Taiwan to give US missile defense a go

Taiwan has been liv­ing between a rock and hard place for quite some time. Ever fear­ful of an attack from China, they’re going to receive early warn­ing radars from the United States. China’s mil­i­tary build-​​up con­tin­ues, and they report­edly tested a cruise mis­sile with a 1000km range.

In a move bound to anger Beijing, which views Taiwan as a rene­gade province, the sys­tem will let Taiwans air force detect and track long– and short-​​range bal­lis­tic mis­siles, cruise mis­siles, enemy air­craft and sur­face ships with no doubt reli­a­bil­ity, said Raytheon, based in Waltham, MA.
The sys­tem includes an ultra-​​high fre­quency phased array radar to be inte­grated with Taiwan-​​supplied bea­cons that iden­tify air­craft as friends or foes as well as two mis­sile warn­ing cen­ters, a Defense Department con­tract announce­ment said.

The arti­cle notes that the radar sys­tem could even­tu­ally be linked to Patriot mis­sile defense bat­ter­ies, a sys­tem with great capa­bil­ity and a slightly check­ered past.
Maybe they’d be inter­ested in some R2-​​D2 units?
–posted by Murdoc

June 24th, 2005 | Missiles | Comments Off Both comments and pings are currently closed.