Washington: The US Army has formally approved a new air and missile defence sensor to replace its aging Patriot for low-rate production, according to its system developer Raytheon.
The service has been working on replacing its aging Patriot air and missile defence system for over 15 years, initially running a competition for a full system before cancelling those plans in favour of developing a new command-and-control system and a new radar separately.
The Army’s Lower-Tier Air and Missile Defence Sensor, or LTAMDS, “is a huge, significant capability,” Maj Gen Frank Lozano, program executive officer for missiles and space, said at Redstone Arsenal, Alabama, last month. “We anecdotally say it doubles legacy Patriot radar capability and not only does it double it, it provides you 360-degree capability.”
The radar is a major modernisation element for the Army’s Integrated Air and Missile Defence system, along with a fully modernised — and already fielded — command-and-control capability called the Integrated Battle Command system.
The Army awarded Raytheon a contract in 2019 to deliver prototypes over five years. Building the radar rapidly was an ambitious challenge, according to Lozano, and the service decided to keep the sensor in testing for an extra year to ensure it was fully mature and ready for prime time.
Now, following several successful flight tests, including ones that combined other major air and missile defence elements over last fall and early this year, the system has been deemed ready for low-rate initial production and the service is preparing to send two prototype systems used during testing to Guam as it builds up the island’s air defence capability.
“I’ve been at Raytheon almost 40 years and worked a lot of large development programs and I have to say, I really don’t know of one that’s gone better,” Tom Laliberty, the company’s president of land and air defence systems said. “To go from … contract award, build six prototype units, test them over a few years and … now ready to deploy them into theater is just unprecedented.”
LTAMDS went through eight major missile flight tests along with roughly 10,000 hours of other testing, including radiate time, radar tracking time and testing against wind, rain, dust and road marches, during which soldiers “kind of beat on them a little bit to see how they stand up,” Laliberty said.
Additionally, LTAMDS is part of a larger air defence system, so the company and the Army worked to mature interfaces with the Northrop Grumman-made Integrated Battle Command System and integrate two different missiles: Patriot Advanced Capability 2 and PAC-3 Missile Segment Enhancement.
