Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!uflorida!haven!rutgers!att!cbnews!budden@manta.nosc.mil
From: budden@manta.nosc.mil (Rex A. Buddenberg)
Newsgroups: sci.military
Subject: Re: radar decoys
Message-ID: <6330@cbnews.ATT.COM>
Date: 6 May 89 03:37:29 GMT
Sender: military@cbnews.ATT.COM
Organization: Naval Ocean Systems Center, San Diego
Lines: 25
Approved: military@att.att.com



From: budden@manta.nosc.mil (Rex A. Buddenberg)
Decoys are a good idea.  Consider a convoy under air attack -- the
missiles are launched and on their own (the bombers are headed home).
So it's the convoy vessels against the missile targeting systems.

(Scenario assumes convoy has been found and aircraft arrived at a
launch point; radar range yes, visual no.)

Now, consider if you take tankers (which have been in handy
surplus for the past decade or so), fill them with something --
water is fine.  And park lots of noise on deck -- chaff launchers,
radar emitters, IR flares, ...  Remotely controlling the vessel
would be a nice touch.  

These decoys are inherently large radar targets, even without
all the added stuff.  Ditto for acoustic noise.  When under
attack, the tankers, sitting at the windy corners of the convoy
become sacrificial.  Now if the ballast isn't flammable, it takes
a lot of attack to sink a 500k ton tanker -- look how many
were actually lost in the Persian Gulf -- and usually because
the fire burned out of control.

Rex Buddenberg