Starlink radiation makes stealth target glow on Chinese radar

You don't actually need the satellites. Bouncing radar waves off the ionosphere to backlight stealth targets has been a known strategy for years.

You don't even need that. Stealth shrinks radar cross sections, but there is always a return. If you see something the size of a golf ball zipping by at supersonic speeds, you can be pretty confident it's not actually a golf ball. Everyone can detect stealth craft, but that's only so useful.

It doesn't really matter though. The purpose of stealth is not to make planes invisible, it's to make the effective range that planes can be detected and - much more importantly - targeted shorter. Thus a network of radars sufficient for denying access to non-stealth planes has gaps exploitable by stealth aircraft. Closing those gaps is not impossible, but it's extremely expensive, and the countries with stealth aircraft tend to have more money than the countries that need to defend against them. And for cases where you can't build bigger or more radar transceivers, for example the terminal guidance of missiles, the only option is getting physically closer to the target, which is a major tactical disadvantage.

So either the US military will seize Starlink as a military asset or they'll order "blackouts" to prevent use in theater. Of course, the blackout will be the leading indicator that an attack is incoming, so...

Non paywalled: https://www.eurasiantimes.com/china-can-detect-f-22-f-35-ste...