Review and Prospect of Airborne Early Warning Radar Development

Development is reviewed of airborne early warning system for 70 years since 1945 in this paper, and its course is compartmentalized three generations based on mission-adaptability, environment-adaptability and platform-adaptability. Then, according to the military requirement, technology characteristics are expatiated for airborne early warning radar in the future, such as wide-band, integration, intelligence and network. In general, airborne early warning radar will improve the adaptability of mission, environment and platform, its concept will be extended and its effect will be important in kill chain. Airborne early warning radar will be more deeply integrated into other systems such as communication, IFF and ECM et al, for more distribution to operation based on information system.