Re: Pads near Cockeyed Ridge South East of Groom



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Message posted by Skeet (Member since 06/29/2022) on August 19, 2022 at 19:08:23 PST:

Groom and Site 4’s Foreign Material Exploitation efforts have clearly been paying off.

I can only imagine how their EW tests affect you in Rachel 😉 It does sound like a fascinating piece of technology. The project appears to be named after Colonel Richard "Moody" Suter, the father of “Red Flag”.

In the quote, it mentions the SA-10 which is the NATO codename for the S-300 - the exact family of radars that I previously thought the pads were used for: CLAM SHELL, BIG BIRD, CHEESE BOARD, and FLAP LID.

It was suspected that technology like Suter was used by the Israelis in Operation Orchard to defeat Syrian air-defence:
https://www.airforce-technology.com/analysis/feature1625/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Outside_the_Box

Mentions of Suter usage in Iraq and Afghanistan from 2006 give us a clue into Suter’s capabilities - adversarial air-defence was non-existent at that point in both wars. My guess is that Suter is a software suite that coordinates sensor fusion from multiple aircraft/sources so it can very accurately track/find and receive/send radio signals. This is likely how it invades the S-300, via the RF data-links between radar, command & control and missiles in the battery. This kind of tech would be very useful in Iraq and Afghanistan for tracking enemy cell phones and radio comms. It could even be used for counter IED operations.

I hope the story behind Suter gets declassified one day. This is speculation on my part but I’m guessing it went something like this:
- In the 80/90’s, the CIA managed to get hold of an S-300 battery.
- It was then transferred to Site-4 or Groom for vulnerability testing, which they found. A system was proposed to exploit the vulnerabilities from the air - a huge potential win for counter air-defence if they could make it work.
- The SENIOR SUTER special access project was started and developed in the 90’s, likely comprising of software and airborne sensors.
- Suter version 1 rolled out of the “black” and demonstrated at JEFX 2000.
- Development continued, broadening the scope of Suter’s cyber capabilities beyond counter air-defence to other radio networked applications.
- Technology matured and deployed in 2006.

Suter was still being developed in 2018 according to this budget document: https://www.dacis.com/budget/budget_pdf/FY20/RDTE/F/0305221F_259.pdf

This has been a fun one to research.



In Reply to: Re: Pads near Cockeyed Ridge South East of Groom posted by Joerg (Webmaster) on August 19, 2022 at 12:29:47 PST:

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