This month Lockheed Martin released a 280-word statement from its radar research headquarters in New Jersey announcing a breakthrough test of an advanced radar platform. And while the tech world shrugged, people watching the evolution of radar saw another step for a system that could have a dramatic effect on future world affairs, from American missile-tracking platforms in the Czech Republic to the ship-based defense of the Taiwan Straits.
The new radar system, called digital beamforming, could become a game-changing technology that may help defeat an overwhelming attack on U.S. warships by missiles. It could also answer one of the chief complaints about ballistic missile defense systems — that decoys or other countermeasures could easily hide a warhead and spoof interceptors. If placed on satellites, new spy and environmental monitoring missions become possible from orbit.
All this comes as an improvement to an existing system called phased-array radar. While traditional radars spin their faces to seek targets, phased-array radars guide a reflective beam electronically from a stationary panel. They can track things by moving the main beam very quickly, within microseconds, at numerous targets. But the phased array systems cannot seamlessly track multiple targets at the same time without losing resolution. Lockheed’s improvement on these radars allows true simultaneous tracking, with each target followed by a dedicated radar beam.
Digital beamforming, then, combines the cutting edges of antenna and digital technologies: A radar array digitizes the signals it receives, preserving all the incoming information. This data is then used to form as many radar beams as necessary to track as many objects as appear. The crucial advantage to this approach is the ability to confidently cover a vast area with a single system.
Lockheed for the first time has been testing a digital beam array to locate and track live targets — in this case, commercial and military aircraft coming in and out of the Philadelphia area. “The hard part was how we combined all the data…to form the individual beams,” Scott Smith, program manager for the radar system at Lockheed, tells PM. Commercially available high-speed digital electronics and advanced signal processors have become advanced enough to allow this data processing to occur, and that in turn has enabled digital beamforming to become practical for use outside a lab.
One key component to all phased-array radars is transmit/receive modules. These inch-long modules increase the power of the transmitted signal, ready the system to receive responses and steer the beam to find targets. Lockheed engineers have used new materials in digital beamforming t/r modules that make them tough enough to hold up to harsh use. By using heat-tolerant silicon carbide in the modules, more power can be pumped through them, giving the radar a longer range and a very precise targeting ability.
Digital beamforming radars will likely find their first homes on ships that track missile threats to U.S. fleets. Those threats will come from ballistic launches hundreds of miles away or from high-speed missiles launched from submarines or warplanes. The Russian government has been busy selling sea-skimming, antiship missiles to China that are designed to overwhelm the U.S. fleet’s radars, so the ability to track multiple, fast-moving threats could become vital in the Taiwan Straits. But a digitized phased array radar can handle many incoming signals at once, and should be able to discern real threats from bits of metal or shaped decoy balloons. So somewhere a Chinese admiral is frowning at Lockheed’s news, and a Taiwanese general is smirking.
The development could even fuel Russian paranoia over its nuclear deterrent and make its leadership more intransigent about U.S. radar bases, ostensibly established to protect Europe from Iranian missiles, on its border in Eastern Europe. One way to beat radar systems is to overwhelm them with signals, including decoys.
Therefore, beamforming can change missile defense equations in favor of the defenders. “Russian analysts examining the [missile defense] system would conclude that, at some unforeseen future time…it might be able to engage many hundreds of targets,” a 2007 Arms Control Association report noted. “Such possibilities, however remote they would seem, would certainly conjure up apocalyptic threats to Russia’s national survival.”
Maybe not so remote: If the radar ground stations that the U.S. wants to establish in the Czech Republic are upgraded with beamforming technology, they could spot Russian missiles just after launch, follow as many missiles as could be put into the air, track inbound warheads amid intentionally scattered decoys and shoot down the real threats. The balance of power in Europe could shift as Russia loses its deterrent edge.
Read more on this and other high-tech headlines from our friends at Popular Mechanics on Military.com.
– Christian
{ 18 comments… read them below or add one }
OOOO nice
ok first get the iowa’s back in action refit with anti missiles systems and i mean alot take off rear gun ad flight deck tada!!!
also why cant we jsut increast the breach and barrel length for the 16in and just use 2 guns per turret what would it take to upgrade a 16in cannon?
Puhleeeze! No more chat-room mangled English!
Im not completely into the current mutual strategic deterrent situation, but do the Russians really believe a Cold-War style massed nuclear attack is still a real threat?
The Russians themselves could do possibly it (in a rogue leader type of scenario), but even a crazy New World Order scenario CIC wouldnt be so stupid as to waste half the planet by initiating a US ICBM/cruise-missile exchange. Global terror is one thing, but global nuclear contamination and megadeath?
Will building the new radar in Europe result in even more Russian missles being aimed at the US? For quick response in case the US, confident with new gadgetry, would move first?
‘great, with the new radar you can actually count al individual warheads as your inadequate defense gets overwhelmed’
This will probably benefit Radar Networking, as well. Isn’t the Air Force about due for a new AWACS aircraft. :)
A good improvement it seems. But while better tracking is great, improved decoys and different tactics mean the threat of overwhelming attack isn’t suddenly negated. You still have to shoot down whatever is coming at you, and the race for counter-counter measures just steps up.
