SPY-7 Radar Advances U.S. Allies Ability to Detect and Destroy Missile Threats

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By Kris Osborn – Warrior Maven

(Washington D.C.) Japanese, Spanish and Canadian warships are evolving their maritime missile defense posture to expand the envelope at which it can detect and destroy incoming missiles, hypersonic weapons and even intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs). To accomplish this, their warships are integrating a new high-powered, more sensitive ship-based radar system engineered to achieve longer ranges and greater precision. The concept is, among other things, to empower Navy ships with an ability to track and destroy enemy ICBMs from the ocean.

As members of the U.S. Navy led Aegis Weapons System network of allied warships, both Japan and Canada are building upon existing ocean-based Aegis ballistic missile defense systems to expand intercept reach ever farther into space than is currently possible.

The well-known Aegis radar, now in use by a growing number of U.S. allied navies, involves an interesting mixture of advanced software, fire control, networking systems and of course radar detection technology. There are a number of Aegis-integrated Navies, including the Spanish Navy, Royal Norwegian Navy, Canada, Republic of Korea Navy and Royal Australian Navy, among others.

Building upon Aegis progress, Lockheed Martin has been working on integrating a new SPY-7 ship based radar variant engineered to greatly increase range, sensitivity and detection capability beyond existing systems. It is a maritime variant of the evolving Long Range Discrimination Radar (LRDR) missile defense system being prepared for operational readiness later this year.

“The radar is scalable. Using this technology, we can offer land and sea based variants,” Chandra Marshall, Radar and Sensor Systems, Vice President, Lockheed Martin, told Warrior in an interview.

The SPY-7 builds upon existing Aegis Radar software, using as many as three million lines of code from Aegis to inform its construction. Built with scalable radar building blocks, described by Marshall as “sub array suites,” the SPY-7 system can be tailored to fit particular mission requirements and operate with less hardware than a larger LRDR.