Radar Defense Today--and Tomorrow

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RADAR is now such a well-advertised secret that no one, physicist or publicist, stops to tell the simple citizen the simple facts about it--how it works, what it does easily, what it can do only with difficulty if at all, how it may be better used, how it may be frustrated. Yet all this can be put in civilian English without coming anywhere near the limit of what is recorded in military Russian. Radar is at once a science and an art, at once a process, a device and a system. What it achieves depends only in part on physics. It depends very greatly on people, as was shown by those of whom I have spoken elsewhere, in describing radar as the secret that was kept by a thousand women. An unintelligent, uninformed, uninterested or unconscientious operator can effortlessly throw away half a million dollars' worth of radar performance. I have not the means of knowing whether the NATO nations are now giving as much earnest consideration to the man as to the machine. The radar man, or the radar woman, is, I suppose, assumed to be much less newsworthy than the electronic Hobab.

In my wholly prejudiced view, radar began only when there was recognition that the agelong military problem of "What is beyond the Hill" should take, in air defense, the form of an attempt to give a substantially continuous flow of information about the exact position, flying height, composition and character of every formation in a possibly considerable number of spaced formations of aircraft, along and beyond an invisible, intangible frontier of detection and location. The frontier had to be thrust so far towards possible enemy bases as to give time for the interception and destruction of each enemy aircraft before it came near an important target. The unstated demand covered independence of the normal cycles of light and dark, of cloud, rain and fog, and--dans la mesure du possible--of the character of the intervening terrain...