I was looking at the mission reports from the nineteenth, and it really feels like the invincibility shield finally cracked a little bit. We have spent the last decade acting like 5th-generation stealth was this magic cloak of invisibility, but that F-35A limping back with combat damage after the strikes in Iran tells a very different story. Today's prompt from Daniel is about SEAD, or suppression of enemy air defenses, and honestly, the timing could not be better given what is happening in the Middle East and Ukraine right now.
Herman Poppleberry here, and you are hitting the nail on the head regarding that F-35 incident. For years, the narrative has been that stealth allows you to bypass the Integrated Air Defense System entirely, but as we saw on March nineteenth, the eye-ads, as we call them, are starting to look back. Daniel’s prompt gets into the core of how this game has changed from a specialized niche for a few brave pilots to a native capability that every single aircraft in the fleet has to master if they want to survive the next ten years.
It is funny you mention the brave pilots because I always think of the old Wild Weasel guys from the Vietnam era. They were basically using themselves as bait, flying straight at radar sites and hoping they could fire a missile before the ground-to-air battery fired at them. It sounds like the military equivalent of poking a bear with a very short stick just to see where its head is. Is that still the vibe, or have we actually evolved past the suicide mission phase?
We have evolved, but the stakes are actually higher now because the bear has a thousand eyes and they are all networked together. To understand where we are in March twenty twenty-six, we have to distinguish between SEAD, which is suppression, and DEAD, which is destruction. Suppression is temporary. You jam the radar, you confuse the sensors, or you simply scare the operator into turning the system off so they do not get hit. Destruction, or DEAD, is the permanent solution where you actually put a hole in the launcher or the command center. What we are seeing right now is a transition where suppression is no longer enough because modern systems like the S-400 can reboot or switch frequencies so fast that the window of suppression is measured in seconds, not minutes.
So if you do not kill it, it just comes right back to haunt you. That explains why the recent Ukrainian campaign between March first and March fifteenth was so aggressive. They were not just trying to jam Russian radars; they were hunting them. I saw they took out over twenty targets including S-400 and Buk-M3 launchers. But the interesting part was the focus on the Nebo-U early-warning systems. Why go after the big long-range stuff first?
Because the Nebo-U is the brain of the entire network. If you take out the early-warning radar, you create what we call a blind spot in the Integrated Air Defense System. Think of it like a security guard’s monitor going dark in one corner of a building. Once that blind spot exists, you can flood that corridor with cruise missiles or drones, and by the time the shorter-range tactical radars see them, it is already too late to react. The Ukrainians have become masters of this systematic dismantling. They are essentially performing surgery on the Russian air defense network, one radar node at a time.
It sounds like they are playing a very high-stakes version of whack-a-mole, but the mole has a surface-to-air missile. Speaking of hardware, you have been talking my ear off about the new AARGM-ER missile. I think you pronounced it Ar-gum E-R? It sounds like something you would say after a bad meal, but apparently, it is the new gold standard for this kind of work. What makes the AGM-88G so much better than the stuff we used five years ago?
The Advanced Anti-Radiation Guided Missile Extended Range is a total shift in how we approach the kill chain. On January twenty-seventh of this year, it hit a massive milestone by demonstrating navigation in GPS-denied environments. That is the holy grail. In a peer conflict, the first thing that goes away is your GPS signal. The Ar-gum E-R does not care. It has a multi-mode sensor suite that can find a radar even if the enemy turns it off to try and hide. It remembers where the signal was coming from and uses its own internal logic to hunt the source. Plus, it has a range of over one hundred sixty miles, or roughly two hundred sixty kilometers. That allows a pilot to fire from well outside the danger zone of most medium-range surface-to-air missiles.
