RAF 100 Group and its EW Legacy

Thursday, October 3, 2019 14:00 -15:00 EDT

ABOUT

Seventy-five years ago the leadership of the Royal Air Force’s (RAF) Bomber Command took a decision which would change air power forever. It created 100 Group. This was a specialist unit tasked with unleashing kinetic and electronic effects against the Luftwaffe’s Integrated Air Defence System (IADS). The Group came into being as the Command intensified its attacks against strategic targets in Germany in late 1943. During its 18 month career 100 Group pioneered electronic warfare tactics and concepts of operations which continue to save aircrew lives, much as they did in the skies over Western Europe.

The story of 100 Group is one of the rapid embrace, and deployment, of technology. This webinar will examine how the Group adopted technology to counter Luftwaffe radar and radio communications integral to the IADS. It will illustrate that the Group’s approach would pave the way for the tactics and techniques routinely employed in contemporary Suppression of Enemy Air Defence (SEAD) missions. Adopting a chronological approach the webinar will discuss the electronic elements of the IADS and how these were countered by the RAF’s Electronic Countermeasures (ECMs). Crucially, the webinar will show how the adoption of these ECMs developed from simply using such systems to protect individual aircraft, to their employment en masse to precipitate the wider degradation of the Luftwaffe’s air defences.