I shared my analysis with you, since you disagreed please do explain.
The advantage of occupying the high ground has been known for thousands of years... that is why satellites were so useful and a hypersonic missile flying above the effective altitude of most SAM systems operating around the world is a huge advantage on its own, but with an unpredictable trajectory and very high speeds makes them very very difficult targets.
Flying high means even very distant targets are not hidden below the horizon for a very high flying weapon.
Why wouldn't a hypersonic missile expect data transmission from the enemy target?
Why would a target send its own position information to a missile coming to destroy it?
The missile might use its own sensors to detect where the enemy forces are located and modify its flight path to compensate for any movement since the target was originally defined to the missile before it was launched, but it is not going to listen to enemy information, which is obviously going to try to deceive it as to where the juicy targets are.
The target might well be a moving target and it might change its position.
Moving targets are easier to see from the air.
IIRC, most of the missiles fired by the S-400 are hypersonic. Aren't they receiving data transmissions from the enemy target ?
Most are active radar homing and therefore receive radar reflections from the targets but those signals originate and are controlled by the missile itself... it wont expect the target to emit anything at all.
Stealth aircraft can be detected by low frequency radars.
They certainly can, but not by just any old low frequency radar... why do you think Russia has spent large amounts of money creating digital AESA long wave radar antennas that didn't previously exist? Take a radar from WWII and it will be a long wave radar too no doubt but that does not mean it will detect and track modern stealthy aircraft...
In fact several Russian VHF radars were marketed as anti stealth radars.
They are... and a lot of work went in to making them suitable for tracking stealthy targets...
The west has not bothered to develop anti stealth radar because Russia didn't have any stealth aircraft, so most western defence systems can't deal with stealthy targets at all.
We have heard the stories about US fighter planes going up against F-22s and not being able to get locks even though it is within visual range... western fighters are not designed to fight stealthy fighters.
Stealth is like camouflage... you can wear bright orange uniforms... a MiG-29 from the 1980s for instance, or you can wear a camouflage uniform... a modern MiG-29 with no gaps in the panels and reshaped parts to reduce signature, or you can wear a ghillie suit like a sniper... Su-57 and LMFS... the difference between the US and Russia is that the US wants all their troops to wear ghillie suits but that limits the amount of equipment they can carry, and gets caught on things and has lots of problems. Russia just wants a few hundred Snipers in Ghillie suits with the rest of the force in body armour and more heavily armed.
Thermal imagers means Ghillie suits are not as effective as they used to be.
Despite this the Russian Air Force continues to procure stealth aircraft. Hardly makes any sense.
They are buying stealth killers... fighters... essentially long range snipers to kill enemy snipers and fighters at max range before they can do damage, and they are buying stealth cruise missile carriers that fire weapons 5,000km or more away from their targets to make them harder to see and deal with...
They are not making their entire fleet all stealth like the US was trying to do till they realised how expensive and flawed that would be because there are a lot of problems with stealth.
Carrying your weapons inside your aircraft limits how many weapons you can carry and remain stealthy, carrying weapons externally means you are not stealthy even after external weapons have been launched because of the pylons... you might as well use a faster longer ranged non stealthy aircraft with external weapons and more weapons... which, with the F-15EX is what the US is now doing and with the MiG-35 and Su-35 and MiG-41 Russia was doing all along.
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