re: PLAN Type 052 Class Destroyer
good point, but is the SAR technique capable of providing a height measurement to otherwise 2D radars?
Accurate height measurement requires a large aperture in the vertical direction. Networking a bunch of ships together would only provide a large aperture in the horizontal direction.
But, you can potentially get around that problem if you can contrive to put the compatible radar also on an aircraft, and add the aircraft to the network of ships via datalink. This way you can create a large vertical aperture as well as a large horizontal aperture, and thus use SAR techniques to provide height measurement as well as precise bearing and ranging measurements.
Better yet, if you contrive to put compatible radars on satellites and network satellites with the ships and airplanes, you would get a truly extensive 3D synthetic aperture radar environment that might just be extremely tough for any stealth platform to beat. Basically you can work the network to get the beam to arrive at the stealth platform from an any direction within an entire hemisphere. The network can continuously and rapidly vary the phase angle of beams from each satellite until it finds a combination where stealth platform would reflect the resultant beam back to one of the receivers.
This is why I suspect the days of stealth as an unbeatable shield is numbered. The wisdom of making major sacrafices in other area to achieve superior stealth in any military equipment expected to remain in use for more than 10-20 years into the future would be a blunder.
