Development of an Effective IR Decoy with Minimal Visible Signature

Nighttime operations are very attractive for the U.S. Armed Forces since these conditions generally maximize their advantage over the opposing forces. The deployment of IR countermeasures to protect aircraft from heat-seeking missiles, however, may remove the advantage of nighttime conditions and expose the aircraft to anti-aircraft artillery and small arms fire. Therefore, a need exists for an IR decoy which is effective against a variety of IR missile threats and also has little or no visible signature. This program addresses this need. The proposed program has two objectives; the identification and evaluation of promising approaches for the generation of a strong IR signature with a minimal visible signature; and, the testing and demonstration of an IR source having little or no visible signature. The program will include modeling the visible and IR signature of candidate concepts, and assessment of IR decoy effectiveness for the concepts based on existing data and simulation studies, and the testing and demonstration of the potential for high IR source intensity and minimal visible intensity for the best concepts.