The Mitchell Institute, an Air Force Association-funded think-tank, will release on Thursday a new paper called "Radar Game and the Value of Stealth", by Rebecca Grant. It comes 12 years after Grant first published a paper called simply "The Radar Game", which defended the US Air Force's long insistence on a mostly- (if not all-) stealth fleet of fighters and bombers. It will be interesting to see if any of the advances in bi-static radar or integrated air defenses have altered Grant's conclusions over the last 12 years. Stealth technology also has come a long way since Have Blue, which combined a forgotten Soviet mathematician's formulas with Skunk Works engineer Denys Overholser's vision for aircraft surfaces that bounce signals away from a radar receiver. As the USAF plots the strategy for developing a new penetrating bomber, balancing the need for survivability with the cost of stealth technology will be a key issue.
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