navy weren't content to just jam the radar sites or depend on evasive action to neutralize the sands they wanted to eliminate these sites on the ground in order to make the skies safe enough for their bombers to hit targets with impunity this secret mission was given to a new breed of fighter pilots the wild weasels these crews flew modified f-4s or f-105s on missions dedicated solely to attacking radar sites a pilot navigated the plane on its dangerous course a backseat electronics warfare officer operated the complicated equipment that would foil the ground radar defenses it was an heroic assignment but also a very dangerous one [Music] there's an argument to be made that if you were in the air force in the mid to late 1960s the single most dangerous job you could have is being a wild weasel crewman a wild weasel was essentially electronically naked without jammers like bait on a hook the pilot trolled for radar signals waiting for the enemy to lock up on them we were the decoys as far as the mission was concerned we wanted them to come after us because we were prepared to go after them the weasels wanted the north vietnamese to launch as many sams as possible so that the other weasels in the vicinity could fire anti-radiation missiles back at the sites on the ground a strike was a heat-seeking anti-radiation missile known also as a harm that could home in on a radar beam follow it until it reached its source and then explode taking out the radar once we would see a radar that was on the air we would try to line up and fire a strike at him to go after and shut down at least shut down his antenna in the meantime the sam was locked on and coming straight for the weasel at mach 3 the weasel pilot had to dog fight the missile and get out of the way if he was lucky there was only one do you feel the shock wave as it goes past you but his fuse isn't working right or he may be going somewhere else or who knows why he doesn't explode but yeah it's it's a scary situation but you don't have time to think about being scared only three medals of honor given to pilots flying fixed-wing aircraft during the vietnam war all went to people who were doing the anti-sam mission the wild weasel mission the secret tactics learned in vietnam were invaluable to the development of electronic warfare and set the stage for its stunning operation years later in the gulf war as u.s involvement in the vietnam war wound down new developments in electronic warfare were left on the shelves untested many of the weasel backseaters or electronic warfare specialists were reassigned to desk jobs in the states when i left vietnam i went to the pentagon this was in the early part of 69 and i became responsible for the operational aspects of all fighter ew and the wild weasels so i got involved in the development of the new systems the new wild weasel more sophisticated radar monitoring equipment went into the conversion from the f-105f to the f-105g it carried standard armaments plus the new harm shrike missile at the same time the air force was enhancing the f4 wild weasel or the f4g each f4g had ecm or electronic countermeasures material that could foil radar detection blistered into the side of the aircraft every time intelligence information indicated a change in soviet sam technology computers designed to jam them aboard u.s planes became obsolete and had to be replaced but a bunch of us in the pentagon decided we should take advantage of this intelligence information and start the drums to get the digital warning system in the in the inventory so that we could make changes to it through software rather than hardware they were able to get money from the air force obtain top priorities and get a testable device ready by july of 1972 and then we wanted to find a place to test it so we knew that the soviets wouldn't probably cooperate with us in eastern europe so i asked the israeli air force if they would help us and the israeli air force said yeah we'll help you except we would like to have that for our airplanes if we test it for you a team of logistics specialists engineers and other contractors went to israel in august of 1972. they flew several missions on israeli f4es against egyptian air defenses which did have sa-3s though not the sa-4s the tests proved very successful whenever the enemy would change frequencies on their sams or any other characteristics it would be just a matter of reprogramming the plane software instead of tearing out a whole system to adjust to the changes so we took the analog system turned it into a digital system and got this in the inventory and this the the grandson of this same digital system is now flying in the f-16s of our inventory today the lessons learned in israel would be put into practice two decades later when coalition forces faced another threat in the middle east iraq was the biggest geographic target the united states ever tried to take on with the exception of the soviet union it was protected by what was arguably the finest integrated air defense system ever seen called together in the late 80s by different systems from the soviet union china germany and france it included the finest radar computers surface-to-air missiles fighters and guns iraqi money could buy known as the kari system it was woven like a big spider web throughout the country protecting virtually every piece of saddam hussein's domain general chuck horner commander of the air war in the gulf was tasked to find a way through this secret maze it is august of 1990 and you have a terrible problem you have just been put in charge of potentially having to take an air force and go into this environment and conduct a large bombing campaign you're going to have to bomb strategic targets around iraq you're also going to have to go over here and you're going to bomb an army into submission down in kuwait and all of this is tied together you have to find a way to obviously take down and destroy the carry system what do you do general horner didn't hesitate he chose brigadier general larry henry a wild weasel backseater who flew in southeast asia considered by his peers to be one of the most skilled tacticians in electronic warfare it would be henry's job to break the back of iraq's carry system with the iraqi armored forces you would find sa-6s sa-8s sa-9s which are very capable missile systems and when you lay that with the command and control system in kuwait and and long range surface air mitchell such as sa-2s their armor and attacking forces would had a significant umbrella over the top of them my job in a nutshell was to erase that and knock out that umbrella larry henry and his team spent two months pouring over secret blueprints from a french company that put the system together they got classified specifications from around the world for all the different radar and communications links and started looking at them as a complete system it's not just the hard shooting elements the fighters the sams the guns it's also the power the electrical grid the communications links the radio links the computers that run it electronically the curry system was like a medieval fortress with big high walls that you had to either break down or get inside and attack from within henry found a way to get in electronically and helped design a plan that became known as phuba's party was henry's call sign when he was a weasel the party was an electronic fireworks display the magnitude of which had never been seen the very first thing that happened in the assault was the army apache helicopters went in and took out the very low frequency radars early warning radars those radars have a low enough frequency that so that you can start you can begin