Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!swrinde!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!pacific.mps.ohio-state.edu!linac!att!cbnews!cbnews!military From: henry@zoo.toronto.edu (Henry Spencer) Newsgroups: sci.military Subject: Re: British ALARM Message-ID: <1991Feb9.025326.29449@cbnews.att.com> Date: 9 Feb 91 02:53:26 GMT References: <1991Feb8.012201.15108@cbnews.att.com> Sender: military@cbnews.att.com (William B. Thacker) Organization: U of Toronto Zoology Lines: 43 Approved: military@att.att.com From: henry@zoo.toronto.edu (Henry Spencer) >From: dnwiebe@cis.ohio-state.edu (Dan N Wiebe) > Does this weapon exist? If so, does anyone know its alphanumeric >designation?... Alarm exists and is reportedly in use in the Gulf. It has no numeric designation that I'm aware of; the British military is not as obsessed with numbers as the US is, and tends to give things names instead. > How, for example, would the missile tell a friendly radar from a >hostile one? How would it tell a mobile (aircraft) radar from a fixed >one? ... The general answer to things like this is that such missiles are programmed with the general characteristics of the radars they are supposed to destroy, and will ignore others. >... Also, aircraft flying at low altitude are generally under some >fairly strict time constraints to accomplish their mission, and the ALARM >must take some appreciable time to get up to 100Kft and back down again, >even if it finds a target immediately. My memory on this is fuzzy, but I believe Alarm can be used in several different modes, and the climb-and-loiter flight profile is only one of them. It is a fairly general-purpose antiradar missile. >Seems it would be more economical >to eliminate the missile's first stage and drop it instead from a >high-altitude aircraft (out of SAM and AAA range) some minutes before ... Unless you start talking about very specialized aircraft, there is no such thing as being out of SAM range. And a high-altitude antiradar aircraft dropping such things in advance would be a wonderful tip-off that a low- altitude raid was on the way. The RAF basically doesn't believe in flying at high altitudes in combat, period. It is also very important that the combat aircraft be capable of defending *themselves*, because if such defense is assigned to specialized support aircraft, there are never enough of them to go around. -- "Maybe we should tell the truth?" | Henry Spencer at U of Toronto Zoology "Surely we aren't that desperate yet." | henry@zoo.toronto.edu utzoo!henry