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The Chinese PLA navy’s ‘kill web’ defeated the US Navy’s EA-18G “Growler” electronic warfare (EW) systems using innovative AI.
Chinese media released videos showing that the EA-18G may have adopted a combat called jamming-while-accompanying, creating a formation with other warplanes and conducting noise jamming or releasing strong signals of dense, false targets to blind the Nanchang plane. However, the plane’s radar system reportedly continued to operate normally and locked onto the targets of the US fleet.
According to Interesting Engineering, the “Growler” is an EW aircraft manufactured by Boeing and mainly used for electronic jamming. It can be loaded with various EW systems to suppress enemy reconnaissance and communication signals in all frequency bands and all directions with high power. It can also launch anti-radiation missiles for precise strikes against shipborne radars.
However, these news show that all its capabilities are not foolproof: “Cognitive intelligent radar has capabilities such as proactive environmental sensing, arbitrary transmit and receive design, intelligent processing, and resource scheduling. It can effectively counter the complex and variable electromagnetic jamming of the EA-18G,” wrote the research team.
China’s modern warships reportedly have multiple radars with different working principles and sensors, and have solved the bottleneck issue in transmitting and processing massive amounts of data to help streamline integration – the researchers claim that this combination significantly reduces the effectiveness of the Growler’s jamming against individual radars.
The scientists have also made breakthroughs in maintaining high-speed and reliable communication across the entire fleet in complex electromagnetic environments, so when an EA-18G launches an attack on a Chinese naval ship, nearby Chinese naval ships counter it immediately.
Then, a giant “kill web” is created as the ships share information, which can “flexibly, actively, quickly and intelligently counter the EA-18G, achieving a transformation from ‘single-resource confrontation’ to ‘systematic detection resource confrontation’”, said the researchers.
