Hey everyone, welcome back to My Weird Prompts. We are coming to you from our apartment here in Jerusalem, and I have to say, the atmosphere feels a bit different today. Daniel’s prompt really hit home because he was talking about the same thing we have been doing all morning, which is cleaning up, checking the go-bags, and keeping a very close eye on the news. There is a lot of movement in the region right now, and when you see those massive military assets being positioned, it definitely changes the vibe of your morning coffee. You look out the window and see the clear blue sky, but you know that just over the horizon, there is a level of technological surveillance that most people can barely imagine.
It really does. Herman Poppleberry here, and I have to admit, I have been glued to the flight trackers and the open-source intelligence feeds lately. When Daniel mentioned the Boeing E-three Sentry, also known as the AWACS, it was perfect timing. I actually saw one on a tracker yesterday flying a long, oval pattern over the eastern Mediterranean, just off the coast. It is one of those aircraft that, once you understand what it is actually doing up there, your entire perspective on modern warfare shifts. It is not just a plane with a big dish on top; it is essentially a flying brain, a central nervous system for an entire theater of war.
Right, and that is what Daniel was asking about. He wanted to know what specific capabilities the Airborne Warning and Control System, or AWACS, adds to United States air power and what some of the most fascinating things the E-three Sentry can actually do. It is such a distinctive-looking plane. If you have ever seen a photo of one, you cannot miss it. It is that big four-engine jet, based on the old Boeing seven hundred and seven airframe, with a massive rotating black and white disc mounted on two large struts over the back of the fuselage. It looks like it is carrying a giant mushroom or a UFO that decided to hitch a ride.
It is a bit comical, honestly. That disc is thirty feet in diameter and six feet thick. They call it a rotodome. But as goofy as it looks, it is the most critical asset in the sky. You can have the stealthiest fighters and the most powerful bombers in the world, but without an AWACS, they are essentially fighting in the dark. The E-three provides what military planners call the God’s eye view of the entire theater of operations. It is the difference between looking through a soda straw and having the roof of the stadium taken off so you can see every player on the field at once.
So let’s start there, Herman. Why do we need a radar in the sky in the first place? We have massive radar installations on the ground, we have powerful radars on Aegis destroyers and cruisers at sea. Why go through the incredible expense and technical headache of mounting one on a forty-year-old airliner and keeping it in the air for ten or twelve hours at a time? It seems like a lot of effort when you could just build a bigger tower on a hill.
It all comes down to the physics of the earth itself—specifically the curvature of the earth and the way radar waves travel. Radar generally works on a line-of-sight basis. If you are standing on the ground with a radar, you can see things that are high in the air from a long way off because there is nothing in the way. But the earth is a sphere. If an enemy aircraft is flying low to the ground, it can hide behind the curve of the earth or behind mountains. This is what pilots call flying under the radar. From a ground-based station, your radar horizon for a low-flying target might only be twenty or thirty miles. But if you take that radar and you move it up to thirty thousand feet, your horizon expands exponentially. Suddenly, you can see over the mountains, you can see down into the valleys, and you can see targets hundreds of miles away that would be completely invisible to a ground-based station until they were right on top of you.
That makes sense. It is like the difference between trying to see what is happening in a crowded stadium from the front row versus sitting in the press box at the very top. But I imagine it is not as simple as just pointing a radar down. Doesn't the ground itself interfere with the signal? I mean, if the radar waves are hitting the ground, wouldn't they just bounce back and create a giant mess on the screen?
That is exactly the technical hurdle that made the E-three such a breakthrough when it was introduced in the late nineteen seventies. When a radar looks down at the earth, it receives a massive amount of what we call ground clutter. The radar waves bounce off trees, buildings, hills, and the ocean surface. If you are looking for a small, fast-moving jet against that background of static, it is like trying to find a specific grey bird flying in front of a giant grey wall. The E-three solved this using something called Pulse Doppler radar.
I remember we touched on the Doppler effect briefly in an earlier episode about weather tracking. Is it the same principle?
Exactly the same. It is the change in frequency of a wave in relation to an observer who is moving relative to the wave source. Think of the way a siren changes pitch as an ambulance drives past you. The E-three’s radar system, specifically the Westinghouse AN-APY-one or APY-two, uses this to filter out anything that is not moving at a high speed. The ground is stationary, so the radar ignores those returns. But a jet moving at five hundred miles per hour creates a distinct Doppler shift. The onboard computers can isolate that shift and display only the moving targets. This capability, called look-down shoot-down, changed everything. It meant that low-flying intruders could no longer hide in the clutter. The E-three can actually distinguish between a low-flying cruise missile and a truck driving on a highway just by the difference in their speed and return signature.
