New radar and missile technology have resulted in a “flattening of the earth” that puts even extremely low-flying aircraft at much higher risk, a Royal Air Force officer said this week.
Air Vice-Marshal James Beck, the RAF’s director of capabilities and programs, said that when he was flying the Tornado multirole combat aircraft in the early 2000s, it was still an “underlying assumption that ultra low flying would allow a formation the ability to penetrate deep into enemy territory without being detected by their integrated air missile defense systems.”
The assumption was that the hostile radars could not see through the ground, and this “underpinned our tactical thinking for many decades,” he said, addressing the UK’s Royal United Services Institute on…more
Source www.businessinsider.com
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