By Kris Osborn, President, Warrior
The US Army & Navy have teamed up to connect a cutting-edge 360-degree threat detection radar with a US Navy SM-6 interceptor missile, a development enabling a more complete kill chain from target detection, verification and destruction.
The integration is quite significant as it massively accelerates the speed with which incoming enemy missile, artillery and even drone threats can be tracked and intercepted or simply blown out of the sky. The effort involves successful initiatives to link Raytheon’s advanced Ghost Eye Lower Tier Air and Missile Defense Sensor fire control to the launch of an SM-6 interceptor missile engineered to destroy incoming threats. This requires the engineering of specific interfaces, technical alignments and software adjustments to ensure otherwise separate systems can connect with one another. This connection was successfully demonstrated recently in an Joint military exercise known as Valiant Shield 24. A LTAMDS radar was networked with the Army’s Integrated Battle Command System (IBCS) to launch an SM-6 at a specified target.
“Using track data from Army LTAMDS simulators and operational SM-6 engagement control software interfaced with IBCS, the test demonstrated the successful integration of these existing, respective Army and Navy program capabilities,” a Raytheon essay stated.
LTAMDS – 360 Degree Radar
LTAMDS has been in development for many years as a specific technological solution intended to defend against a new generation of threats the Army has been anticipating for many years now.
Advanced countermeasures, maneuverable re-entry vehicles, electronic attack jamming and long-range, low-observable cruise missiles are all fast-evolving threats to the U.S. Army identified in a published report in 2019 called “Army Air & Missile Defense 2028 Vision.”
This threat equation, which has only become more significant and advanced in the 5-to-6 years since the Vision statement was published, could be seen as the fundamental inspiration for Army efforts to engineer a new generation of highly-sensitive, long-range, paradigm-changing ground radar systems.
Lower Tier Air and Missile Defense Radar
One Army answer to this threat predicament, now called Ghost Eye by its maker Raytheon, is the Lower Tier Air and Missile Defense Radar (LTAMDS). 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.
The Army’s Air & Missile Defense Vision 2028 outlines the rationale and concepts of operation informing LTAMDS, saying it “will provide dramatically improved sensing capabilities and address complex integrated attacks. LTAMDS also maximizes the full kinematics of the Patriot missile set. As a state of the art sensor, LTAMDS will mitigate the obsolescence challenges of the Patriot radar.”
Several years ago, a Raytheon program manager involved in maturing LTAMDS technology explained that a key advantage of the radar is its ability to update as threats such as cruise missiles maneuver and reposition in flight. This can make it difficult for radar system to maintain a track on the target, so the LTAMDS is engineered to operate with much greater sensitivity, improved range and ability to track smaller, faster moving targets.
This is in large measure achieved through innovative applications of a semiconducting material known as Gallium Nitride, a compound which massively increases power efficiency of radar modules to find, discriminate and track fast-approaching enemy targets. Raytheon was among the first innovators to pioneer the use of GaN for military operations.
“While GaN circuit material is used commercially in everything from LED lightbulbs to smartphones, Raytheon Missiles & Defense has a foundry in Massachusetts that produces GaN for military hardware,” a Raytheon report says.
LTAMDS uses three fixed 120-degree arrays designed to close “blind spots” or make it possible to maintain a track as an attacking missile shifts course in flight.
The speed and precision with which electromagnetic “pings” can bounce off of a target and generate a return signal determines the fidelity, resolution or accuracy of the “rendering” of the threat emerging from the radar return. Therefore, precision ground-defense radar such as LTAMDS can generate the shape, size, distance and speed of an approaching threat. Since radio frequency travels at the speed of light, a known entity, and the time of travel can be determined… a computer algorithm can then determine the exact distance of a threat object.
“Numerous countries are developing ground-, sea-, and air-launched land-attack CMs using an assortment of unconventional and inexpensive launch platforms. In addition, long-range, low-observable, advanced CMs enable our adversaries to present a complex air and missile defense problem with high-volume, high-precision missiles capable of 360-degree avenues of approach,” the Army Vision states.
Kris Osborn is the President of Warrior Maven
Osborn previously served at the Pentagon as a Highly Qualified Expert with the Office of the Assistant Secretary of the Army—Acquisition, Logistics & Technology. Osborn has also worked as an anchor and on-air military specialist at national TV networks. He has appeared as a guest military expert on Fox
