Australia Uses Fighter Plane to Sink Drug Ship

You don't need to explain to me the fact that the Air Force has had its head in its dirt chute regarding EW for a very, very long time.

Well the Tactical Air Force perhaps, the SAC guys were always into it. Penetrating into the Soviet Union on an EWO mission required all the tricks. Including blasting the air defense sites along your flight path with nukes mounted on SRAM missiles or SCAD (Subsonic Cruise Armed Decoys, which were to replace the Quail decoys but morphed into the ALCM along the way. The old Quail had a repeater to make the little it look like a B-52 to the enemy radar.

Quail

SCAD/ALCM

Yes, we'll have to disagree.

We do agree that the Prowler is much better suited to the Navy's need. 3 people do much better at identifying signals, which is very useful for the Navy's need but of minimal value to the USAF's role.

If that is the definition of a flexible platform, then you are right. If being able to go deep, stay long and provide almost twice the number of transmitters is flexibility, the the Raven was better.

Speed can be an asset in going deep. On one occassion, we tried to convince a Mig to fly south after us to where the F-15s were...the Mig thought better of it, but I wouldn't have tried something like that in a Prowler. While nice to have, I didn't consider it all that useful, so we at least partially agree there.

We strongly disagree about transmitters. Having 10 internal powered by very stable generators is vastly superior to having props spinning on pods on the wing, and carrying 4-8 of them, depending on fuel. In over 50 sorties over Iraq, I only had a transmitter failure once - so 1 out of over 500 attempts. In Prowlers, I normally had 1 pod failure every other sortie over Iraq (losing 2 transmitters out of 14 attempts). On one rotation, I rarely had more than half the transmitters work. I flew multiple missions where 2 Prowlers had less than 6 good transmitters between us.

In addition, the nose-tail jamming orientation of the Prowler makes it more difficult to keep jamming power close to the target than the side jamming of the Raven. The Raven also had a smaller dead spot - about 10 deg to either side of the nose/tail, vs problems with getting line of sight on any target on the far side of the aircraft for the Prowler.

I'm not an authority on how long it took to replace a bad jammer or exciter on taxi out - it never happened to me. But if you powered down an engine and dropped the canoe, all the stuff was there to work on. I believe there was fire suppression for the canoe, but don't quote me on that - I was never very good at things like that.

TEAMS sucked. The mission planning used in the final days of the Raven, when I flew them, was great. And the post-AMP navigation system was a thing of beauty.

We do agree that carrier landings are very hard on a jet and avionics, and that the USAF jets have a much easier mx problem to solve.

One area I am sure we DO agree on is the USAF's total stupidity on EW, and the professionalism of the Navy ECMOs. The USAF generals can't spell EW, let alone understand it. They worship at the altar of stealth. I've been lectured twice in the last 2 weeks about how the USAF 'is willing to assume risk in this area' to get funding for 2 or 3 more F-22s. One of these days, I'm going to shout, "Your F'n assumption, THEIR F'n lives!"

While I'm not a Prowler fan, I am proud of my time in them, proud of the service they continue to provide, and I admire the Navy's understanding of electronic warfare. I wish they could export 1% of what they know to the USAF.

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