seeing a stealth aircraft henry and his team knew that they had to make the iraqi sam operators think they were picking up signals from a sizable strike force before the operators would be willing to light up their radar just minutes after the baghdad control centers had been destroyed about 40 bqm 74 target drones were launched from saudi arabia simultaneously aircraft coming in from the west dropped a whole series of israeli-made glider decoys called tactical air launch decoys at this point there was something that on radar looked big enough to be a strike force so the iraqi operators of the radars and sam sites all turn on their radars and they begin to engage and probably something between oh 100 and 200 surfaced air missiles go off flying at these decoys and they've turned their radars on at that moment every aircraft that could carry a high-speed anti-radiation missile came up and fired at those iraqi radar sites the results were spectacular over a hundred iraqi radar of all varieties never came back on they were destroyed for the rest of the war we had a sequence of events i think which allowed the stealth airplanes to come and go unseen and bomb and it's very disconcerting i think if you're an enemy and you don't see an airplane but you're getting bombed how did that happen and then you see airplanes and you're getting bomb but they're not really airplanes and when you try to destroy the airplane somebody destroys the thing you're trying to to shoot those airplanes down with i believe that the electronic combat contribution to the air campaign was significant and helped a lot within the first few hours of desert storm coalition forces had managed to take control of the skies puba's party was a complete success the gulf war confirmed that in modern battle he who controls the ether controls the war [Music] almost daily there's a new advance in electronic technology scientists technicians and engineers are constantly incorporating those advances into weapon systems new and old in hopes of gaining an edge in the electronic battlefield electronic warfare never stands still measures and countermeasures change constantly and it takes a concerted effort not only to keep up with those changes but also to develop new electronic capabilities one only hopes that in the next confrontation he has tricks that the enemy hasn't thought of yet this is that whole pendulum of measure countermeasure you have to constantly update the electronic order of battle you constantly have to get that information out to the planners and make sure they know okay they've moved these sam sites from here here and here and they've moved them down here here and here over 16 000 people worldwide make up the air intelligence agency arm of the united states air force their mission is to exploit defend and attack and to ensure superiority in the air space and information domains many of these experts are stationed at kelly air force base in texas as part of the air force information warfare center and the joint command and control warfare center sensor harvest is a command and control warfare analysis system they rely on it targets countries by looking at specific areas where they might be vulnerable to electronic intrusion the nice thing about sensor harvest it gives the air component commander a variety of options beyond physical destruct i found in my time in bosnia last year that going and blowing things up was the least desirable plan sensor harvest uses advanced computer technology to provide vital information on ew targets in this case it's a fictional country what we do is we gather information where things such as an electronic order of battle will show us where some where the enemy has positioned their equipment and their military units it takes about six months for sensor harvest to analyze and build a virtual country including sam sites radar electric grids and other vital electronic areas once built this intricate information serves as a valuable tool for operations out in the field as well as for strategists in the pentagon this is the target aircraft that's uh the missile is aimed at often the distance we have the firing aircraft is going to fire an infrared air air missile at the target once the the missile is shot we'll see once the simulation starts the aircraft will fly in this direction and the missile will chase it this corner up here shows the eye of the missile this is what the missile is looking at so we fire we can see that the missile starts to track and it's chasing the airplane this next scenario is the same as the one we just showed you except this time the aircraft will release three salvos of four flares [Music] but even with the best technology and the best minds in the world perfection is still unattainable witness operation allied force the nato air war to dislodge the serbian army from kosovo in 1999. this was the first major war fought totally from the air and every high-tech asset available to the nato forces was put into play one of the most advanced was the stealth f-117 fighter when one was shot down it sent shockwaves throughout the electronic warfare community they didn't put together an ew war that took out the yugoslav air defenses immediately the early warning radars that can see stealth a little bit were still operating the f-117 flew the same route exiting the target four nights in a row on the fourth night the serbians were waiting for it and shot up a blanket of missiles that the stealth flew into there's an old engineering adage if you can't repeat it you haven't done it and the yugoslavs were never able to do it again so it shows that there was a counter-counter measure that was brought in by the u.s forces to prevent that happening again does the rapid evolution of electronic warfare having come so far in such a short time suggest that the next wars will be fought exclusively in the electronic spectrum will there be bloodless games of electronic wizardry won by those with the better gadgets or tricks measures and counter measures what we have seen is that the attacks on the troops probably achieve very little at all but the attacks on the yugoslav economy like knocking out bridges and knocking out their electrical system from the nato point of view there was nobody killed they could have carried on that action just as long as was necessary the yugoslavs saw their economy being taken out all around them the only solution was to surrender maybe this is the pattern of the war of the future then again maybe not one of the great misconceptions about electronic warfare and air power in general is the idea that they can win wars by themselves they can't what they can do though is they can enable ground forces naval forces forces that have the ability to provide presence it's impossible to predict exactly how future wars will be fought but it is certain that electronic warfare the wizard war born when the first electric pulse coursed through a metal wire is now as ubiquitous as the microwave oven in kitchens and it's just as clear that a nation's ability to stay ahead in this ethereal chess match will determine its viability as a military force in the future

Channel: Timeline - World History Documentaries

Views: 399,687

Rating: 4.7891426 out of 5

Keywords: History, Full Documentary, Documentaries, Full length Documentaries, Documentary, TV Shows - Topic, Documentary Movies - Topic, 2017 documentary, BBC documentary, Channel 4 documentary, history documentary, documentary history, radar documentary, invention of radar, death ray, electronic warfare, battle of britain, radar technology, electromagnetic spectrum

Id: 8JmaMlkiBoA

Length: 51min 23sec (3083 seconds)

Published: Sun Aug 30 2020