Return to SAGE - Historical Notes
Table of Contents
- Sage Background
- The Jam vs CounterJam contest
The special battle of electronic countermeasures (ECM, jamming) versus electronic
counter-countermeasures (ECCM, antijamming)1 is mostly played out in the domain of
time and radio frequency rather than of time and space, as in conventional warfare, and that is the reason why ECM and ECCM operators need reference
to panoramic receivers that display signals on a time versus frequency display.
ECM was a very real threat even when the SAGE system began, yet its best long range radar, the AN/FPS-20 had no ECCM capabilities. It would have been
blinded during a real attack. In my opinion, the Russians would have trashed us.
Perceiving this problem, an attempt was made to correct the deficiency by installing
a variety of ECCM capable radars which operated at diverse radar frequencies; this concept came to be called frequency diversity (FD).
There was yet another problem, though it appeared to me not to be apparent to a lot of people involved with that system: tactics of the air battle between the interceptors and the incoming bombers were worked out at the SAGE direction center, whereas the electronic warfare battle happened one echelon down, at the radar installations. The two activities were well separated and did not have especially strong communications links, which - I think - was not a good idea. The ECCM buttons and panoramic video displays were located at the latter sites. I was in the first group of students that went through ECCM training at Keesler AFB, where I learned the details of the various FD radar systems (see further down), and when I finished that course I was sent to the Sault Ste. Marie (SSMADS) direction center, to be a radar inputs and countermeasures officer (RICMO), not to one of the radar sites (where I could have used that training). Best advice to a RICMO was “Let the people at the radar sites handle the ECCM; stay out of their way because you can’t see the panoramic displays.” The RICMO could relay assessments of the jamming situation and its severity to the weapons director (WD); otherwise, there was not much he could do. Given the circumstances, I believed that a good NCO could replace the RICMO. Was there anything else the RICMO could do? SSMADS was shut down and we were sent to DUADS (or at least most of us). In my case that other role happened at Duluth. I replaced a lost air surveillance officer (ASO) no less than four times (one was an actual fatality, when our ASO died in a T-33 crash). I spent more time being temporary ASO than RICMO (minimum rank for an ASO was captain, and I was still a first lieutenant). In desperation the senior weapons director (SWD) wanted to make me permanent ASO, which was not only denied by 30th Air Division but also used as an excuse to move me to 30th, to be its ECCM operations officer! Just before I left DUADS some notices about an upcoming passive tracking capability reached us. Now that made sense, an ECCM capability that would work at the direction center end. It had come up in the Keesler training program. I wish I could tell you what became of that at DUADS, but I finished my active duty tour before anything happened. I don’t even know if actually became a system asset, but it does illustrate one kind of ECCM (and I will take up some others further down). Passive tracking is a direction finding method that uses a jammer’s transmitted signal to find and track the jammer’s position. Turning on a jammer might blind an ordinary radar set by overloading its receiver, but the jamming signal can also be used as a beacon. Electronic warfare is not a one way street! This should call to mind missiles that can home on jam and anti radar missiles that home on a radar’s signal (as in the Wild Weasel attacks we used against Russian surface to air missiles in North Vietnam). ECM is a mixed blessing, and I think realization of that is what brought stealth into existence. There were some intermediate ideas, such as minimum skin paint coverage - holding the jamming signal to just enough (but the FD radars offered switch selectable receiver channels - ECCM or normal, etc. - and some receiver modes might reveal even minimal jamming signals).
Could it have been handled? You have to weed out the ghost tracks. I think the laptop that I’m typing on right now could be programmed to perform that task with great finesse, and these personal computers we take for granted today are far more powerful than the old SAGE computer! All aircraft fly at a characteristic cruise speed, but those ghost crossings behave differently - speeding up, slowing down, going steady at unexpected speeds. Yes, they could have been weeded out. For all the money poured into SAGE, it seemed to stay several steps behind where it needed to be. That was because the Pentagon people and Robert McNamara believed that mutually assured destruction was our only true line of defense. I believe it got worse after I left.
