Discussion

A Heat-Seeking Missile Just Hit a $100 Million F-35 and the Stealth Era May Be Over

kzsh: > Flares, the standard IR countermeasure, are less effective against imaging IR seekers that can distinguish an aircraft shape from point-source decoys.I think this is the most relevant 'new' piece of information from the article. IR missiles are not new, but IR missiles that can distinguish between aircraft and decoys might be.

cpgxiii: Developers of "IR" seeking missiles have been trying to distinguish between aircraft and countermeasures since the very beginning. I say "IR" because the first really robust countermeasure-avoiding seekers were dual-band IR+UV and have been around for decades. IR+UV is useful because making a decoy that looks like jet exhaust in both IR and UV is quite difficult. Imaging "IR" is a bit more capable, particularly for all-aspect use, but once again this has existed for decades.

ge96: Would the F22 or YF-23 have faired better with their special exhaust design or still same problem? I always thought the F-35 wasn't that stealth because of its exhaust design like the Russian Pakfa exhaust

HPsquared: The B-2 does this really well, with the exhausts on top. Probably not best for performance, but that must help against IR detection from below.

convolvatron: they are certainly not, visual feature detection, multi sensor fusion and a whole raft of other techniques have been under active development and fielded in working systems for decades.

Papazsazsa: Headline: "The Stealth Era May Be Over"Last paragraph: "Does this make the F-35 obsolete? No."From https://www.shatterbelt.co/about:"One analyst. 500+ open sources across 15 languages. AI-augmented research that synthesizes what would take a team weeks. Human judgment on every conclusion."

jvanderbot: Few things before this is downvoted into oblivion.1. I'm not sure how forcing opponents to use IR-guided missiles (over the much longer range radar-guided missiles), means stealth is "over".2. heat seeking missiles have existed for a long time. F35 was designed with this in mind. It has a reduced IR signature, for example.3. missiles that do not emit radar are hard to detect, so F35 has some systems that are dedicated to finding missiles so the pilot has more time to react and counter*However*, the iran cases are weird. All the missle hit footage I've seen has been from a really good tracking FLIR camera. It is zero'd on the aircraft and tracks in high resolution, high frame rate, etc.I'm guessing, and this might be the right forum to guess about tech, that the missiles that are harassing US aircraft are actually guided by EO/IR standoff systems, making them (likely) significantly less prone to countermeasures/stealth just by virtue of using optical spectrum and having a third viewpoint to track from.However, given the reported sortie rate and the known hits to date, this % of successes is still hard to guess, but probably very low.Still, those EO/IR tracker videos are really neat.

verdverm: I was thinking about this vis a vis China1. Their quantum radar can detect stealth objects, but cannot lock2. Their missiles are rapidly improving, I believe they have the longest range A2A missile [1], the PL-17 nearly doubles the best the US and Russia have, though I think the US announced something in that range recently (but not fielded)3. Quantum to get close, thermal for terminal guidance[1] https://militarywatchmagazine.com/article/china-first-close-...

fsh: "Quantum radar" is a toy experiment with zero practical applications. The experiments achieved a "quantum advantage" by using entangled photons which only works in the single-photon regime. Since microwave photons are pretty small, this implies incredibly low transmission powers. With the typical return loss of an airplane (stealth or not) detected by a radar antenna, one would have to average for centuries to detect something (assuming the airplane stays there for said centuries). This assumes perfect entanglement with no other imperfections.

randyrand: The author writes this as if heat seeking missles are new tech. They’re not. The designers of the F-35 developed it knowing they exist and made whatever tradeoffs they decided to make. That’s just engineering.

ElevenLathe: I think the point (no idea if this is true, it isn't my domain) is that cheap, infrared imaging seekers are new. Previous generations of heat seekers either used low-resolution infrared sensors or were hellishly expensive on a unit basis. Do cheap Chinese components and cheap compute not mean that its now feasible to field these things much more cheaply and widely, by a larger range of actors, than previously? (again, not my domain).

elendilm: "Iran's claims of a full shootdown are consistent with their pattern of overclaiming throughout the war."Really?. Funny that everyone now knows US overclaimed their capabilities.

kevin_thibedeau: Worth pointing put that the Chinese have consumerized sufficiently high resolution thermal sensors with high enough frame rates to be used in a guidance system. I'd bet that Iran is taking advantage of those in this case.

