loke wrote:The discussion about need for Growler support for 4-4.5 gen fighters is an interesting one.
AFAIK Israel does not have access to Growlers. Still they very successfully conducted many raids above Syria before they got the F-35. How did they do that without Growlers?
In complement to what hornetfinn replied earlier to you, I would say that the Israelis did (and do) that thru SIGINT/ELINT which allows them (Israelis) to pinpoint the position of enemy radars/air defenses.
The Israelis have lots of platforms to achieve this such as their F-16I (Sufa), UAVs and like previously mentioned even ground based SIGINT/ELINT equipment, etc...
After pinpointing the position of enemy radars/air defenses the Israelis can opt to destroy those enemy assets with a myriad of munitions such for instance as cruise missiles (like the Delilah for example) or other longer range weapons (such as the SPICE or SDB for example) or alternatively to bypass/avoid them.
The F-35 allows a clear continuation of the same 'strategy' above into the future.
“Active stealth” is what the ignorant nay sayers call ECM and pretend like it’s new.