So lets go on to those FD radars and a few things about them. First of all,
An even broader historical account that includes
And what came out of all of that testing and system development? Could those
radars really deal with a heavy ECM environment. Some of the concepts were
not actually compatible with the SAGE system even though they worked well if you were just viewing the radar video. The usable results were specific
long range radar systems with ECCM capabilities
The AN/FPS-35 long range search radar: The AN/FPS-27 long range search radar:
Although it pre-dated the above FD radars, the
The venerable AN/FPS-20 did have an antijam upgrade, i.e., to the AN/FPS-64: An historical tabulation of radars types (over the years) is here: So you had VHF radars (the FPS-24), UHF radars (the FPS-35), L-band radars (the FPS-7 and FPS-64 modifications of the old FPS-20; the FPS-7 could change frequency, though not rapidly), and microwave radars the (FPS-27). An enemy plane flying through the SAGE system would likely have double or even triple coverage from adjacent search radar sites, so if one intended to hide beneath jamming, it necessitated adding more jamming equipment to the bomber, thus a payload weight penalty. Basically, FD alone was not a bad idea. A measure to counter ECM was called a fix. Generally, the fixes in the transmitter were the most effective, followed by those in the antenna system, followed by receiver fixes, and finally by those involving video processing. TRANSMITTER FIXES Of the transmitter fixes, the best was frequency agility:
Of course, the jammer’s power was spread out over a much wider frequency range, which only degraded the radar’s performance. Narrow band spot jamming is what blinds a radar set, which is what would have happened to the FPS-20. Another transmitter fix was pulse compression: In this technique the radar transmits a longer than usual pulse, say 20 microseconds long, and during that transmission the frequency is varied (chirped). If nothing were done the longer pulse would degrade target resolution, but the received signal was passed through a special electronic filter that compressed the pulse to, say, 5 microseconds, restoring resolution. It was as if the radar pulse was transmitted at much higher power, enough to cause dielectric breakdown in the waveguide, so it was a burn-through-the-jamming fix. It was not a selected fix; pulse compression was in operation at all times. There were other transmitter fixes like staggered pulse recurrence frequency, which defeated some pulse-type jammers and eliminated interference from other (friendly) radars. ANTENNA FIXES
RECEIVER FIXES SAGE radars had to operate at a constant false alarm rate (CFAR) to avoid overloading the SAGE computer. CFAR and some resistance to jamming was gained by Dicke and Logarithmic-type receivers, though not what I want to call spectacular. The Dicke method involved wide band amplification, followed by hard limiting, followed by narrow band amplification. Logarithmic receivers simply process signal amplitude logarithmically. VIDEO FIXES These eliminated some types of pulse jamming and aided when chaff drops blossomed. But one night during a SAC/NORAD Big Blast exercise a chaff drop was caught in the jet stream, north of the Canadian border, and the MTI of several radars along with clutter mapping couldn’t cope with it. It very nearly shut us down! After that I realized that weather conditions during a Russian chaff drop could mean the difference between a general thrashing and a total disaster. Never doubt that inattention to the electronic warfare situation can be devastating.
Two questions are worth asking: If WWIII had actually happened in 1962 (the Cuban Crisis), what would have been the result? The Russian bombers would have used a strike and roll-back approach, nuking radars and direction centers and fighter bases on their way to the other strategic targets. We would have shot a significant number of them down (and probably some of our own interceptors, too!), but we would have only blunted the blows. I very seriously doubt that I could have survived it. The cost in military and civilian lives would have been staggering. I’m glad WWIII didn’t happen on my watch. Now that we’ve been through glasnost and perestroika and the Berlin wall coming down, can we feel safe from nuclear annhilation? Personally, I think the prospect is worse now than it ever was. But that’s just my own opinion. What do you think? _______________________
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