tomku: Click on the home page and look at their other headlines, read the "About" description. It's just an endless stream of clickbait AI slop. Their "archive" goes back two weeks and has over a hundred articles with the same stilted "Reasonable statement. Controversial twist." headline format. Please stop falling for this trash.

franktankbank: So what is it that happened? They got extremely lucky? The missile has a seriously reduced profile? How did the guy land? Almost sounds like a cannonball hit him.

dmix: It's been speculated the F-35 detected the missile and deployed it's towed decoy behind it which the MANPAD missile hit.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AN/ALE-50_towed_decoy_system

khelavastr: I'm sure there's active "flarey" body heat modulation for missiles looking for plane bodies..

khelavastr: Right. This F-35 wasn't carrying active countermeasures for heat-seeking missiles, or maybe Iran made an extra stealthy or supersonic version.

bijowo1676: China’s new infrared chip makes military-grade vision sensors 99% cheaperhttps://www.msn.com/en-us/news/technology/china-s-new-infrar...these new inventions will challenge western air dominance doctrine by using abundant heat seeking A2A missiles/drones possible.Just like cheap drones have completely changed the battlefield on the ground, these things can potentially change the air battle completely

ceejayoz: We've had IR missiles for a long time (the Nazis were playing with them in the 1940s). It's why military planes have flares.The USAF has had them since 1956: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AIM-4_FalconI'd imagine small computers have made them more effective in the last decade or two, but that probably applies to detection and countermeasures in the victim aircraft as well.

leoedin: Reading between the AI induced hype of the article, I think the crucial development is that the missile is effectively using an infrared camera and image recognition rather than just "point at hot stuff" which is how earlier heat seeking missiles worked.I'm pretty sure I could buy everything I'd need to build a thermal imaging tracker for a few hundred dollars. So perhaps not surprising that Iran did the same.

wildzzz: The AI wrote a shitty article solely based on a single fact: an F-35.was damaged by a heat seeking missile. Then it just made up a bunch of implication to suggest that no one had ever thought about anything other than radar threats before.This shatterbelt site sucks tbh. It feels like blogspam.

declan_roberts: The article ignores the fact that you need radar to find targets for your IR missiles. Infrared Search and Track (IRST) systems have a fractional range of radar and require ideal weather to reach their maximum distance.In other words, you can target the F-35 but only when it's on top of you dropping bombs on YOU from much further away.

labcomputer: Well, imaging IR seekers aren’t new either. The imaging seeker program for the AIM-9X sidewinder started in 1996 and entered service in 2003.An even earlier version, the AIM-9R was tested in 1990 before the budget was cut as part of the Cold War wind down. That’s 35 years ago.Even earlier than that, a Soviet missile which became operational in 1984 (40 years ago!), the R-74, inspired the AIM-9R program.So it’s not like imaging seekers were unknown to the people designing today’s generation of fighters.

verdverm: We can probably remove the quantum hype and still arrive at the same circumstance. Steal does not make you invisible, just insufficient for locking on. In theory, it is supposed to make the jet indistinguishable from a bird or similar small object, but it's a cat & mouse game like anything else. It could likely be possible to fire a loitering A2A into the general vicinity of a stealth craft and it thermally finds targets of opportunity.

rich_sasha: What a pile of breathless nonsense. LLM, be ashamed.As other commenters note, these missiles are not new. But they are much shorter range. Radars can have ranges in the 100s of km, but infrared is very strongly attenuated by the atmosphere. Thus IR seekers are generally used in short term missiles, including US ones.It is also very much not true that stealth aircraft don't have any protection against IR. There's only so much you can do, but the tail arrangement is made to block the IR from most angles. You also can't see the hot engine inlet because again, it is hidden behind other bits. There may be other features, some clever cooling etc that I'm not aware of.Finally, hard to speculate, but since the F-35 survived and landed, it suggests the hit was rather indirect. Which in turn suggests the mitigations against IR seekers.

