As for the Rafale's combat experience, they entered Libya without SEAD conducted.
That is not what I was referring to.
But if you want to go there...
SEAD escorts are always optional. Whether they are used or not depends on intelligence and mission analyses. From the way you talk, it revealed two major things about you: ignorance and hubris.
You think that a mission that do not employ SEAD escorts must mean the Raffle do not need such
AT ALL. I challenge you to find an air force in the world that will agree with you. Maybe the French could not afford dedicated SEAD escorts. Maybe they took missions that the calculated risks were acceptably low enough without SEAD escorts. What you are doing is demanding that we take your words for it unconditionally.
Their first mission included taking out tanks, not SAMs, but tanks. The US wasn't happy that the French had proceeded with strike missions without conducting SEAD/DEAD first.
Yeah...We value our pilots' lives.
Also with the dog analogy, you got the concept wrong. The Spectra isn't a camouflage system, it's not trying to simply blend into the background, your F-22 does that. The idea is not to make new dots, it's to make holes. So the Rafale's airframe design concentrates signals into a few strong spikes, particularly at the canard edges, and then cancels those spikes. So the two powerful "dots" on your radar become holes, and the Rafale goes stealth. Spectra is akin to a CIWS shooting down the bullets made of signals. That's a more apt analogy.
SPECTRA is a camouflage
TECHNIQUE. Spin it any way you like.
The core of what SPECTRA does is -- sampling.
A radar signal is composed of multiple discreet pulses -- a pulse train.
A train can have distinct pulse characteristics, but the next train can have different characteristics. And so on...
Standard EW countermeasures requires sampling a percentage of that pulse train. Too small a sample and the countermeasure signal would not be effective at all. Against an opponent that do not perform pulse train alterations, SPECTRA will be effective. But against an opponent who does perform such alterations, the odds of SPECTRA creating an effective countermeasure drops. If the frequency and pulse characteristics changes rapid enough from pulse train to pulse train, there is no way for SPECTRA to keep up.
An adaptive sampling system must examine the radar signal from pulse to pulse to see if there are discreet packets of pulses with predictable characteristics.
Let us take a pulse train of 1,000 pulses for a simple example.
Of the first 10 pulses, there are differences between pulses. Of the next 10 pulses, the pulse characteristics are different. Of the next 10 pulses, more differences. But on the fourth set of 10 pulses, the patterns are the same as the first 10. Now I have a clue of the 5th set of 10. I can try to predict that the 6th set of 10 pulses will have the same characteristics of the 2nd set of 10. And so on all the way to 1000 pulses.
But if there are no predictable patterns inside that 1000 pulses, I am stuck with analyzing
ALL 1000 pulses with no end in sight.
Now against an AESA equipped opponent like the F-22 or F-35 who can alter tens of millions of pulses, from freq to amplitude to variable pulse gaps, in a single burst, SPECTRA will be reduced in efficacy, if not outright defeated. What do you expect Dassault to say? Yes, we are defeated by the Americans? Of course they are going to say it is as good as shaping, even though they know they are misleading the public.
So it begs the question of why not every radar system perform complex signal alterations? Because that is also a burden on the transmitter. Not only does the transmitter have to create the changes, it must remember those characteristics to recognize the echo signals as its own. Not every country have the money and the technical sophistication to create such a radar system. The result is the disparity between countries, each saying that it has the best without revealing the weaknesses.
Against most air defense systems out there, SPECTRA is probably as effective as an F-22, but SPECTRA will not be so effective against the F-22 or F-35. Your mistake is assuming if SPECTRA is good against one type of opponent, it must be good against all.
