Noise jamming: brute force
Barrage jamming floods every frequency the radar uses with white noise. The radar's receiver can't pick the target echo out of the static. The downside: the jammer broadcasts its own location and needs enormous power. Spot jamming is smarter — listen for the radar frequency, then blast only that narrow band.
Deception: fool the computer
Instead of noise, send fake echoes. Range-gate pull-off (RGPO) copies the radar pulse, delays it slightly, and retransmits with growing delay. The radar's tracking gate follows the fake and loses the real target. Velocity gate pull-off does the same with Doppler shift. Modern Digital Radio Frequency Memory (DRFM) can do this with microsecond precision.
Escort vs stand-off
An escort jammer flies with the strike package, protecting nearby aircraft. A stand-off jammer orbits far away, attacking the enemy's early-warning radars from outside missile range. The EA-18G Growler, based on the F/A-18F, carries ALQ-99 pods that do both. The Next-Generation Jammer (NGJ) replaces it with active arrays and AI-driven waveform selection.
Anti-jam: STAP and LPI
Radar fights back. Space-Time Adaptive Processing (STAP) separates moving targets from jammer noise using both spatial and Doppler filtering. Low Probability of Intercept (LPI) radars spread their power across wide bandwidths, hopping frequencies so fast the jammer can't find them. Stealth reduces the target signal so far that jamming needs to be impossibly powerful to matter.