Breakthrough: Patriot Missile Tracks & Destroys Maneuvering Cruise Missile

By Kris Osborn, President, Center for Military Modernization

The now “classic” Patriot missile was made famous more than 30-years ago for intercepting SCUD missiles fired from Saddam Hussein’s Iraq at US forces during Desert Storm, yet the weapon is now continuing to break through into new generations of performance and defensive capability. 

The maturation of the Patriot has been steady in recent decades, resulting in the most current advancement in which a new Patriot missile radar system called The Lower Tier Air and Missile Defense Sensor able to track threats across a wider area aperture and intercept moving targets with greater precision.  The Patriot, upgraded with the now functional, Raytheon-built LTAMDS, was able to destroy a cruise missile threat at White Sands Missile Range, N.M., according to a service essay on the demonstration. 

Destroying a cruise missile is indeed a new capability, as their trajectory is not like a parabola-like ballistic missile trajectory, making them much harder to track and destroy. 

The LTAMDS successfully detected, tracked, and classified the cruise missile threat surrogate while integrated with the Integrated Air and Missile Defense Battle Command System, a meshed collection of integrated sensor “nodes” which identified the optimal intercept solution. 

“A PATRIOT Advanced Capability – 3 Missile Segment Enhancement interceptor successfully engaged the CM threat surrogate utilizing data from the radar’s primary sector array. Interceptor acquisition and uplink/downlink communications supported the intercept, resulting in the elimination of the target,” the Army essay said. 

Unlike the more linear directional configuration of the existing Patriot air and missile defense system, the Raytheon-built LTAMDS is engineered with overlapping 120-degree arrays intended to seamlessly track approaching threats using a 360-degree protection envelope.