The Race to Countermeasures Against Rad By Richard Scott A 46 Anti-ship missiles employing active radio frequency (RF) homing first came to prominence half a century ago, presenting a significant challenge from the perspective of ship self-protection. Given that anti-missile missiles were beyond the technological capability of the time, the immediate response from most of the major navies was to investigate soft-kill countermeasures - to disguise the platform, and/or distract or seduce the RF homing heads - as a key component of their ship self-defense armory. Naval forces turned to a technology learned and applied by allied air forces during the Second World War, specifically the clouds of radar-reflective metallic filaments - originally known as "window" - sown from bombers and bomber support aircraft to create false radar echoes and confuse air defense radars. Now the same technology - known as chaff by that time - was exploited to deceive radar-homing antiship missiles. The first naval chaff decoys were introduced to service in the late 1960s as a response to the proliferation of the Soviet P-15/SS-N-2 (NATO codename "Styx") missile. These early chaff systems were designed to confer ships with a means to either distract (in the search phase) or seduce (in the terminal homing phase) the relatively simple 'Styx' radar seeker by deploying patterns of chaff from fixed multi-barrel mortar or rocket launchers. However, it was during the 1980s that the importance of effective soft-kill defense was to assume a much higher priority. The bitter experience of the UK Royal Navy in the South Atlantic in 1982, the 1984-88 Tanker War in the Persian Gulf, and the Iraqi missile attack on the frigate USS Stark in 1987 all served to illustrate the growing threat from anti-ship missiles. At the same time, western intelligence continued to see the Soviet anti-ship arsenal growing in sophistication. The Journal of Electronic Defense | October 2014