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this post was submitted on 16 Apr 2026
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Also be aware of anti radiation munitions if you decide to operate one of these in a warzone. Radarmen have very short battlefield lifetimes because turning on a radar without lots of electronic countermeasures (hell even with countermeasures) is basically like turning on a spotlight that says “blow me up”.
So, one of the really interesting things to me about this approach is that it offers the same asymmetric value proposition that cheap attack drones do to modern pre-drone IADS.
That is: this is a platform that costs 10-15k, and an AGM-88 of modern manufacture costs almost 900k, and a Kh-31 costs about 550k - and, just as importantly, both require a long time to manufacture. So, you could theoretically make a moderately large distributed array sprinkled over a few square kilometers, and even if they’re ALL turned on, it quickly becomes logistically infeasible to knock them all out without spending a silly quantity on antirad munitions, as well as massively attriting your stocks of antirad munitions. And if you turn like 10-25% of them on at a time and cycle through your array, the problem becomes even harder for the attacker. And if you have some sort of process or mechanism - like, oh I don’t know, figuring out how to do light aerial transport with cargo drones, or even figuring out how to mount these distributed array nodes on the drones themselves, and some sort of lightweight tether for providing power - the problem becomes a MASSIVE pain in the ass for an adversary (especially that last idea, which introduces z-axis and immediate maneuverability, such that the array could feasibly detect and altogether avoid an incoming antirad munition).
And that’s the paradigm of modern warfare - not just drones, but also networked and attritable systems that maintain functionality when elements are taken offline
Unless I'm missing something in your plan i don't think that would work well. If these radar stations aren't surrounded by very serious defensive systems for hundreds of miles in every direction, then they'll simply be blown up by dumb howitzer shells that only cost around 2000 dollars.
Howitzers are cheap, relatively long range, mobile, and accurate enough. If you don't have strong enough defenses to prevent the howitzers from moving into range, then they'll just blow up all your radar stations with cheap shells.
The locating them is the problem I think
Locating the radar base station? No that's the easiest part. Radar is like turning on a Hollywood style searchlight pointing up into the sky. The instant you turn it on its extremely obvious where the radar searchlight is coming from