Originally Posted by
tartare
Naive question - in terms of engaging using air power, how difficult would it be for an IAF fast jet to engage a Hamas powered paraglider in an area where there are lots of manpads?
Assume an F-35 or F-16 would easily be able to get a lock on the paragilder to engage from higher altitude I would imagine, but a missile engagement would be very wasteful in terms of $$$.
Flying low enough to engage with guns would put you in range of manpads - right?
Assume an Apache cannon engagement would be more effective and practicable.
Reason I ask is it actually seemed like a pretty cunning way to infiltrate from the air.
Low cost, slow, probably hard to pick up against ground clutter and very STOL.
Of course the easiest way to kill them would be to just shoot at them using an SLR from the ground...
The issue with the paraglider scenario is that it falls in to the zone rejected by Radar software due to its low speed. It will also be quite close to ground clutter. This can make them hard to detect and track, so you would need to do something like patrol for them.