I am afraid I disagree with what you are positing as they are not based on facts but pure speculation.
IADS threats are dangerous and the air losses from the Kosovo and Iraqi air campaigns are primarily from them. There is a wide body of published information on those air campaigns in terms of actual experiences - not theoretical. The Kosovo air campaign demonstrated that towed decoys were generally effective and the reason why currently all US and European platforms come with it as a standard protection feature - even the F-35. Standard defensive measures include the deployment of flares, chaffs and or towed decoy. Physically out turning as a defensive feature may be stuff of Hollywood.
Threat avoidance would be the primary goal through VLO/ECM but when that fails then the default is to activate disposable counter measures. There is no evidence from the report that the F-16 engaged in such measures when it was targeted. Modern ESM such as the Israeli ESM system would had classified the nature of the threat. Modern ESM are able to tell exactly what is the threat, what SAM system is in play and via their RF modulation whether the threat is in search, detection or tracking mode. The F-16 knew exactly how serious was the threat but is faulted for "professional judgement" by ignoring it.
So? Your own assumption (while we're on the subject of who's speculating and who isn't) was that jamming was out of the picture because the S-200 radar had achieved burn-though. At this point, if the missile is tracking true, your only option is to outmanoeuvre it. I was merely adopting your hypothesis for argument's sake and pointing out that even then, the F-16 should have stood a very decent chance due to the kinematics of the S-200, if the crew had not made an error of some kind.
Modern integrated ECM using deception techniques rather than noise activates automatically in response to detection of radar signals classified as threatening. Deception works by re-transmitting an appropriately modified copy of the waveform received from the threat, thus distorting the return seen by the radar - but it also means no received signal, no jamming signal. The pilot merely "arms" the system once he enters hostile air space, the rest of the jamming response is largely automated (though aural warnings and visual indications are given so the pilot can execute manoeuvres in support). Hence the notion that the pilot "forgot to turn on the jammer" is scarcely credible really - the EW system does that for him.
Frankly I am mystified by your view that burn through is some form of hypothesis. J/S is a very exact science in radar and EW.
Burn through in and of itself isn't a hypothesis, but your claim that it was the root cause of the F-16 shoot-down is. How you could read my message as dismissing the physics of it frankly mystifies *me*. I actually used the word "inevitable" in there!
What we do know (a fact) is the F-16 was hit and that means by default burn through was achieved.
It means no such thing. ECM can be defeated by other means, if the jammer signal is identified as such by whatever technique it can be filtered out, or (if it's a noise jammer that transmits constantly) you can try a HOJ shot.
We don't know any of that except the threat successfully engaged the F-16. The rest is your speculation.
I beg to differ.
First of all, the source you quote makes NO mention of burn-through, it merely states that the *passive* component of the EW system worked as advertised, that is to say it detected the threat and alerted the crew. So (on that count you're correct again) it wasn't for lack of situational awareness that the shoot-down occurred.
Second, that the S-200 has a very substantial minimum range because it can't engage targets with its four boosters still attached isn't speculation. Sources differ on how big exactly the minimum is, but the *lowest* figure I've seen is 7km, others state 17km. It's not speculation either that even after this the S-200, due to its *massive* size, will struggle to hit an agile target until it has burned off some more fuel, so against an F-16 the minimum range should effectively be longer still. It follows from these considerations alone that, whatever else happened, the F-16 must have been *at least* 10, probably more like 20km from the SAM site.
Third, that the wreckage came down inside Israeli territory is a confirmed fact too - the settlement in the vicinity is actually mentioned in the article you linked. Again, how close to the Israeli border do you expect the Syrians to put a S-200 site? Another indication that the aircraft can't have been all that close to the SAM site. In fact, on this point we don't really have to speculate at all, the following image is modified to show the precise location of the Syrian S-200 site closest to Israel from an original image created by respected analyst Sean O'Connor:
If you measure in Google Maps the distance from there to the approximate site of the F-16 wreckage you get ~140km, convincingly corroborating the above conclusion that (even allowing for distance covered after the hit) the aircraft must have been in the dozens of kilometres from the SAM site.
What it comes down to then, is whether several dozen kilometres is close enough to the S-200 for burn-through to occur, and I doubt that's the case. On the one hand, the Square Pair engagement radar is pretty powerful (100kW transmitter, no idea how much of that is lost before the antenna though), on the other hand the F-16 has a much lower RCS than the targets this fairly ancient system was designed to counter. At the site where you probably got your tables and diagrams from there is a quantitative example of the burn-through diagram, showing the cross-over between jammer and skin return at <5km. That's a fairly typical scenario and, since the low RCS of the F-16 likely offsets the high transmitter power of the Square Pair, it may not be too far from the truth for this specific engagement as well.
On balance, it probably wasn't burn-through, as I've been saying.
