Maarkhoor
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The International Salon of Weapons and Military Equipment—2010, held at the famed Zhukovsky airfield outside Moscow, outwardly resembles U.S. defense industry shows. Exhibits stand in rows inside a cavernous hangar converted into a convention hall. Engineers and sales flacks talk up their wares. Employees hand out pens tattooed with company names and logos. Clusters of visitors—on the first day of the show, mostly potential international customers—gather at the displays. Here, a couple of Eastern Europeans peer through the scopes of unloaded sniper rifles. There, a group of Asians gawk at a demo of small radio-controlled quadrotors.
This is all pretty standard defense industry fare. But some differences become more apparent when I reach the booth of the Russian firm Almaz-Antey, one of the world's leaders in antiaircraft weaponry and the nation's largest arms dealer. A promotional animation on a large screen hanging over the display shows an Almaz missile streaking toward an airplane that looks a lot like a carrier-launched F-35C Lightning II. The missile closes and the airplane disappears in an orange explosion.
The image is shocking—I'm used to seeing American stealth warplanes prevail, in combat as well as in corporate promotional animations. The U.S. government has invested 16 years and $396 billion to ensure that F-35s can fly undetected through well-defended airspace. And the Russians are selling defense systems that can knock them out of the sky?
I notice a trio of men in nearly identical gray suits and close-cropped beards examining toy-train-size models of mobile radar and missile launchers. They are from the Sharif University of Technology in Tehran, a civilian institution that has ties to the military. Late last year, a scientist from Sharif visiting the United States was arrested for purchasing unspecified equipment that could be used in military programs.
Almaz engineer Ivan Shalaev sidles next to them and they settle into a conversation in English. It's a perfect opportunity to eavesdrop. The Iranians ask Shalaev questions about infrared sensors that can detect an airplane by the heat of its engines and the air friction against its skin. But Shalaev tells the Iranians that infrared is just one tracking method the company offers to customers.
Behind him are seekers that use enhanced radar to chase down warplanes. Several are cut open to show a gimballed disc studded with a forest of tiny T-shaped transmit/receive modules. Under the disc is a small computer that can quickly process even the most subtle radar returns. This makes the missile responsive and difficult to outwit. Almaz-Antey is selling these upgraded warheads to fit on existing antiaircraft missiles, including ones it sold to Syria, Venezuela, China, and Iran.
The Iranians don't answer any direct questions, beyond stating their university affiliation, when I introduce myself as an American journalist. But Shalaev is open, even friendly. He's a hometown boy; his father was an engineer, too, who worked on advanced Russian aerospace programs here at the Zhukovsky.
The young engineer is not shy about which airplanes are in his company's crosshairs. Asked if the new seekers could track and destroy an F-35, Shalaev grins and says, "Well, we're going to try."
Two years after the Zhukovsky Arms show, sales of Russian antiaircraft equipment are surging, and Almaz-Antey is at the head of the effort. Company officials, quoted in Russian media, say that the nation's new defense plants—the first built in 20 years—will make antiaircraft weapons.
That's not good news for U.S. pilots and American allies. The Pentagon strives to hold any place in the world, no matter how well defended, under threat of air attack. Modern U.S. warplanes are designed to evade enemy radar, electromagnetic snoopers, and heat-seeking missiles. The Pentagon calls this low observable (LO); the rest of the world calls it stealth.
LO aircraft enable precision strikes against protected targets, allow military containment of rogue states, and curb the geopolitical appetites of potential adversaries. Their existence creates diplomatic leverage. Selling antiaircraft weapons to anyone who feels threatened by the U.S. and NATO is a way of making Russia a global power player.
"Russia still believes it has an important role to play in the world," says Travis Sharp, an analyst with the Center for a New American Security. "Producing and selling advanced military equipment is one way to signal to other states that you are not someone to mess with, nor are your allies someone they should mess with."
Selling these weapons is also lucrative. In a recent $2 billion deal, Almaz-Antey delivered 15 batteries of S-300PMU-2 mobile antiaircraft missile systems to China. Each battery has two or three radar units and four missile launchers. The radar can simultaneously track 100 targets; each launcher can shoot four missiles that speed toward targets at Mach 6. That's about 60 missile-launching vehicles for the price of four F-22 Raptors. The S-300's keen radar and fast-moving missiles guard the Taiwan Strait and form an umbrella that would protect a Chinese invasion of Taiwan.
Scary as the missiles might be, it's the radar systems that pose the gravest threat to stealth airplanes. Post–Cold War engineers in Russia breathed new, deadly life into VHF radars that have been around since the 1970s by digitizing their signals. Increasing computing power has improved the system's ability to glean coherent information from a jumble of data. Faint VHF radar returns that once would have been construed as random background noise can now be detected and identified.
"These VHF radars can detect aircraft constructed using stealth technology," Viktor Ozherelev, a division head at Almaz-Antey, claimed at a 2007 arms show. "The Americans know their stealth program has failed." Most experts say this is an exaggeration, but it's not unfounded.
The interplay between radar and airplanes is a physical one. Stealth airplanes are shaped to deflect radar waves away from the receivers—but not every radar scans at the same wavelength. Increasing the frequency of a wave decreases its wavelength (the distance between its peaks). The shorter the wavelength, the more detailed the return and the better the resolution.
