AWACS is sitting at long range and firing active search radar from single direction. To get a proper coverage of area, you'll want to have as much data from as many data points as possible which are interlinked and share radar data. This makes both active jamming and stealthiness much harder to execute. This ranges from flying hugging ground to actually flying stealthy planes to avoid detection.

Incidentally, that is exactly what both NATO and Russian tech developed into back in the 1980s and 1990s.

The real problem is that plane simply has no tasks in these wars. The closest it could come to seeing action is maintaining some no-fly zone somewhere, but even those tasks are typically better handled by non stealthy aircraft that can afford to keep their search radars in active mode all the time to add to radar coverage of the area.

So you're not blaming the fact that most motivated and best people leave, and those who know that jobs are shit and are good will never take them?

It's not at all occurring to you that offering a demanding job at a slave wage is not the best way to get good employees?

You must be an true modern US big business manager. Or stupid. But those two are synonyms.

That's not really hard to "learn" when you're oceans away from everyone who could even remotely oppose you.

Thing is, wikipedia at the very least 100% confirms my take on it. Hence, either GP has a much better source, or he's talking about things he just doesn't understand.

No offence, but pulse form of radars is not "new". It's what came with early PESAs. That was in 70s, 40 years ago.

Regardless, you're still talking about search radars anyway. Fire control radar needs to have power to burn through jamming. You're not going to do that with a 60 watt radar against military grade multi-spectrum jammer. Modern ships use radars that are rated in megawatts for this, aircraft usually push into tens of kilowatts range.

It is certainly true that most search radars can operate in low power mode to reduce visibility. It is completely and utterly unfeasible for that kind of power to do anything to a modern jammer. And it is even more unfeasible to expect a fire control radar to get any kind of result with those power ratings.

You should keep on reading till the end then. Wikipedia is knowledgeable enough to tell you exactly what I told you in above post about the actual firing mode. "Fire and forget" means that pilots doesn't have to think about guiding the missile. It doesn't mean that plane's system has the same luxury. In fact, the best known counter action to AIM-120 long range launch is to lock your own fire control radar on the enemy and open fire. This will likely force enemy fighter to flee, and AIM-120 will self destruct without mid life update.

While we don't know the exact specs for obvious reasons, it would take quite a state of art radar to provide accurate fire control data at 200km+. As of typing this, F-22's radar has stated detection range of 100-200km (search radar). Active fire control radar is typically far more limited in range as it has to fire a tight beam and collect far more accurate data. About the only fighter aircraft in existence that can pull off a maneuvre you're describing and is not a dedicated AWACS aircraft with huge radar antenna is MiG-31, which is specifically designed for this task and isn't really a fighter - it's more like an AWACS married to a plane that can launch missiles.

A far more likely scenario is for planes to fire up radars in short bursts one by one to provide mid life updates to one another to confuse the enemy a bit like P-700 missile swarms do, but with interlinked planes taking turns with quick "fire-ups". However this will most likely happen in "danger zone" where enemy can engage as well due to range issues.

There are a LOT of things that retrofits were planned for in case of F-22 program. They were almost all canned because of exploding costs of the program.

That's why it's called top secret technology. It wouldn't be top secret if random people on internet forum such as ourselves would know, would it?

Officially F-22 is designed to be used with AIM-120 AMRAAM which is not capable of what you're describing in any of its current or known planned variants. I assume you have some sort of classified information available, as most missiles known to be used in US Air Force today require data from aircraft they're being fired from for both initial and mid life course updates. Their own radar is typically very short range terminal stage one, designed for terminal guidance purposes.

Dare I ask for a source?

According to news on wired, there's a total of seven aircraft in entire US airfoce that can handle the task. AWACS is incapable of it, they have special retrofitted civilian aircraft with this communications system and standard data link.

Actually the main reason was because our multinationals controlled these just fine until recently, and wars were often used by said multinationals to improve their extraction terms with locals.

And nowadays we cannot really go to open war with China that uses its state companies to do the same thing.

I don't think you know how RADAR works. To get a "lock on" you need radio illlumination. To illuminate, someone, you or someone else needs to radiate energy towards the target. That is what fire control radar does - it fires a thin, concentrated beam of energy at the target in a certain pattern, and tracks the reflections. That is something that F22 cannot use when stealthed. Unless someone else illuminates the target for it, in which case it will need exact data on how illumination was done, or unless target itself radiates energy in which case it can use anti-radiation systems to get a passive lock.

Or clued in politicians with certain agenda diverting attention from things their handlers told them to divert attention from and diverting said attention to things their handlers told them to divert attention to.