This is electronic warfare in action. It happened in real time to Mike Cocke, now Senior Director of Business Development for Self-Protection Systems at Terma, during his nearly 24-year career as a United States Air Force Electronic Warfare Officer.
"The countermeasures happened so fast that by the time I realized that I should be scared, it was already dealt with," Cocke recalls. What would have happened without those systems? The radar would have locked the aircraft, handed off tracking data to a missile, and fired.
Modern warfare begins in the electromagnetic spectrum and not by pulling the trigger.
The electromagnetic spectrum encompasses every frequency band used for military operations: radar, communications, GPS navigation, electro-optical sensors, infrared detection and laser systems. Most people outside military circles have never heard of spectrum warfare. Many inside the military understand it only vaguely.
"When you see military operations on TV or in the news, you see tanks, you see airplanes, you see ships," Cocke explains. "This is the invisible side of it that you can't see, but it is the foundation for military operations going forward. It's absolutely essential."
Electronic warfare traces its origins to World War II, when both sides deployed aluminum foil strips to create false radar returns and noise jammers to fill scopes with static. Radar could detect, but destroying fast-moving aircraft proved difficult.
That calculus changed on October 7, 1959, when a Soviet SA-2 missile shot down a Taiwanese RB-57 reconnaissance aircraft. It was the first time in history a guided missile had destroyed an aircraft in operational conditions. The United States truly woke up during Vietnam, where American aircraft carried no sensors to detect hostile radar, no jammers and no warning systems. The losses mounted rapidly.
"From that point, the Air Force built out all of the architecture that you saw in Desert Storm," Cocke notes.
Neither Russia nor Ukraine has achieved air superiority. Consequently, neither side can generate the operational momentum needed to achieve strategic objectives, a stalemate Cocke finds historically familiar.
"I see a parallel between what was going on in World War I and what's going on in Ukraine. Neither side has air superiority. And because they don't have air superiority, they can't get the initiative on the ground."
For soldiers on the ground, the degraded electromagnetic environment creates a paradox: when units transmit, those emissions reveal their positions. Communications become targeting data and soldiers face the choice between isolation and exposure.
Traditional radar threats operated on fixed, hardware-defined parameters. Once Western intelligence identified an adversary's war-reserve operating modes, countermeasures could be developed with confidence.
"Night one of a big war, they're going to go to war reserve mode number one. But by night five, you know all of their tricks."
Software-defined radios have eliminated that certainty. Frequencies change. Scan patterns shift. Operating modes disappear overnight and get replaced by entirely new configurations. At the same time, modern integrated air defense systems now operate as kill webs rather than kill chains, with multiple radars sharing tracking data across meshed networks. Severing one link accomplishes nothing when dozens of alternative data paths exist.
The U.S. acquisition system was never built for this. It was designed to field equipment that works flawlessly from day one, sensible when threats evolved over decades, not months.
"Perfect is the enemy of good enough," Cocke argues. "If we can get good enough into the field, let's do that and keep iterating. We don't have time to wait for perfect."
Cocke spent nine months learning to identify radar systems by their audio signatures alone, the sound of scanning patterns, pulse characteristics and frequency behaviors. That expertise took thousands of hours to develop.
AI systems can do the same in days. More importantly, they can identify patterns no human operator would ever catch.
"I'm an EWO. I think I'm a dinosaur. I think the future EWOs are going to be an AI algorithm sitting in a black box on an aircraft making the decisions."
The measure-countermeasure cycle that defined electronic warfare since World War II hasn't changed. Only its speed has.
"Learn how to make decisions with incomplete information. Take the initiative and execute as best as you can with what you have. That has worked for thousands of years. It can still work again."