Aerospace engineers designed stealth airplanes primarily to beat the detection equipment that poses the greatest threat—X-band radar. Surface-to-air batteries use this band because it operates at wavelengths that give the optimal compromise between the range and resolution needed to identify and track a target. But when stealth airplanes are exposed to radar waves longer than this wavelength range, they generate stronger radar returns.
This is all pretty standard defense industry fare. But some differences become more apparent when I reach the booth of the Russian firm Almaz-Antey, one of the world's leaders in antiaircraft weaponry and the nation's largest arms dealer. A promotional animation on a large screen hanging over the display shows an Almaz missile streaking toward an airplane that looks a lot like a carrier-launched F-35C Lightning II. The missile closes and the airplane disappears in an orange explosion.
The image is shocking—I'm used to seeing American stealth warplanes prevail, in combat as well as in corporate promotional animations. The U.S. government has invested 16 years and $396 billion to ensure that F-35s can fly undetected through well-defended airspace. And the Russians are selling defense systems that can knock them out of the sky?
I notice a trio of men in nearly identical gray suits and close-cropped beards examining toy-train-size models of mobile radar and missile launchers. They are from the Sharif University of Technology in Tehran, a civilian institution that has ties to the military. Late last year, a scientist from Sharif visiting the United States was arrested for purchasing unspecified equipment that could be used in military programs.
Almaz engineer Ivan Shalaev sidles next to them and they settle into a conversation in English. It's a perfect opportunity to eavesdrop. The Iranians ask Shalaev questions about infrared sensors that can detect an airplane by the heat of its engines and the air friction against its skin. But Shalaev tells the Iranians that infrared is just one tracking method the company offers to customers.
Behind him are seekers that use enhanced radar to chase down warplanes. Several are cut open to show a gimballed disc studded with a forest of tiny T-shaped transmit/receive modules. Under the disc is a small computer that can quickly process even the most subtle radar returns. This makes the missile responsive and difficult to outwit. Almaz-Antey is selling these upgraded warheads to fit on existing antiaircraft missiles, including ones it sold to Syria, Venezuela, China, and Iran.
The Iranians don't answer any direct questions, beyond stating their university affiliation, when I introduce myself as an American journalist. But Shalaev is open, even friendly. He's a hometown boy; his father was an engineer, too, who worked on advanced Russian aerospace programs here at the Zhukovsky.
The young engineer is not shy about which airplanes are in his company's crosshairs. Asked if the new seekers could track and destroy an F-35, Shalaev grins and says, "Well, we're going to try."
Two years after the Zhukovsky Arms show, sales of Russian antiaircraft equipment are surging, and Almaz-Antey is at the head of the effort. Company officials, quoted in Russian media, say that the nation's new defense plants—the first built in 20 years—will make antiaircraft weapons.
That's not good news for U.S. pilots and American allies. The Pentagon strives to hold any place in the world, no matter how well defended, under threat of air attack. Modern U.S. warplanes are designed to evade enemy radar, electromagnetic snoopers, and heat-seeking missiles. The Pentagon calls this low observable (LO); the rest of the world calls it stealth.
LO aircraft enable precision strikes against protected targets, allow military containment of rogue states, and curb the geopolitical appetites of potential adversaries. Their existence creates diplomatic leverage. Selling antiaircraft weapons to anyone who feels threatened by the U.S. and NATO is a way of making Russia a global power player.
"Russia still believes it has an important role to play in the world," says Travis Sharp, an analyst with the Center for a New American Security. "Producing and selling advanced military equipment is one way to signal to other states that you are not someone to mess with, nor are your allies someone they should mess with."
Selling these weapons is also lucrative. In a recent $2 billion deal, Almaz-Antey delivered 15 batteries of S-300PMU-2 mobile antiaircraft missile systems to China. Each battery has two or three radar units and four missile launchers. The radar can simultaneously track 100 targets; each launcher can shoot four missiles that speed toward targets at Mach 6. That's about 60 missile-launching vehicles for the price of four F-22 Raptors. The S-300's keen radar and fast-moving missiles guard the Taiwan Strait and form an umbrella that would protect a Chinese invasion of Taiwan.
Scary as the missiles might be, it's the radar systems that pose the gravest threat to stealth airplanes. Post–Cold War engineers in Russia breathed new, deadly life into VHF radars that have been around since the 1970s by digitizing their signals. Increasing computing power has improved the system's ability to glean coherent information from a jumble of data. Faint VHF radar returns that once would have been construed as random background noise can now be detected and identified.
"These VHF radars can detect aircraft constructed using stealth technology," Viktor Ozherelev, a division head at Almaz-Antey, claimed at a 2007 arms show. "The Americans know their stealth program has failed." Most experts say this is an exaggeration, but it's not unfounded.
The interplay between radar and airplanes is a physical one. Stealth airplanes are shaped to deflect radar waves away from the receivers—but not every radar scans at the same wavelength. Increasing the frequency of a wave decreases its wavelength (the distance between its peaks). The shorter the wavelength, the more detailed the return and the better the resolution.
Aerospace engineers designed stealth airplanes primarily to beat the detection equipment that poses the greatest threat—X-band radar. Surface-to-air batteries use this band because it operates at wavelengths that give the optimal compromise between the range and resolution needed to identify and track a target. But when stealth airplanes are exposed to radar waves longer than this wavelength range, they generate stronger radar returns.
