In an exercise, a stealth fighter does not have to be struck physically to be considered “downed” instead it merely has to be deprived of its advantage long enough that the rules declare that a missile would have hit its target.
It is the eternal lesson in engineering of the long-running legend of how a U.S. Navy EA-18G Growler flew through an exercise at the Nellis Air Force Base in northern 2009 and registered a simulated AIM-120 AMRAAM hit on an F-22 Raptor. The story was immortalized with the aid of a famous photograph of a Growler with an F-22 “kill” decal and a brief, informal explanation of it by the pilot who piloted the jet.
When journalist Stephen Trimble noticed the marking at Joint Base Andrews, the pilot was asked about the reason it was there and gave a very straightforward and direct response: because this is the EA-18G that killed an F-22, and that the outcome was a direct hit with an AIM-120 AMRAAM. They omitted at the time such details as would determine an argument in bar-rooms, how it was set, how much emit/deny had been made or not made, what assets were supporting, what could and could not be done by each crew, etc.
The matchup is useful even without the missing context, as it puts modern air combat as practitioners think of it, as an electromagnetic problem followed by a platform-versus-platform problem. The design of F-22 is based on low observability, high-end sensor fusion, and see-first-shoot-first (or shoot first) capabilities it can do at beyond visual range and control its own emissions. The essence of the business of the Growler is to carve what other aircraft are able to detect and communicate with through the receiver to create a picture of the spectrum and through the pods to disrupt radar and datalink reliant tactics. The “truth” of the fight in the kind of situation that Nellis is designed to operate is frequently the training goal: This is forcing the crews to decide in the face of confusion, latency, incomplete tracks, and lack of updates instead of perfect information.
Nellis exercises are part of a larger Red Flag exercise that is specifically structured as a contested combat training exercise in an integrated air, ground, space, and electronic threat environment. The result of those limitations is important since they can contract the normal playbook of a fifth-generation jet purposefully. With radar suppressed, or with datalinks suppressed or with the geometry requiring some circumstance, the fight may shift to timing and positioning, which a two-seat Growler crew, designed to operate in the spectrum during a tactical flight, can provide an opportunity to issue a simulated shot.
What the anecdote fails to back up is the shallow notion that jamming can “turns off” stealth. The ALQ-99 pods on the Growler have the potential to be useful in disrupting radar performance, although the emission of hard can also increase the ease of locating the jammer. A technical aspect that has been overlooked is that the situational awareness of the F-22 is heavily dependent on its electronic situational aids; the AN/ALR-94 has been reported as having the ability to perform precise passive tracking, and during development it was tested with a high-speed dynamic RF simulator that had the capability to simulate over 2,000 radar emitters at a time. Practically, a loud and broadband jammer may turn into a beacon-convenient to defeat denial, but risky because the enemy aircraft may take advantage of passive detection and missile guidance logic that relies not on a traditional radar lock.
The bigger trend is not novel: expensive aircraft are “killed” during training too often to be educational, in particular, when distance is forced, sensors limited, or forced merges used. Other exercises produced similar controversies when it was announced that the Raptor had simulated victories over other aircraft, such as a popularly discussed Red Flag Alaska exercise where close-range maneuvers very momentarily reduced the margin between the Raptor and the Eurofighter Typhoon. It is not the failure of stealth that is constant in these stories, but rather that stealth is a margin a very strong one that diminishes when the electromagnetic environment is turned into the primary weapon.
To engineers and operators, the Growler “kill mark” is not a scoreboard item, rather a memory, survivability lives in the full stack-emissions control, passive sensing, networking, tactics and training to break assumptions before a real adversary can.
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