Nice Radar Plane You Got There. Shame If Something Should Happen To It.

The U.S. Air Force is gearing up to launch a five-year, $150 million effort to equip its big, slow aerial tankers and radar and reconnaissance planes with an artificial-intelligence jamming system.

The goal of Project Kaiju, named for the rubber-suit monsters of Japanese cinema, is to protect the so-called “high-value airborne assets” from the latest Russian and Chinese missiles, which might switch between infrared, radar and radar-homing guidance in order to dodge current jammers.

The Project Kaiju jammer, if it works, would keep up with fast-switching enemy seekers and spoof them accordingly.

But it’s worth pointing out that long-range missiles with multi-mode seekers aren’t the only way to go after refueling, radar and recon planes. The Soviets proved that decades ago.

High-value airborne assets, or HVAAs, are critical to the USAF’s way of war. They gather intelligence, spot targets and steer friendly aircraft. Perhaps most importantly, they keep fighters and bombers gassed up so they can travel potentially thousands of miles between their bases and enemy targets.

America’s rivals—the Soviet Union during the Cold War, Russia and China today—know how important these high-value planes are. No sooner had HVAAs entered U.S. service than the Soviets began working out tactics for destroying them.

The USAF’s main HVAAs appeared in the 1960s and ‘70s and are still around today: Three dozen E-3 airborne early-warning planes, a couple dozen RC-135 surveillance planes and 400 or so KC-135 tankers.

The E-3s were particularly important for U.S. and NATO war plans in Europe. The four-engine Boeing 707s, each with a giant rotating radar dish on its fuselage, would detect and track Soviet warplanes and guide alliance warplanes to intercept them.

The E-3s were—and are—“battle-managers,” to borrow a recent term. Soviet planners figured that if they destroyed the managers, they could throw NATO war plans into disarray.

But there was a problem. The USAF and allied air forces planned to protect the E-3s. “Allocating adequate fighter defense assets and proper [offensive counter-air] operations against adversary threats are the primary defenses for HVAA,” the Pentagon explained in a 2002 doctrine.

In other words, friendly fighters would patrol between the E-3s and other high-value planes in order to block enemy jets. The protective fighters also could get aggressive and zoom into enemy air space to shoot down possible attackers closer to their own bases. That’s “offensive counter-air.”

As a back-up, the HVAAs could fly inside the protection umbrella of surface-to-air missile batteries on the ground, while also staying as far from the front lines as possible while still contributing to the battle.

The E-3s enjoyed a lot of protection. But that didn’t mean they were invulnerable. Veterans of the Cold War observed the Soviet air force working out tactics for overcoming that protection and getting clear shots at the big, slow radar planes.

“Back in the ‘80s, we watched the Soviets practice HVAA intercepts on their side of the inter-German border with squadron-sized formations of MiG-25s,” tweeted one former U.S. intelligence officer, who writes under the pseudonym “Nate Hale.”

A dozen high-flying, supersonic MiG-25s, each packing four R-40 missiles with a range of 50 miles, posed a serious threat. USAF fighters might shoot down some or most of the MiG-25s, but they’d have to shoot down all of them to keep the E-3 safe.

As a tactic, this aerial bum-rush was risky for the attackers. Losses among pilots and planes surely would be catastrophic. Soviet Frontal Aviation in the ‘80s possessed only a few regiments of MiG-25s and could’ve spent them all going after HVAAs.

But then, the USAF and NATO possessed only a few dozen radar planes. Was it worth it to Soviet planners to exhaust their entire MiG-25 force in order to degrade the E-3 force? Inasmuch as HVAAs were critical to alliance operations—probably yes.

Don’t think the Chinese haven’t considered a similar approach to knocking down American high-value planes. With or without the multi-mode seekers that the USAF aims to spoof with its Project Kaiju jammer, the Chinese People’s Liberation Army Air Force could hold at risk the few radar planes the USAF and allied air arms could project into the Western Pacific.

Consider the mass formations of warplanes the PLAAF has sent into Taiwan’s air-defense identification zones in recent months. In just one mission back in June, the Chinese air force sortied a record 28 planes, including 16 J-11 and J-16 fighters.

Now imagine 16 Chinese fighter barreling toward a USAF E-3 and its escorts. “It is highly likely that current high-signature [surveillance] and [battle-management] platforms attempting to operate in future contested and highly contested environments ... would suffer high levels of attrition,” the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments in Washington, D.C., explained in a 2019 study.

A high-tech new jammer is a Band-Aid on this wound. “Our solution?” Hale quipped. “Keep HVAA forward and give them more capabilities so they will be an even more tempting target.”

The Air Force knows it has a problem. Project Kaiju is a temporary fix as the service works on a totally new approach to airborne battle-management that wouldn’t include any big, slow radar planes.

Instead, the E-3’s current sensor and command functions eventually could spread across a force of small, fast, armed stealth fighters plugging into an A.I.-driven data network.

But there’s no similar plan for replacing hundreds of indispensable aerial tankers that also are HVAAs—and are equally vulnerable to enemy attack.