One hundred sixty miles is a lot of breathing room, but it does not mean much if your plane’s own radar is acting up. This brings us to the elephant in the room, or maybe the donkey in the room in your case, Herman. The F-35 radar crisis. I am reading that the U.S. military is actually accepting new F-35s right now that do not even have radars installed because of the delays with the Northrop Grumman APG-85 system. That feels like buying a luxury sports car and the dealer tells you the headlights will be mailed to you in six months.
It is a massive bottleneck. The APG-85 is supposed to be the heart of the Block 4 upgrade, which is what gives the F-35 its native SEAD capabilities. Without it, these jets are restricted to training roles. They are not combat-coded. The issue is tied to the Technology Refresh 3, or TR-3, which has been plagued by software stagnation. We are currently in March twenty twenty-six, and we are flying frontline jets that are essentially running on hardware and software suites designed for the threats of twenty twenty-one. When you are going up against an Integrated Air Defense System that is being updated in real-time with artificial intelligence and passive sensing, that gap is dangerous. It is exactly why that F-35 in Iran took damage. It was likely caught in a Sambush.
A Sambush? That sounds like a dance move, but I am guessing it is less fun. Is that just a fancy way of saying a surface-to-air missile ambush?
That is exactly what it is. A SAM ambush, or Sambush, uses passive sensors. Instead of turning on a big, loud radar that screams "here I am" to every electronic warfare suite in the sky, the defenders stay silent. They use optical sensors, thermal imaging, or even passive coherent location which tracks how the stealth aircraft disturbs existing signals like radio or television waves in the air. They wait until the aircraft is close, then they flip on the fire-control radar for a split second, launch the missile, and turn it off again. If your aircraft does not have the latest electronic warfare suite to detect that split-second pulse, you do not even know you are being targeted until the missile is active and locked on.
So the stealth is not failed, it is just being bypassed by smarter hunters. It reminds me of what we talked about in episode six hundred thirty-two regarding outsmarting modern air defenses. The technology is always a moving target. But the scale of Operation Epic Fury in Iran is what really gets me. Seven thousand eight hundred aimpoints struck. That is a staggering amount of ordinance. How do you hit nearly eight thousand targets and only lose, or rather damage, one manned aircraft?
It comes down to what Lieutenant General David Deptula calls the shift from attrition-based warfare to dominance-based warfare. In the Vietnam War, we lost forty-six percent of our F-105 inventory to air defenses. That is nearly half the fleet gone. In Operation Epic Fury, we are using a combination of mass and precision. We are not just sending in a few stealth jets and hoping for the best. We are using swarms of decoys, stand-in weapons, and long-range electronic attack. We are essentially D-D-o-S attacking the air defense network. We give their computers so many targets to track and so much noise to filter through that they cannot effectively engage the actual strike packages.
It is basically a physical version of a computer virus. You just overwhelm the system until it crashes. But you mentioned something called a stand-in weapon. Is that the SiAW I have been seeing in the news? The Air Force just put out a notice on March fourth saying they want six hundred of these things every year. That is a lot of missiles for a "peaceful" era.
The Stand-in Attack Weapon is the future of the internal carriage for the F-35 and the B-21 Raider. It is a supersonic missile designed to be carried inside the weapons bay so it does not ruin the stealth profile of the jet. The reason they want six hundred a year is that the doctrine is shifting. We used to rely on specialized units like the V-A-Q one hundred thirty-three Wizards flying the E-A-18-G Growlers to do the heavy lifting for electronic warfare. But in a high-intensity conflict, you cannot wait for a Growler to show up. Every F-35 has to be its own Wild Weasel. The SiAW gives every pilot the ability to take out a high-value radar node the second they detect it.
So we are moving away from the "mommy" aircraft protecting the "baby" fighters. Every plane has to grow up and hunt its own food now. That is what you mean by native SEAD, right? It is no longer a support role; it is just part of the job description for every pilot.
