– During the Cold War, we had a strong air force in Sweden. We assumed that the enemy was a large and resourceful actor, and to survive, we needed to hide our aircraft in various ways, says Hans Kariis, who is a research leader at the electronic warfare department in Linköping.
During the war, wartime air bases were built where roads could be used as runways and where refuelling could take place in forest parking areas.
– To prevent the enemy from knowing where the aircraft were located, we had decoys that looked like Viggen, made of steel pipes and fabric. A gas burner was placed at the engine's location to generate heat and thus deceive the opponent's heat sensors, continues Hans Kariis.
After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Sweden's defence policy direction changed. The focus shifted to peacekeeping operations abroad, and the knowledge of hiding and deceiving the enemy with decoys was forgotten.
Decoys can deceive drones
Now the security policy situation has changed again, while technological development has progressed rapidly, not least through the use of drones in warfare.
Hans Kariis, together with research colleagues Jonas Rahm, Lars Bohman, and Fredrik Näsström, has conducted a preliminary study on behalf of the Swedish Armed Forces on how the development of sensors affects the ability to hide and protect units, and how different protections can be evaluated.
Decoys can cause the opponent to waste valuable ammunition on, for example, a fabric aircraft.
To assess how well a protection works, one needs to know what sensors the enemy has. In Russia's ongoing war against Ukraine, for example, reconnaissance drones with cameras are extensively used by both sides.
Combination misleads opponent
The data processing of images is another aspect, and nowadays there are automatic algorithms that can detect targets in an image much faster than a human.
The detection of drones, and thus the threat, is still the greatest challenge according to Hans Kariis.
Concealing and protecting units is significantly more difficult now than in the 70s and 80s.
The next step is to test different types of protection – both in the form of digital models of battlefields and through real-life trials.
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