h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

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Roke [URL removed by moderator]a affiliate of Siemens, has developed a method to detect vehicles disguised by the stealth technology by a normal cell phone (transmitting station).

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One of the stealth aircraft got knocked down in Yugoslavia, though, and by all accounts this was down to an optically guided anti-aircraft gun of not much more than WW2 vintage. (ie, no fancy radar, just Human Eyeball Mark One looking through an optical gunsight)

Was this sheer fluke, or could at least some of the capacities of the Stealth Fighters have been talked up for propaganda purposes? (ie - "you do not have a hope of beating the US iof A, boy, we have such a great tech-no-logical lead that you would be wise to surrender now!")

Or could it just be, as the Vietcong of old and the Iraqi resistance serve to demonstrate, that the way of defeating hi-tech military equipment is with low-tech solutions?

(An aircraft, proof against every form of 21st-century radar detection, might still be picked up by WW2-and pre-WW2 technology, which were probably beneath the designers' dignity to guard against? I'm thinking of those Heath Robinson contraptions used by the Royal Observer Corps in the Thirties - sound deflectors and sound locators, which being unpowered and completely manual are emitting no signal and therefore cannot be detected by ECW kit, but which in trained hands might well yield information like "single jet engine at thirty thousand feet, bearing 030 degrees"