TABLE OF CONTENTS Electronic warfare is, by its nature, reactive to threats. EW receivers are designed to detect, identify, and locate threats, and EW countermeasures are designed to reduce the effectiveness of those threats. In this chapter, we look at threats in general: the classes of threats, the platforms they threaten, the signals associated with them, and the classes of countermeasures used against them.
Like most fields, electronic warfare is practiced by professionals who use their own special language. Unfortunately, this language is often a variance with proper usage in the native tongue of the land. To avoid confusion in later discussions, here are some important definitions associated with EW threats.
Threats are the actual destructive devices and systems. In EW, we normally deal with the signals associated with the threat systems, so we often define a "threat" as a signal associated with the actual threat. While this can be confusing, it is the way people in our profession express themselves a grammatical "sin" we have been committing for many years and will continue to commit throughout this book.
We often divide threat signals into radar and communications classifications. The differentiation is that radar signals are used to measure location, distance, and velocity while communication signals carry information from one point to another. While they have totally different functions, the two types of signals can have similar parameters. Radar signals can be either pulsed or continuous wave while communication signals are, by their nature,...
