USAF E-3 AWACS are outdated.
But the role is going ahead - USAF, RAF, RAAF have all selected the new E-7 Wedgetail to be the future AEW platform.
Not at the time the article was written, especially what the article was based on, ie, ELINT. While the radar remained a PESA, the rest of the antennas have received significant ugprades.
The issue was the distance from targets. And the fact that new AESA radars ended up matching the range of the AWACS alongside the distance advantage. We have ended up in a situation where fighter jets can see more than AWACS, including defeating a very big weakness, the radar horizon.
It still proves the point that AEW will be offloaded to a separate platform. Manned, unmanned, fixed wing, rotary wing - it depends on requirements & available launch options.
Yes. In fact, some reports have claimed that the NGAD won't even carry a radar of its own. It will be off-loaded to a cheaper drone. Whether it will eventally come true or not, I don't know.
Basically what I'm getting at is we can end up with a combination of drones with L/S band radars and fighters with X band to cover the entire air space instead of dedicated AEWs with crews, like the E-2/3 or Ka-31, with questionable survivability.
There's no major Carrier navy out there that is considering ditching AEW as a separate role.
Actually we don't yet know that. They are still working on concepts, both RN and USN. The USN's E-2Ds are still relatively new and will see service alongside the SHs into the 2040s. But the RN solution will be more up to our speed for Vikram and Vikrant. Plus, our interest is also geared towards the era beyond 2035 via IAC-2, so whatever the USN's making for that era, we need to keep an eye out for that, 'cause I doubt the E-2 will be in production beyond 2025.
At least NATO's definitive E-3 replacement is said to be a distributed system based on drones after 2035, while looking at the E-7 as a stopgap purchase until that point.
Most likely it has 1,000 transmit/receive modules and it was misconstrued/mistranslated as being able to track 1,000 targets.
The Koreans clearly said tracking 1000 targets. When the interview was given during the radar's unveiling, they said the radar TRM numbers will climb from 1088 to up to 1300 with the final production model. So both were two different topics.
There's not much of a difference between AWACS radars and fighter radars in terms of number of TRMs, at least based on aspect. In fact bigger fighters can easily have more TRMs than AWACS.