Precisely. We are seeing this distributed lethality where the electronic shield is part of the airframe’s own software. But that brings us back to the software problem. If the Block 4 upgrades keep slipping, we are essentially building the world’s most expensive airframes and then hobbling them with outdated brains. The B-21 Raider is going to face the same challenge. It is designed to be the ultimate SEAD platform, a flying ghost that can dismantle an entire country’s network from the inside out, but it lives and dies by its sensor fusion.
It feels like the hardware is outrunning the code. We can build a missile that flies two hundred sixty kilometers and navigates without GPS, but we cannot get the radar software to play nice with the flight computer. It is a very twenty twenty-six problem to have. I do wonder, though, about the human element. If you are a pilot and you know that the enemy is using passive sensors and Sambushes, how do you even fly into that? It sounds like you are just waiting for a ghost to hit you.
You rely on the network. This is where the Integrated Air Defense System meets the Integrated Attack Network. A single F-35 might not see the passive sensor, but a high-altitude drone or a satellite might detect the heat signature of the missile battery or the communication link between the command center and the launcher. That data is fed back to the pilot in real-time. The goal is to see the threat before it even knows it is a threat. It is a total transparency of the battlefield. But as we saw on March nineteenth, that transparency is never one hundred percent. There will always be a guy with a mobile launcher hiding in a garage who waits for the perfect moment.
It is the ultimate game of hide and seek, but the seeker has a supersonic missile. I think the takeaway for me here is that the era of "invisible" stealth is over, and we are entering the era of "electronically dominant" stealth. It is not about not being seen; it is about making sure that even if they see you, they cannot do anything about it because their systems are screaming in agony from electronic interference.
That is the Deptula model in a nutshell. You don’t need to be invisible if you are untouchable. But to be untouchable, you need the Ar-gum E-R, you need the SiAW, and you absolutely need the APG-85 radar to actually show up to work. We are at a pivot point. If the U.S. and its allies can solve the software stagnation, the Integrated Air Defense Systems of the world are going to become obsolete very quickly. If not, we are going to see more jets coming home with holes in them.
Or not coming home at all, which is the scary part. It is wild to think that the F-105 pilots in Vietnam were losing half their friends, and now we consider one damaged jet a national crisis. The expectations have certainly shifted.
They have, but that is because the cost of a single F-35 or a B-21 is so high that you cannot afford to lose them at Vietnam-era rates. We have traded quantity for extreme quality, and that means every single loss is a strategic blow, not just a tactical one. That is why this move to native SEAD is so vital. It is about self-preservation through offensive dominance.
Well, I for one am glad I am a sloth and not a pilot. My version of suppression is just closing my eyes and hoping the problem goes away, which usually works for me, but probably wouldn't work great against an S-400.
Probably not the best tactical approach for a five hundred million dollar stealth bomber, Corn.
Fair enough. I think we have covered the spread here. From the Ukrainian blind spots to the Iranian Sambushes, the world of air defense is getting a lot noisier even as the planes get quieter. It is a fascinating contradiction.
It really is. And as we look toward the sixth-generation F-47 and the full deployment of the B-21, the line between an electronic warfare plane and a strike fighter is going to disappear entirely. They will be one and the same.
Just like you and your research papers, Herman. One and the same. I think that is a good place to wrap this one up. We have dismantled the eye-ads and hopefully haven't crashed any software in the process.
We made it through without any combat damage, which is more than that F-35 can say.
Too soon, Herman. Too soon. Huge thanks to our producer Hilbert Flumingtop for keeping the radar running on this show. And a big thanks to Modal for providing the GPU credits that power the AI backend of My Weird Prompts. If you are finding these deep dives useful, leave us a review on your podcast app. It really does help other people find the show.
You can also find our full archive and search for topics like electronic warfare or stealth at myweirdprompts dot com. We have over fifteen hundred episodes in the vault if you want to go even deeper.
This has been My Weird Prompts. We will be back next time with whatever Daniel decides to throw at us.
Until then, keep your sensors clear.
And your software updated. See ya.
