im not sure i used the right tags but what ever, i want to talk about aircraft design and tech , i was thinking recently about stealth and electronic warfare , both are used to not be detected by radar but the question is , is it better for an aircraft to have stealth or electronic warfare , you may think why cant it have both like the f35 but i was thinking about this if an aircraft like the ea18 can jam radars and in result the radars cant see or track the aircraft why dose it need stealth , you may think that a stealthy aircraft whouldnt be detected at all unlike an aircraft that uses ew that the enemy would definitely know is there just not very well, but think about a country like the usa , if it whould ever go to a war with a major country like russia or china it whouldnt send in one or 2 aircraft at a time it whould send multiple and heres the thing where i think an ew aircraft will be better , an ew aircraft jams the enemy radar which means that the radar cant see where and how many aircraft there are , an ew aircraft can fly solo and jam enemy radar and then fly with 10 more aircraft and a jamed radar wouldn't see the difference , and a disadvantage that a stealthy aircraft has is its limited payloads, in weight and number stealth aircraft lack in payload capacity , so in this situation where you want to attack and do significant damage and not just drop 2000punds of bombs on a target , to understand it more lets compare the f15 and f35 payloads , the f35 can carry up to 22,000 lbs , compared to the f15s 29,500 lbs and dont forget that stealth is not invisibility and even today there are radars that can detect stealth, so think in 5-10 years well probably could detect and track stealth better then today so you couldnt fly stealth aircraft becouse they whould be detected , but if we have an ew aircraft it could mask as many aircraft as needed , and the enemy whouldnt know if its one or 100 , so is it really better to invest in aircraft that can be detected when you want to deliver a large payload , think about this like that , we dont know the real cross section of the f35 but lets say its
0.01 m² and the f15 is 25 m² and an Advanced long-range radars that uses low-frequency VHF/UHF radars can detect aircraft with an rcs of 0.0001 m² but (but) it cant track the target and needs a target that is closer to be trackable , so a stealth aircraft can be detected but not tracked , and what happens with an ew aircraft , it is detected but not tracked , so whats the difference if both aircraft can be detected but not tracked , the difference is the payload an aircraft that is not design to be stealthy has a much larger payload so theres no point in stealth aircraft when you want to deliver a large payload which is 99.99 % of all usaf bombing missions , so do we need stealth aircraft ? no . today they look useful , but its becuse there havent been a major war and most wars where there are stealth aircraft involved are thought between nations with less advanced radar that is not capable to track stealth but already today there are countrys who can , so if theres a war with russia,china, or any other country with modern radar then stealth is not stealthy any more becouse it wont be able to hide the aircraft
