This brings up another thing I wanted to ask an expert such as yourself.
Could China network some kind of future stealth UAV over a large area to serve as some type of multistatic radar network? You can have the UAVs alternately turn their radars on-off to prevent them from being engaged. Maybe even in the far future have them also fire missiles?
The problem lies that UAVs cannot carry large and powerful radars without being big and expensive themselves.
Second, bistatic networks only work if the emitter is stationary and whose coordinates are well known to the receiver. The receiver also must know exactly the frequency and when exactly the pulse is emitted. I wonder if the network needs some fixed target somewhere that can be used for baseline measurements. In any case, you want all the receivers and emitters networked.
For that to work, both UAVs must also be able to precisely track each other, and all the UAVs in the network must be able to precisely track each other. It kind of gets really complicated and you generally want to follow the KISS principle as much as you can.
So does the difficulty lay in identification rather than detection?
Yes. But high resolution radars also have another problem, they tend to be short in range. To get better range, you need more power.
You can also go to the extreme end with low frequency radars. At some point, the radar frequency is so long it ignores shape issues. A thing is a thing no matter what the shape is. However, these kinds of radars can detect, but cannot be used for fire control tracking and resolution.
The third way is sheer brute power. At some point, no matter how you shape a thing, it will have to reflect back because the radar emission is that strong. The Russians figured this out to be around 20kw. Now you are aware of the Inverse Square Law, so the further out the radar, the weaker it gets---
"In physics, an inverse-square law is any physical law stating that some physical quantity or strength is inversely proportional to the square of the distance from the source of that physical quantity."
However, this applies to emission that is being spread equally from its source. It does not apply to focused and directed beams.
So a partial answer against VLO targets would be powerful electronically scanning radars, preferably with a very wide range of frequencies through mode selection, from low frequency to high frequency for high res work. You also have to match that with back end processing, the ability to process and discriminate weak signals, etc,.
