Modern Carrier Battle Group..Strategies and Tactics

Re: The End of the Carrier Age?

Good arguments there gentlemen. As to the question of finding CV battle groups, what if one finds an aircraft that is detected and gives off signal that confirmed it's NOT commercial therefore military. Once that plane location, heading, are detected, one can draw a circle (image wise) around it for 600 - 1,000 miles in accordance to its range ability. With that alone one can start aiming for other signals to detect other combat planes around that area, from there with the process of elimination, one can get the GENERAL location of the carrier. Finally, with a general location, one can go ahead and focus on that general area instead of a large swath of ocean to find the carrier. What do ya think?

Re: The End of the Carrier Age?

Engineer said:

LOL!


ELINT satellites will specific look for military signals. Not to say that a CVBG can't go into radio silence, but this is a mean for detection nonetheless.
there are commericial ELINT system. as for signals, you don't know what signal is if you don't have existing data base that has been analyzed. the reaons its call electrical intel is because it collect RF signal, then people analyzed, store in database, then when need it missile can use correlation with detected signal against existing database to track/id targets. tell me whats the signature between an anti air emitters from china vs russia vs N.korea. there is a reason US navy plane fly around to gather different emitter signature for analyzing.

SAR is essentially an AESA radar. It is called SAR because of the mapping capability.

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SAR and other radar can detect ships. however like i mention before due to large area and multiple detections. the ships detect on radar image only cover few pixels, not enough to ID it, without revist, zoom in or other info.

Re: The End of the Carrier Age?

Engineer said:

And as I have pointed out, SAR can provide large coverage in a relative short time. This isn't about using mapping algorithm for detecting ships, but about the capability of the radar itself. The resolution require depends on the type of target you wish to detect, and for a large target such as an aircraft carrier, you don't need ultra high-resolution so that you can see fishing boats as well.


I have already done so. See this post.


Once again, radar can be used to identify the ships. Unlike optical sensor, radar can also measure frequency, phase, polarization in addition to intensity of echoes. Polarization is routinely used in remote sensing to distinguish types of surface.

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and as i said many time before if the radar cover a large area, the resolution goes down, a carrier might only occupy 1 pixel. unless you know the RF frequency signature from US carrier, you are not gonna able to ID it.

the surface of ship and its wake can be detect by radar, but in a million sq mile there is gonna be alot ships, many are large steel ships.



its much easier to detect and ID the ship if the coverage of image is smaller, and the carrier occupy large amount of pixiels so image processing and other algorithm can recognize it. much more difficult if the radar image cover large area.



ships detect by SAR after post-processing. without further zoom in, processing, you can't id which is which. the more ship it detect the more resource need it to ID those.

Re: The End of the Carrier Age?

"SAR is essentially an AESA radar. It is called SAR because of the mapping capability"

Comment: I think you are confused about how Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) works. The SAR works similar to a phased array, but contrary of having a large number of parallel antenna elements like a phased array, SAR uses one antenna in time-multiplex. The different geometric positions of the antenna elements are result of the moving platform.

In other words the motion of the antenna along a track causes it to resemble a very large antenna and enjoy the increased resolution that results. The synthetic aperture is produced by signal processing that has the effect of lengthening the antenna. Using such a technique, radar designers are able to achieve resolutions which would require real aperture antennas so large as to be impractical with arrays ranging in size up to 10 m.

In other words it is like taking a series of snapshots of something as you move along a track and then integrating those individual snap shots to produce one detailed picture of the object in question

Re: The End of the Carrier Age?

NikeX said:

"
In other words it is like taking a series of snapshots of something as you move along a track and then integrating those individual snap shots to produce one detailed picture of the object in question

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Exactly. the radar send pulse then receive it, it doesn't take entire image of the cover area. the data is send to processor 1 to few pixel at a time then combine into one 2d image. data can be processed during that time. but each pixel represent a position in a 2d image, and its value can be use to identify its a ship or not.

looking at the raw SAR image, thats the actual data send by the receiver. not something processed just for human eyes only

Re: The End of the Carrier Age?

Regarding using aircraft leaving and returning to the carrier, the USN has already prepared tactics that handle that situation. In one case aircraft previously launched from the carrier would return to some large surface ship and go into a landing pattern around this vessel, lets say a large tanker, and then appear to land.

What would really happen is that the aircraft would approach the large vessel and then drop below the radar horizon to skim the waves to fly several hundred miles away to land on the real carrier. There they would land in radio silence or under the control of the E2 to recover aboard the carrier. In fact there is a series of signals that can be relayed to the aircraft attempting recovery via the landing light system (the meatball) and controlled by the LSO to where radio silence is never broken. That and other tactics allow the carrier to perform flight operations right under the nose of an enemy conducting a search for the carrier. I got this from an S-3 pilot.

Re: The End of the Carrier Age?

s002wjh said:

there are commericial ELINT system. as for signals, you don't know what signal is if you don't have existing data base that has been analyzed. the reaons its call electrical intel is because it collect RF signal, then people analyzed, store in database, then when need it missile can use correlation with detected signal against existing database to track/id targets. tell me whats the signature between an anti air emitters from china vs russia vs N.korea. there is a reason US navy plane fly around to gather different emitter signature for analyzing.

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So you are saying governments routinely gather signals for analysis. Good, then "you don't know what the signal is" isn't a problem.

s002wjh said:

SAR and other radar can detect ships. however like i mention before due to large area and multiple detections. the ships detect on radar image only cover few pixels, not enough to ID it, without revist, zoom in or other info.

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Again, you are repeating yourself. I have pointed out in this post that once ships have been detected, narrow beam can be used for identification. In another post, I have given an example of a pyramid search scheme for identifying the most interesting targets first. Your pixel analogy is still flaw, as pixel only contains intensity, whereas information from radar contains frequency, polarization, and phase information that help in identifying the targets without zooming in.

»Ø¸´: The End of the Carrier Age?

The US can't hide any of it's carriers. China could dedicate a real time imaging micro-satellite constellation to every carrier in every ocean on earth and use that to track them 24/7 and guide missiles towards them in conjuction with drone sweeps/radar/etc.

Re: The End of the Carrier Age?

"...with a general location, one can go ahead and focus on that general area instead of a large swath of ocean to find the carrier. What do ya think?"

Comment: The job of the Carrier battle group is to make sure the enemy search is focused on the wrong area and cause him to waste precious resources chasing shadows and ghosts while the Carrier is hundreds of miles away performing its primary mission.

Re: The End of the Carrier Age?

Engineer said:

So you are saying governments routinely gather signals for analysis. Good, then "you don't know what the signal is" isn't a problem.



Again, you are repeating yourself. I have pointed out in this post that once ships have been detected, narrow beam can be used for identification. In another post, I have given an example of a pyramid search scheme for identifying the most interesting targets first. Your pixel analogy is still flaw, as pixel only contains intensity, whereas information from radar contains frequency, polarization, and phase information that help in identifying the targets without zooming in.

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A active radar only contain its own frequency, the receiver use it to determine its own transmit signal or not.

you can prioritize detected target, however all target has to processed individually to eliminate the false target. its not an simple task, it take time and resource to know which one has the high priority. also if the cover area is too large there won't be enough info for you to prioritize the target. in the SAR, you only see bright spot, to determine its speed, length, width, direction its heading for every single targets, you need better information. which mean zoom in/better resolution on every target, and process all the target through the algorithm.



its tough to know info of all those ships without further information.

read this

SAR is an active sensor, transmitting its own energy, and
then measuring the return scattered by the earth’s surface
back to the satellite’s antenna. SAR processing is the
transformation of raw SAR signal data into a spatial image

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