So, the E-three is up there, it is seeing everything for hundreds of miles. Daniel mentioned that it acts as a battlefield management system. How does that information actually get used? It isn't just the pilots of the E-three looking at a screen and calling people on the radio, right? I mean, I imagine the pilots are busy just flying the plane.
You are right. The pilots are just the bus drivers in this scenario. Inside the E-three, behind the cockpit, there is a whole team of mission specialists. We are talking about maybe twenty to thirty people sitting at computer consoles in a windowless tube. These are air battle managers, weapons directors, and surveillance technicians. They are seeing a digital map of the entire sky. They can see every friendly aircraft, every unidentified aircraft, and every known enemy asset. They can even see ships at sea using a specific maritime mode. They are essentially the air traffic controllers for the war, but with a much more active and aggressive role.
I love that term, air traffic controllers for the war. But they aren't just saying, hey, turn left at the next cloud, right?
Not at all. They are directing the flow of the entire battle. If a group of friendly fighters is running low on fuel, the AWACS controllers will see the tanker orbits and direct the fighters to a nearby tanker. If an enemy threat pops up on the edge of the radar range, the AWACS will alert the nearest fighter patrol and give them an intercept vector before the fighters’ own onboard radars even pick up the threat. They are managing the big picture. They can tell which friendly units are engaged, who needs backup, and where the gaps in the defense are. This is why it is called a force multiplier. One AWACS makes every other plane in the sky more effective because they all have better situational awareness. It is like having a coach who can see the entire field from a drone while the players are down in the mud.
You mentioned that they identify friendly versus foe. How does that work? In a crowded airspace like we have here in the Middle East, where you have civilian airliners, multiple different air forces, and drones all in the same area, how does the AWACS keep it all straight? It seems like it would be so easy to make a mistake.
That is a huge part of the job, and it is a high-stakes game. It uses a system called Identification Friend or Foe, or IFF. The rotodome on top actually contains two different radar systems. The big one is the primary surveillance radar that bounces waves off objects to see where they are. But there is a second, smaller antenna that sends out an interrogation signal. Friendly aircraft have a transponder that receives that signal and sends back a coded, encrypted response that says, hey, I am a friendly F-fifteen, and here is my unique ID code. If the AWACS sees a target that is not sending back a friendly code, it is marked as a track of interest or a hostile. The crew then uses other pieces of intelligence, like flight plans or electronic signatures, to figure out what it is. In nineteen ninety-four, there was a tragic friendly fire incident in Iraq involving two Black Hawk helicopters because of a failure in this exact process, which led to massive changes in how AWACS crews are trained and how IFF is handled.
It sounds like an incredible amount of data. How do they share that with the fighters? I assume they aren't just reading out coordinates over a voice radio anymore. That would be so slow, especially in a fast-moving dogfight.
No, that would be way too slow and prone to error. They use high-speed digital data links, most notably something called Link sixteen. This is a jam-resistant, high-speed tactical data exchange network. It allows the AWACS to beam its entire radar picture directly into the cockpits of the fighter jets. So, a pilot in an F-thirty-five or an F-sixteen can look at their multi-function display and see exactly what the AWACS sees, even if their own radar is turned off. This is a huge tactical advantage.
Wait, why would they turn their own radar off?
Because radar is active. It is like turning on a flashlight in a dark room. You can see things, but everyone else can see your flashlight from a long way off. If a fighter jet turns off its radar, it becomes much harder to detect. But by using Link sixteen, they can fly silent, not emitting any radar signals that might give them away, while still having a perfect view of the enemy thanks to the AWACS lurking in the distance. They can sneak up on an enemy, get a missile lock using the AWACS data, and the enemy won't even know they are there until the missile is in the air.
That is terrifyingly efficient. And the range we are talking about is staggering. You mentioned hundreds of miles?
An E-three flying at thirty thousand feet has a radar range of over two hundred and fifty miles for low-flying targets and even further for high-altitude ones. That means one single aircraft can monitor an area of about one hundred and ninety thousand square miles. To put that in perspective, that is almost the size of the entire country of Spain. Three E-threes flying in overlapping patterns can provide complete radar coverage of all of Central Europe. It is an incredible amount of coverage from just a handful of airframes.
