Exactly my point, they don’t have an internal gun because requirements were different. Not because it would be difficult or expensive to have one.
Remove the gun is understandable because stealth aircraft aren’t expected to have many WVR dogfight.
But what is the benefit of not having fuselage jammer while still have towed decoys and use APG-81 as jammer?. The airplane has towed decoys so they clearly see jamming as necessary. No way they fear the airplane a few kg heavier.
F.e. AN/ALQ-131 is round about 300 kg. Of course a good part of that comes from it being an external pod. But cerainly a couple of kgs won’t do it.
Comparison with ALQ-131 is a rather disingenuous, the first model of ALQ-131 came into production in 1970s that almost, 50 years ago, electronics parts such as processors, memory cards are much more bucky than what we have now. Self-protection jammer can be made much smaller nowadays, EL/M-8222 is only 100 kg, ALE-50 is only 1-2 kg, and that with receiver, TwT, transmitter, signal generator, CPU. ASQ-239 already has necessary components such as antenna, memory cards, CPU to analyze incoming radar wave and generate optimum jamming pulse to be used by APG-81 and ALE-70. So adding transmitter and TWT is a couple of kg at the most. Keep in mind they can fit everything inside a package as small as GEN-X/ALE-50/ALE-55/Brite cloud.
Furthermore, jamming output required is proportional to radar cross section. F-35 RCS is between 0.1-0.2% of F-16. We know ALE-50 is enough for F-16, so a transmitter that 800-1000 times weaker than ALE-50 would been enough for F-35. A couple of kg is redundancy.
Jamming your own systems – is known to have occured. Manufactures probably don’t like to talk about it. Less of a problem of course if your not transmitting.
BAE claims Barracuda can jam without interfering with radar and rwr, so that another advantage for F-35 EW apart from cognitive processing.
This is such a no brain discussion. If they can put a receiver, a transmitter and a signal analyzer inside ALE-50 decoy then they can put the same electronic parts inside the F-35 airframe without any trouble. We aren’t in the 60s anymore
Note: two decoy inside the launcher
More important, ASQ-239 will be far better than EW on others fighters
While the specifics of the jet’s electronic warfare, or EW, package remain opaque, scientists, program watchers and military leaders close to the program say it will be key to the jet’s evolution and its survival against the future’s most advanced airplane-killing technology. In short, cognitive EW is the most important feature on the world’s most sophisticated warplane.
“There are small elements of cognitive EW right now on the F-35, but what we are really looking toward is the future,” Lee Venturino, president and CEO of First Principles, a company that is analyzing the F-35 for the Pentagon, said at a recent Association of Old Crows event in Washington, D.C.“Think of it as a stair-stepper approach. The first step is probably along the ESM [electronic support measures] side. How do I just identify the signals I’ve never seen before?”
To understand what cognitive warfare is, you have to know what it isn’t. EW makes use of the invisible waves of energy that propagate through free space from the movement of electrons, the electromagnetic spectrum. Conventional radar systems generally use fixed waveforms, making them easy to spot, learn about, and develop tactics against. But newer digitally programmable radars can generate never-before-seen waveforms, making them harder to defeat
A concern that U.S. EW was falling behind the challenges of today’s world prompted a 2013 Defense Science Board study that recommended that the military develop agile and adaptive electronic warfare systems that could detect and counter tricky new sensors.
“In the past, what would happen is you’d send out your EA-18,” the military’s top-of-the-line EW aircraft, Deputy Defense Secretary Bob Work said last month in an event at the Center for New American Security. “It would find a new waveform. There was no way for us to do anything about it. The pilot would come back, they would talk about it, they’d replicate it, they’d emulate it. It would go into the ‘ gonculator ,’ goncu-goncu-goncu-gonculatoring, and then you would have something, and then maybe some time down the road, you would have a response.”
That process is far too slow to be effective against digitally programmable radars. “The software [to defeat new waveforms] may take on the order of months or years, but the effectiveness needs to programed within hours or seconds. If it’s an interaction with a radar and a jammer, for example, sometime it’s a microsecond,” said Robert Stein, who co-chaired the Defense Science Board study.
Read “interaction” in that context to mean the critical moment when an adversary, perhaps a single lowly radar operator, detects a U.S. military aircraft on a covert operation. That moment of detection is the sort of world-changing event that happens, literally, in the blink of an eye.
Just before the study came out, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, established the Adaptive Radar Countermeasures program to “enable U.S. airborne EW systems to automatically generate effective countermeasures against new, unknown and adaptive radars in real-time in the field.”
The goal: EW software that can perceive new waveforms and attacks as quickly and as clearly as a living being can hear leaves rustle or see a predator crouching in the distance, then respond creatively to the threat: can I outrun that? Can I fight it? Should I do anything at all? It’s a problem of artificial intelligence: creating a living intelligence in code.
https://www.defenseone.com/technology/2016/01/most-important-technology-f-35/125228/
One of BAE Systems’ flagship programmes in the airborne EW domain is the AN/ASQ-239 electronic warfare/countermeasures system which equips the Lockheed Martin F-35A/B/C Lightning-II fighter. Few details have emerged regarding the exact design of the AN/ASQ-239, although the firms’ official literature stresses that it provides RF and IR (infrared) protection, and can operate in a ‘signals dense’ environment. Perhaps the most interesting hint that the defence community has had regarding the design of the AN/ASQ-239 is its apparent use of so-called ‘cognitive’ electronic warfare techniques. Cognitive EW intends to increase the amount of processing which an aircraft EW system can perform as soon as it detects a potentially-hostile RF signal. Traditional electronic intelligence required RF transmissions to be detected, recorded and then analyzed. Once the signals had been analyzed as hostile, an RF jamming response could be devised to be applied against this threat. Yet this process was understandably time consuming.
Cognitive EW employs software programmes inside the EW system to identify an RF transmission and its waveform, even if this has not been encountered by the system before, and then to devise an appropriate jamming response. Ultimately, such an approach promises to greatly accelerate the speed with which hostile signals can be detected and then jammed. This will help to protect combat aircraft carrying such EW systems, and also other aircraft in a strike package which may not possess cognitive EW capabilities.
https://armadainternational.com/2017/08/electric-avenue-radars/
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