E-2 Hawkeye
Posted on 06/13/2025 9:40:57 AM PDT by Alas Babylon!
Aseismic shift has occurred in the Trump administration’s new defense spending plan that is just emerging when it comes to the USAF’s airborne early warning and control (AEW&C) predicament. The service’s E-3 Sentry Airborne Warning and Control System (AWACS) aircraft are dwindling in number and rapidly aging into unsupportability. The proven and in-production E-7 Wedgetail, based on the Boeing 737 and serving with multiple allies, was supposed to bridge the gap between the E-3’s retirement and pushing the sending part of the mission to space-based distributed satellite constellations. You can read all about this here. Now, if the administration gets its wish, that won’t happen. The E-7 will be cancelled and the E-2D Hawkeye, currently flown by the U.S. Navy, will step in to fill the gap.
This major turn of events came to light today as Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff U.S. Air Force Gen. John Caine, and Bryn Woollacott MacDonnell testified before the Senate Appropriations Committee. MacDonnell is Special Assistant to the Secretary of Defense and is currently performing the duties of the Under Secretary of Defense (Comptroller) and the Pentagon’s Chief Financial Officer. In 2023, the USAF announced its intention to purchase E-7s, potentially as many as 26 of them, as replacements for a portion of the E-3 fleet.
At the hearing today, the question of the current future of the USAF AEW&C force came from Sen. Lisa Murkowski late in the hearing. Murkowski is a Republican from Alaska, where fighters, tankers, and E-3 Sentry jets launch regularly to intercept foreign planes, primarily Russian fighters, bombers, and surveillance aircraft, over the vast arctic wilderness. Chinese H-6 missile carrier aircraft also appeared off Alaska last year for the first time, as part of a joint mission with Russia. Chinese air and naval presence in the region is only expected to grow in the future.
(Read more at source)
I am retired USAF, and while the E-2D is a US Navy aircraft, it makes sense rather than spending billions of $$$ on another stop-gap aircraft program.
AVIATION PING!.......................
E-2 Hawkeye
plus it’s a smaller target with less heat signature. br>
Plus the E2-D production line is still making aircraft for Japan, who dropped E-7 possible procurement in favor of the E2-D.
E-3 Sentry
E-7 Wedgetail
There are going to be a lot of warhawk politicians upset that their stocks in companies to supply this change are going to lose money.
No wonder it was cancelled. They put the spinning hypnotic disc on the top rather than the bottom.
What I know about this fits in a thimble, but I have to ask: When does drone technology come into play for this function? Is that what comes after the interim use of the E-2?
And it’s a solid, proven platform...
The prop-driven E2 is what’s replacing the E3.
“the E-2D Hawkeye, currently flown by the U.S. Navy, will step in to fill the gap”
Not surprised with the shift. We already have Hawkeyes in the mix, they are cheaper to maintain and in cost, they are being used by allies, they are not a kick off the boeing 737 which has been having it’s problems lately (again).
wy69
The AWACS planes and refueling jets are reportedly the prime targets for the PLA’s J20 stealth fighters, with the thought that taking out those assets would blind and starve our fighters to keep them from carrying out attacks into China. I believe our Air Force is counting on a distributed surveillance network shared between the F35s and the AI drones.
The AWACS planes and refueling jets are reportedly the prime targets for the PLA’s J20 stealth fighters, with the thought that taking out those assets would blind and starve our fighters to keep them from carrying out attacks into China. I believe our Air Force is counting on a distributed surveillance network shared between the F35s and the AI drones.
Navy plane is 232 million each. The Boeing Wedgetail is 1.5 billion each.
Space-based assets.
From the article:
“But you know, the E-7, in particular, is sort of late, more expensive and ‘gold plated,’ and so filling the gap, and then shifting to space-based ISR [intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance] is a portion of how we think we can do it best, considering all the challenges,” Hegseth responded.”
That’s what I would assume as well.
A network can see better and is far more robust.
Turns out having 5000+ high powered Ka and Ku Starlink satellites in low earth orbit constantly blasting out high energy beams of microwaves makes for a dandy source of frequency stable backscatter for bistatic radar in this case multiple mobile synthetic aperture radar receivers. Starshield is the dedicated military version with much more hosted payloads they admit to infrared and visible trackers, plus high-speed encrypted data,plus a GPS hammer proof backup plus atomictime sync. It would be trivial to put thousands of massive microwave radiometers and use them as bistatic radar.
This also makes most if not all stealth technology void since you will always have reflections on some directions and having thousands of receivers to sensor fuze them together makes stealth obsolete. You can inverse the equation and look for the microwave shadow from the ground reflections that is moving at jet speed it’s impossible to hide that effect. The effect is the same as someone running in front of a wall of lights even if they had a light at the same intensity moving with them the edge effects and Doppler will still betray them.
As a note even with GPS signals at millions of times weaker than Starlink they are already used for surface reflection bistatic radar by NOAA satellites in orbit they are so sensitive they can not only image and direct wind speed on the ocean surface, but also centimeter level ripples and of course larger waves.
Losing the E3 with 1950s tech is meaningless once you have thousands of eyes on the sky looking down on the entire planet all at once if they don’t already have enough hosted payloads secretly on Starlink to do this now.
The E-2 is a proven platform, and still in production.
*thousands of passive microwave radiometers.
The phased array receiving antennas on an existing Starlink / Starshield make fine passive radiometers once you have an atomic clock / oscillator frequency reference to null out orbital Doppler.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.