It is easy to see why they are such high-priority targets. If I am the enemy, the first thing I want to do is take out that flying brain. If you blind the AWACS, the whole air force is suddenly stumbling around in the dark. How does the E-three protect itself? It is a big, slow airliner. It is not exactly going to outmaneuver a missile or a modern interceptor.
You are right, it is a very lucrative target. In military terms, they call it a High Value Airborne Asset. Because it is so vulnerable, it never flies alone in a contested area. It is always protected by a screen of fighter jets, usually flying in what they call a CAP, or Combat Air Patrol. These fighters are dedicated to keeping anything from getting close to the AWACS. But the E-three also has its own defensive suites. It has electronic countermeasures to jam enemy radar and infrared sensors to detect incoming missiles, along with flare and chaff dispensers. But its best defense is its range. It stays far back from the front lines, often over friendly territory or international waters, using its long-distance eyes to stay out of trouble.
We have been talking about the E-three Sentry specifically, but Daniel also mentioned the E-seven Wedgetail and the fact that NATO and other countries use these systems. Is the E-three getting a bit long in the tooth? I mean, the seven hundred and seven airframe hasn't been in production for a long time. I can't imagine finding spare parts for a nineteen sixties-era jet is easy.
It is definitely showing its age. The U.S. Air Force has been flying some of these individual airframes since the nineteen seventies. They have been upgraded dozens of times—new computers, new sensors—but you can only do so much with an old airframe. Maintenance is becoming a nightmare because parts for the old TF-thirty-three engines and the airframe itself are getting harder to find. They are essentially museum pieces that we are still asking to do the most important job in the military. That is why the U.S. is finally moving toward the E-seven Wedgetail, which is based on the Boeing seven hundred and thirty-seven.
And the E-seven looks very different, right? It doesn't have the rotating mushroom. It has more of a... well, a wedge on top.
Right. The E-seven uses a completely different type of radar called a Multi-role Electronically Scanned Array, or MESA. Instead of a rotating dish that physically turns to see in different directions, it has a fixed, fin-like structure on top. The radar beam is steered electronically by shifting the phase of the radio waves. This is much faster and more reliable because there are no moving parts. It can also focus more energy on a specific area. If the crew sees something suspicious, they can tell the radar to stare at that one spot with incredible intensity, which makes it much better at tracking small, stealthy targets or fast-moving drones. It is a massive leap in technology.
It is interesting that the U.S. is actually a bit behind on this. Australia, the United Kingdom, and Turkey are already flying the Wedgetail. We are just now getting around to it.
Yeah, the U.S. kept upgrading the E-three because it was so capable, but they eventually hit a wall. The transition to the E-seven is going to be a huge deal for U.S. air power over the next decade. But even with the new hardware, the mission remains the same. It is about command and control. It is about being the nervous system of the entire air force. The E-seven will be able to manage not just manned fighters, but also the upcoming swarms of collaborative combat aircraft—those autonomous wingman drones we keep hearing about.
You know, thinking about our situation here in Jerusalem, it makes me think about the logistical side of this. When Daniel sees those photos of assets moving, he is seeing the visible part of a very complex machine. An AWACS deployment isn't just the plane. It is the hundreds of people who maintain it, the tankers that keep it fueled, and the secure communication satellites that relay its data back to headquarters.
Absolutely. The E-three has incredible endurance, especially with mid-air refueling. They can stay airborne for twenty-four hours if they have to. The crew usually works in shifts. There is a small rest area with bunks and a galley on board because those missions are grueling. You are sitting in a dark tube, staring at a computer screen for ten hours, making life-and-death decisions about which targets to prioritize. It takes a huge amount of mental stamina. I have talked to former AWACS controllers who say the hardest part isn't the technical stuff; it is the fatigue of staring at a screen for half a day while the plane is vibrating and the air is dry.
I want to go back to something Daniel mentioned, which was the Air Battle Management System. We have talked about the radar and the data links, but what are some of the other fascinating things the E-three can do? I have read that they can actually assist in search and rescue missions. That seems like a very different vibe from directing a dogfight.
They can! Because they have such a powerful communication suite and a high-altitude vantage point, they often act as a communication relay. If a pilot is shot down behind enemy lines, their low-power survival radio might not be able to reach a distant base. But the AWACS, flying high above, can pick up that signal and relay it to the rescue teams. They can also coordinate the entire rescue operation, directing the helicopters and the fighter cover to the exact location. They are the only ones who have the big-picture view of where the enemy threats are in relation to the downed pilot.
What about electronic warfare? Can an AWACS tell if it is being jammed, or can it do some jamming of its own? I imagine with that much power on board, they could really mess with someone's radio.