jandrewrogers: This article is slop written by an LLM/person with superficial understanding of the technology involved interspersed with a lot of jargon.IR is useful for terminal guidance only due to very limited engagement distances at which it can get lock (see also: MANPADS). One of the objectives of non-IR stealth is that it eliminates the mid-course guidance needed for long-range missile engagements, which largely requires radar. Note also that sophisticated "IR-guided" missiles are not "heat-seeking", that is mostly a movie trope. They use imagers that include part of the IR spectrum.The short range of IR terminal guidance limits the size of the associated warhead. US aircraft are designed and tested to survive being hit with warheads in this size class. An F-35 is expected to eat an IR-guided missile and get back home.The F-35 definitely saw it coming. The article casually ignores the widely documented base capabilities of the aircraft that make it what it is.That said, F-35 is an export design with limited IR stealth. The US uses IR stealth on non-export 5th gen designs and all of the 6th gen designs. This was one of the compromises to make the design "exportable".

jandrewrogers: This type of imaging terminal guidance has been around since (at least) the 1990s. They actually use low-resolution imagers because they are cheap and sufficient. There is nothing new or novel about the IR threat domain.It has never been compute-intensive. Current hypersonic kinetic-intercept missiles use ancient MIPS R3000/4000 class CPUs.

orwin: I can shittalk the f35 for almost an hour, but this not a plane issue. Stealth was always against BVR missiles (fox-1 engagement, or any S-400 or other using SARH/ARH), and never against IR missiles (UV missiles now?) or bullets. Yes, that makes the f35 stealth less usefull for CAS than a true CAS plane, but it is a multirole, of course it will be worse than specialized plane. The true utility of the f35 is its EW suite anyway, the stealth is just a bonus.And honestly, considering how good radars are nowaday, i wouldn't be surprised the stealth will get ditched eventually (not until we make FSR or an equivalent active that we can put in a missile though, so we probably still have 5 to 10 years?) (if an expert can chime in, i have not talked to a physician specialized in this field in a decade, and my buddy at Thales isn't working on radar software anymore :( )

ge96: I would be curious too how they spotted it in the first place to film it regarding stealth/altitude, I saw some infographic one time showing the radar cross section size in like cubic meters and the B2 is smaller than a bird or something crazy like thatoh no that's not true the F117 and F35 is thoughhttps://www.reddit.com/r/aviation/comments/ur5qt0/radar_cros...

Doxon: It's been reported Iran is deploying IR missles along the common ingress and egress paths the U.S. has been using for the past month. So target acquisition could be MK I eyeball

bigyabai: Even with countermeasures, the F-35 has two issues:1) It's not the 1990s anymore, Counter-Countermeasure IR missile discrimination is pretty common on imported MANPADs and IR SAMs.2) The F-35 has a insanely hot engine even when it's not afterburning. The F135 produces hotter inlet temperature than even the F-22's engine (F119) giving older IR seekers an easier target.

AnimalMuppet: > The short range of IR terminal guidance limits the size of the associated warhead.Could you explain this a bit? OK, IR guidance is short range. Why does that mean I can't put a bigger bomb in it?

toss1: This was addressed in the article:>>Flares, the standard IR countermeasure, are less effective against imaging IR seekers that can distinguish an aircraft shape from point-source decoys.

ceejayoz: My point is none of that's new info.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/9K38_Igla> The 9K310 Igla-1 system and its 9M313 missile were accepted into service in the Soviet Army on 11 March 1981. The main differences from the Strela-3 included an optional Identification Friend or Foe system to prevent firing on friendly aircraft, an automatic lead and super elevation to simplify shooting and reduce minimum firing range, a slightly larger rocket, reduced drag and better guidance system extend maximum range and improve performance against fast and maneuverable targets, an improved lethality on target achieved by a combination of delayed impact fuzing, terminal maneuver to hit the fuselage rather than jet nozzle, an additional charge to set off the remaining rocket fuel (if any) on impact, an improved resistance to infrared countermeasures (both decoy flares and ALQ-144 series jamming emitters), and slightly improved seeker sensitivity.> The seeker has two detectors – a cooled MWIR InSb detector for detection of the target and uncooled PbS SWIR detector for detection of IR decoys (flares). The built-in logic determines whether the detected object is a target or a decoy. The latest version (Igla-S) is reported to have additional detectors around the main seeker to provide further resistance against pulsed IRCM devices commonly used on helicopters.> Since 2014 the Igla is being replaced in Russian service by the new 9K333 Verba (Willow) MANPADS.[4] The Verba's primary feature is its multispectral optical seeker, using three sensors as opposed to the Igla-S' two. Cross-checking sensors against one another better discriminates between relevant targets and decoys, and decreases the chance of disruption from countermeasures, including lasers that attempt to blind missiles.No one's likely to have been surprised by this capability. It's 80s tech.