U.S. Plans:  Pentagon Awards Sea-Based Radar Contract for 2005

The United States plans to integrate sea-based, X-band radar into the Ground-based Midcourse Defense test bed program by September 2005, Missile Defense Agency officials said yesterday (see GSN, June 14).

The agency awarded a $31 million contract to Boeing last week to begin designing the radar, Defense Daily reported.  Raytheon will probably do the majority of the work, according to the Daily.

The agency plans to use a “phased approach” for developing and implementing the radar, agency spokesman Air Force Lt. Col. Rick Lehner said.  That approach should allow agency officials to decide at the end of each phase whether to continue with the system, he said.

Under the agency’s plan, the first phase — preliminary design of the radar — would last until October, followed by completing the radar design and platform and beginning fabrication of radar hardware, which is scheduled to last through June 2003, Lehner said.  The third phase, from July 2003 to October 2003, would focus on completing environmental analysis.  During the final phase, engineers would assemble hardware and integrate the system into the ground-based missile defense test bed by September 2005, he said.

“Having a moveable radar on a sea-based platform increases our flexibility to do more operationally realistic testing,” Lehner said.  Developers plan to design the radar so that it could also be based on land and could be upgraded if the president decides to deploy an operational system, Lehner added.

Meanwhile, the Missile Defense Agency also plans to continue upgrading Cobra Dane radar at Shemya, Alaska, Lehner said (Kerry Gildea, Defense Daily, Aug. 6).

For further information, see:

MDA Basics of Missile Defense

MDA Missile Defense System

MDA Midcourse Defense Segment

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U.S. Plans:  Officials Blame Bad Luck for PAC-3 Failures

U.S. military officials are blaming many of the poor test results in the Patriot Advanced Capability 3 missile program on the maxim known as Murphy’s Law — if something can go wrong, it will — the Washington Post reported today (see GSN, July 1).

The PAC-3 missile performed well in a series of developmental flight tests from 1999 to 2001, missing its target in one out of 11 intercept tests, according to the Post.  Those early successes led to high expectations this year for four, more challenging tests that were led for the first time by Army troops rather than contractors, according to the Post.

A mishap occurred in each of the four tests, the Post reported.  For example, radar was faulty, a missile failed to fire or a ground system’s computer failed to guide the missile to its target (see GSN, May 30).  The test problems resulted from rare anomalies that would have been overcome in combat simply by using more missiles, Pentagon officials have said.  The tests did indicate some technical flaws with the PAC-3 system, but those could be fixed, Pentagon officials said.

“Nothing that we’ve encountered so far would indicate that we’ve got some sort of a systemic problem — either in hardware or in software — on the missile,” said PAC-3 program manager Army Col. Tom Newberry.

Missile defense critics have said, however, that the Pentagon’s experiences with the PAC-3 program lead to questions about the Bush administration’s plans to begin deploying less-developed longer-range missile defense systems (see GSN, July 19).

“It’s a hard thing to compress,” said Phillip Coyle, the Pentagon’s chief weapons test evaluator during the Clinton administration.  “It’s not just a matter of the number of tests; it’s trying to capture all the conditions that a weapons system is likely to confront” (Bradley Graham, Washington Post, Aug. 5).

For further information, see:

MDA Basics of Missile Defense

MDA Missile Defense System

PAC-3 Fact Sheet

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