Enshiftification marches forward. Hey IRC is still around!

Maybe if the jet was moving at walking speed

The receivers just aren’t that delicate, and by the time you’re in range to try something fancy and expensive you’re also in range to just throw something that explodes at the radar. Believe it or not explosives are insanely inexpensive for governments, especially compared to a death laser like you’re envisioning.

Not to mention your death laser is also throwing out huge amounts of the same radio waves that could lead a radiation tracking missile right up your nose.

We do that, it’s called bombs. We bomb the radar when we can, which makes it not work. If you can get close enough to disperse something, you’re close enough to drop a bomb which has the advantage of preventing the radar from working again later.

Radar sweeps do give away their location, and radiation seeking missiles exist whose only job is to lock on to where radar is coming from and make it blow up even if the radar tries to turn off.

As someone else mentioned chaff can also be effective but it’s mostly used against missiles with little radars in the nose, to confuse that little radar and make the missile miss.

What IS sometimes done is an electronic warfare plane will fly off to where the strike team isn’t and go make a lot of radio noise, so when the strike team comes along the radar is busy looking in the wrong spot. This is how Ukraine sank the Moskva https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinking_of_the_Moskva , a decoy made noise over at 6 o clock while cruise missiles came in from 9 o clock. Absolutely textbook maneuver!

Radar works like this; imagine you’re playing hide and seek in the woods after dark. You have a flashlight and you think it’s a good idea to shine it around looking for your buddies, and if you see them with the flashlight that’s the radar dot. Making the dot big is like having all your buddies who are supposed to be hiding also having REALLY BIG flashlights, so bright that you can’t see what you’re looking at very well.

In warfare the hide and seek game also includes a gun, and even a really bright light still more or less tells you exactly where it’s coming from allowing you to shoot at the light until it goes out. Not great for the survivability of the hiders!

The smart hider might set up their jamming light somewhere else so the seeker shoots at nothing, however the lights are still very expensive and they make cheap rockets designed to home in directly on radar and blow it up. The least expensive way overall for the hider to avoid the seeker is for the hider to wear all black clothing and be small.