It is very sensitive to electronic signals. While its primary job is active radar, it also has passive sensors that can listen for enemy radar emissions. This is called Electronic Support Measures, or ESM. It can identify the type of radar an enemy is using, which tells the crew exactly what kind of surface-to-air missile site or fighter jet they are dealing with. It can geo-locate those emitters with surprising accuracy just by listening. As for jamming, it generally leaves the heavy-duty offensive jamming to specialized planes like the EA-eighteen-G Growler. The AWACS wants to stay relatively quiet in terms of electronic noise so its own radar can work at peak efficiency. It is more of a listener than a shouter.
It is really the ultimate multi-tool. It is a radar station, a command center, a communication hub, and an intelligence gatherer all in one. It is no wonder that whenever there is a crisis anywhere in the world, the E-three is usually one of the first assets to arrive on the scene. It is the ultimate signal of intent.
It is the first in and the last out. In the opening days of the Gulf War in nineteen ninety-one, AWACS planes were in the air twenty-four-seven, managing over three thousand sorties a day. They recorded every single air-to-air kill of that conflict. Without them, that level of air superiority would have been impossible. And we see that today in modern conflicts. Even if they aren't directly involved in combat, they are often flying just outside the borders of a conflict zone, providing intelligence to allies and ensuring that no one gets surprised. For example, since the conflict in Ukraine began, NATO AWACS have been flying constant patrols over Poland and Romania, keeping a very close eye on everything moving in the region.
It is a bit of a sobering thought, especially given where we are sitting right now in February of twenty-six. These planes represent an incredible amount of power, but they are also a stabilizing force in a way. If everyone knows exactly what is happening in the sky, there is less room for the kind of misunderstanding or accidental escalation that can lead to a much bigger conflict.
That is a great point, Corn. Transparency, even if it is one-sided, can be a deterrent. If an adversary knows they can't sneak anything past the AWACS, they are less likely to try a provocative move. It is a silent sentinel. You might not see it, and you might not hear it, but it is watching everything. It is the ultimate insurance policy for an air force.
So, looking forward, do you think we will ever see an unmanned AWACS? With the way drone technology is going, it seems like the logical next step. Why put thirty people in a vulnerable plane if you can do it from the ground?
It is definitely being discussed. There are already high-altitude drones like the MQ-four-C Triton or the Global Hawk that do some surveillance, but they don't have the massive power requirements or the crew capacity of an E-three. The real challenge isn't just the radar; it is the human element. Those twenty air battle managers on board are doing complex cognitive work that we aren't quite ready to hand over to an AI yet. They are making judgment calls based on ambiguous data and changing rules of engagement. However, in the future, you might see a smaller crew on the plane managing a fleet of unmanned radar drones that extend the reach of the main ship.
Like a mother ship for a swarm of sensors. That sounds like something out of a science fiction movie.
Exactly. That seems to be where the technology is heading. More distributed, more resilient, and less dependent on a single, massive, vulnerable airframe. But for now, the E-three and the upcoming E-seven are the kings of the hill. They are the indispensable assets that make modern air power possible.
Well, Herman, I think we have covered a lot of ground here. Or a lot of air, I should say. Daniel’s prompt really gave us a chance to dig into a part of military technology that often gets overlooked because it isn't as flashy as a stealth fighter, but it is clearly much more important to the overall success of a mission. It is the backbone of the entire operation.
It is the unsung hero. It is the one that makes everyone else look good. I am glad we got to talk about it, especially today. It makes me look at those flight trackers with a lot more respect. When you see that little icon moving in a circle for eight hours, you realize there are thirty people in there working incredibly hard to keep the peace or manage a conflict.
Definitely. And speaking of respect, we really appreciate all of you for tuning in and being part of this community. If you are enjoying the show, we would really appreciate it if you could leave us a quick review on your podcast app or on Spotify. It genuinely helps other people find us, and we love hearing what you think. We have been doing this for a long time, and your feedback is what keeps us going.
Yeah, it makes a big difference. And if you have your own weird prompts or questions you want us to explore, you can always get in touch. We love the deep dives into technical subjects like this.
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This has been episode eight hundred of My Weird Prompts. It is hard to believe we have done eight hundred of these. It feels like just yesterday we were recording episode one in that tiny basement.
It really is. Thanks for sticking with us, everyone. Stay safe out there, keep your go-bags ready if you are in a part of the world that requires it, and we will talk to you next time.
Goodbye everyone! Keep your eyes on the skies!
