NightIntruder wrote:My understanding from the reference was all the CM measures given to F4Es were sort of improvised, one-three shots at most. Also, from the same reference, all Navy aircraft were banned from using their CM pods to not interfere with radar coverage provided by the Fleet.
I didn't hear about Project Shoehorn, indeed, so yes, time to learn some more 🙂 Thanks for the heads up!
Anyway, AFAIK, no CM was effective against the "burn through" power of NV radar, and as such, the effectiveness of CM screens was limited under ca. 15 nm or so. Maybe, I didn't understand that fully due to the language barrier, it's possible.
The reference mentions that there were concerns over using very dense chaff screens to blanket NV radar. Immediately afterwards, it talks about how F-4 pilots started putting chaff into the speedbrakes regardless of these concerns, and that chaff used defensively by other single planes posed no problems.
"each plane dumped chaff whenever it made a turn. The resulting chaff return posed no problem for shipboard fighter controllers, because the radar return was concentrated in a compact area."
With regards to jamming pods, as far I know, the only jammer that was banned from use was a deception jammer on the F-111A. This is because the americans didn't want to give away the full capability of their jamming technology. Standard noise jammers were fine to use for any plane that could equip them. That said, the early jammers carried by the F-4 were fairly limited in coverage and power. They had a burn through range of 8-10 n.miles.
On the subject of chaff and flares, I was digging into whether f-4 phantoms were able to successfully break radar locks with chaff countermeasures and came across an interesting quora page on the subject, with answers from retired Vietnam war pilots. Anyone can claim to be anyone on the internet, so these should be taken with a grain of salt. The stories on the page seem credible enough and don't conflict with each other, so I think they are at least worth repeating.
Here's part of a story from one Lance Teillon on quora. Supposedly he was a Radar Intercept Officer and flew in the F-4 and F-14.
"What you’re referring to as North Vietnam’s S-75s, we called the SA-2 (surface to air) Guideline missile and yes, chaff worked very well against it. While flying a BARCAP mission one day off the coast of Viet Nam, my flight of 2 F-4’s were vectored to do a weather reconnaissance of the Do San peninsula, which is just south of Haiphong Harbor. Since we were on a BARCAP mission, we weren’t overly concerned about this area as our intel showed no SAMs so we approached at about 300′. What no one realized was that the NVN had moved a mobile SAM unit into the area overnight and as we approached the peninsula, I picked up a strobe at 12:00. The strobe and an audible warning in our headsets was my signal to start pumping out chaff. I immediately lost the strobe and warning, indicating the bad guy radar had broken contact with us. So yes, chaff was a very effective counter measure."
Source: https://www.quora.com/During-the-Vietnam-War-were-flares-and-chaffs-deployed-on-aircraft-such-as-the-F-4-Phantom-II-and-F-105s-If-so-how-did-these-countermeasures-hold-up-against-North-Vietnamese-S-75s
It seems like chaff was indeed effective against radar guided missiles. The phenomenon of "burn through" is a term that applies more to jamming signals than chaff. What chaff does is distort a radar return signal and make it difficult to determine the range/direction of a jet. That's good for confusing a radar operator, or the computer that is guiding a missile. On a related note: in vanilla Arma 3, most radar guided missiles have a mere 4% chance of their lock being broken by countermeasures. It seems like a small number, but when you factor in the range of radar guided missiles, a pilot has a real chance of breaking lock with constant countermeasure pulsing and evasive flying.
After all this digging, I think it's safe to say that if we got an F-4 with countermeasures, it would be realistic within the Prairie Fire timeline, so long as it was an updated model of the F-4B, or the devs used some hacks to let the existing jets dump a single cloud of chaff when you tap the speedbrakes. The reason they have no countermeasures at the moment is simply because the ones in the game aren't equipped with them. It's understandable, since there's lots of other equipment that didn't make the cut (like the M113). The F-4's that we already have are great.
