Abstract The potential abilities of polarimetric multiple-radar architectures with distributed antennas in electronic counter-countermeasures (ECCMs) are analyzed based on differences between target echoes and deception jamming in scattering coefficients properties. According to the differences in generation mechanism between the target scatter and jamming, a signal model of real targets and deception jamming for two-dimensional vector sensors is established. By applying the Neyman-Pearson (NP) criterion and a hybrid NP-Maximum Posteriori (MAP) criterion, a two-stage detection/discrimination algorithm is proposed. In our proposed algorithm, the targets and jamming are detected in the first stage from a Gaussian noise background. Then, a discriminator based on the generalized likelihood ratio test is designed by exploiting the property of polarization discrimination. A theoretical analysis is also given to evaluate the performance of the second stage of the algorithm. Moreover, the discrimination performance can be improved by optimizing the transmitter polarization parameters. Simulation results indicate that the proposed ECCM strategy is effective against DRFM jamming, especially when JNR is high and transmit polarization is optimally designed.