Well put. This will offend many - it often causes outrage when I speak - but it is something USN
has long neglected - and continues to neglect. During the Pacific War, it was the Japanese which
used radar passively more often. By late war, the US tendency to 'radiate with practically everything
practically all the time' made it very practical to simply listen for the enemy. Besides, Japanese
radar transmitter tubes had very limited life - using receive only was more practical on a continuous
basis. Shinano in fact detected the sub that sank her FIRST - by use of passive radar detection.
Her captain made remarkable errors and miscalculated what he faced and where it was - but EW gave
him the opportunity to evade: he simply screwed it up. That was common in WW2. By my day, a generation
later, one could detect a US carrier a thousand miles away (more or less) - and the few carrier admirals
smart enough to go passive would, every few years, astound the rest by beating them in war games.
Never mind we got the same German missiles the Russians did, and similar German scientists and engineers,
and developed them first actually (Loon was a V-1 with 4 inch longer wings for example, and huge numbers
were built to use against Japan, later in 1945, from many platforms). Never mind, we were STILL ignoring
the missile threat over 20 years later - and intelligence the enemy was training to use them in the South
China Sea caused great alarm at the top. At that time, most USN SAM systems were combat ineffective -
we averaged 60 rounds per kill (and my ship only carried about 27 - 28 minus a practice round was typical).
The first two systems - Talos and Terrier - were total failures for years (read When the Bird's Didn't Fly
in the USNI Proceedings) - until Terrier was redesigned to use the Tartar as its second stage. Not that
one defeats missiles by shooting them down. It is MUCH more efficient to use EW. Yet we didn't take that
seriously until 1968 - when it was too late to do it gracefully. So we did it ungracefully - using emergency
funding (no time to wait for Congress, or for industrial R&D). That program gave us numbers of things -
in the long term: chaff launchers, jammers of sophisticated new types, the Phalanx point defense gun
system (designed for a 30 mm gun - a gun that WAS built for the A-10 - but incredibly NEVER was fitted to the
mount! - the 20 mm was supposed to be 'war emergency' for Viet Nam. But we took many years even to get that.
We also got the EW rating. But we did away with it. Not one person who ever met an EW thinks that was a good
idea - but it made bureaucratic sense. Yes - communications specialists do essentially the same thing - but
they don't do it as operations people - and they are not anti-air warfare specialists. But we have NOT faced
a peer enemy (until now - probably we face two of them today) - and we get away with fielding ships WITHOUT
even their point defense guns (when I went aboard USS Chung Hoon, her Phalanx platforms were empty - no funding
to fill them). Precisely because EW is an art as well as a science you need people with operational experience
using it in combat operations - very different from communications specialists who are more oriented to trying
to understand enemy comm signals. DOD generally is so proud of its 'joint' capabilities it misses the forest
because of the trees: people do not train in the context of EW, do not "think electronically" and are overly
dependent on active signals in every sense. USN used to have deception specialists to attach to ships - called
Beachjumpers - and they were impressive. But they went the way of the dodo (and the EW rating) - although I did
see a call to bring them back a couple of years ago. When no one in the crew thinks electronically, we risk
being upstaged by enemies who thing SIX YEARS is merely the FIRST level of education for their EW people. They
have post post doctoral specialists for which we have no English word because we have no comparable level of
training. It isn't just about hardware, it is about how you train, how you exercise, and how you think.
I once played RN Sandy Woodward in a manual game with many players, almost all of them US military officers, or ex
military officers, or NCOs/Petty Officers. I put the Royal Marines on two carriers and sent them via a deep
Southern route to the Falklands, but I stayed on an LPD in a large task force headed directly for Stanley -
broadcasting every morning a demand the Argentines leave or be thrown out. They could DF my signals and
thus know where to send search planes. I focused on air defense - we put Army AA and SAM units on the big
decks of container ships and LSDs etc. But my carriers were radio silent, and under the command of the Marine
commander UNTIL he was safely ashore - HE controlled the carriers. It worked - the (very professional) team
playing the Argentines - with a vastly superior land based air force - and a carrier which had their very best
squadron (the Second Attack Squadron, which serves as an air demonstration team in peacetime) - were entirely
surprised when we landed "too soon" - because they did NOT detect the passive approach of the first wave invasion
force. I modeled the operation on a US Sixth Fleet Commander who managed to become 'invisible' in the narrow
Med - by being both radio passive with his main force - and giving the enemy something to listen to where he
was not. Once we had the Marines ashore, we could operate Harriers and helos from land to cover them, and we could
go hunting with the carriers - cutting the islands off from the mainland (in a sense the British never achieved -
C-130s flew into Stanley until just a few hours before the surrender, in spite of one hit on the runway by
one thousand pound bomb in the first air strike). We turned Goose Green airstrip into a makeshift forward
operating base. But we were unopposed BEFORE we landed because we approached radio passive. USN usually leaves
TACAN on - any plane or ship with a commercial interrogator gets instant range and bearing from that! No need
to DF the signal. [I hard wired TACAN on my ship so it had a mode which seemed to be on but in fact was standby -
not able to transmit - because I could never get turning it off into an official EMCON plan; it was only on if I
thought no one might use it against us.] I used to try to train captains in EW - but they could not grasp why
one might want to turn radar off! It is like celestial navigation - we did away with it! [It was returned to
curriculum for officers only last year, a pleasant surprise. Someone has figured out war might not be play
nice nice.]