Do you know who this benefits?
Mitt Romney
The question I have is why are they telling us? I thought radar technology is one of the things that goes into the “top secret” file.
It may be just to drive the Chinese and Russians crazy. For all their “stabing at the weaknesses” stratagy has just suffered a great setback.
I guess they will have to wait until a greedy buerocrate sells the technology (to the Russians) or a Chinese engineer decides to “help the homeland” and just give it to them.
Which should be in about three years after it becomes common.
Or am I just being cynical…..
How till some chicoms spys working at lockmart steal it and send it to the commies.
The EW countermeasures world has been using this technology for years.
so whats so new about all of this anyway? the equipment can allready track and scan multiple targets – its the back end gear which sorts the junk from the vampires.
data linking? allready done with link 11/22 so the battle group allready share situational awerness information anyway;
and whoever said `brahmos is old news anway` – firstly India has brahmos so they are unlikely to be used against a US carrier group, and the russian system is called Yakkont – a land/sea and air launched missile with some unique abilites , but this is not the time nor the place to discuss those.
any system which reduces the available response window is allways a credible threat – the total time from detection to impact of these mach 3 sea skimmers is around 25 seconds , now remember chain of command , the radar operator has a light flick on so looks and checks , then calls over his section leader – so on and so forth , this all takes time , and time is something you don`t have; this system also makes CIWS useless – from max to min range of ciws is 1 second which is likely to be less than 60 rounds fired and even then the mach 3 fragments even if ciws does hit will sweep the deck.
Curious to know how much this weighs and how much redesign is necessary. Simple retrofit or keel up build? Hard to know how much is really new vs. just evolutionary stuff.
Radical need for & needed.
Made in the USA or do we outsource too?
Make for mobile radars & naval ships.
“The EW countermeasures world has been using this technology for years.”
Good point Jon. There is a reason people haven’t made a big fuss about technology.
I learned about and practiced working with some of the concepts and methods for digital beamforming radar tech in an antenna theory class in 2004. If the ideas and math are standard curriculum in universities, especially the kind of low budget school I was attending at the time, then the technology has most likely already been developed using black funding dollars, and has eventually overflowed into the ‘real world’.
I wouldn’t be surprised if there were prototypes and working digital beamforming devices well before the turn of the millenium.
“The EW countermeasures world has been using this technology for years.”
Good point Jon. There is a reason people haven’t made a big fuss about technology.
I learned about and practiced working with some of the concepts and methods for digital beamforming radar tech in an antenna theory class in 2004. If the ideas and math are standard curriculum in universities, especially the kind of low budget school I was attending at the time, then the technology has most likely already been developed using black funding dollars, and has eventually overflowed into the ‘real world’.
I wouldn’t be surprised if there were prototypes and working digital beamforming devices well before the turn of the millenium.
“The EW countermeasures world has been using this technology for years.”
Good point Jon. There is a reason people haven’t made a big fuss about technology.
I learned about and practiced working with some of the concepts and methods for digital beamforming radar tech in an antenna theory class in 2004. If the ideas and math are standard curriculum in universities, especially the kind of low budget school I was attending at the time, then the technology has most likely already been developed using black funding dollars, and has eventually overflowed into the ‘real world’.
I wouldn’t be surprised if there were prototypes and working digital beamforming devices well before the turn of the millenium.
Phased array is also huge in comparison. It’s hard to find a spot for one array set, let alone multiple in order to get certain coverage requirements.
I bet, it isn’t very good!Since,it can be overcome
easily,by warps in space(time)meta etc…It’s the same as:First person,second person and third person sequencing!Making it,easy to decipher!The math,is inverted on it.
Chain of command issues aren’t necessarily all that serious in some of the important cases.
Anything going faster than Mach 1 that is smaller than an F-18 with trajectory even remotely in your fleet’s direction is guaranteed to be bad, so you can put responses to those threats on auto-pilot.
Similarly, if you have a friend or foe ID system networked for the local fleet, everything that isn’t a friend and is supersonic is appropriate for immediate destruction in an autopilot basis.
Also, in blue sea conditions, it is a fairly trivial matter to identify all friendly ships, and all other surface ships big enough to carry missiles or aircraft within range. Once this is accomplished, it is easy enough to tag anything moving faster than a helicopter originating from a non-friendly ship or from blue sea where there is no ship identified (which would include fixed wing aircraft, very fast attack helicopters, and most subsonic missiles) as suitable for immediate destruction. If hostile action is anticipated (e.g. for ships in the Persian Gulf after Iran has made a threat or the U.S. have commenced hostile action about to be discovered), the threshold could be set lower.
This isn’t to say that there aren’t hard cases. When your ship gets overflown by a Russian bomber, you have to either not respond even though that puts you in a situation where you have the equivalent of a drawn gun you can’t hide from pointed at you, or shoot it down before it gets too close to respond to and risk starting a new World War.
Likewise, there is still room for stealth attacks, either a la a submarine based torpedo, or from a ship that looks like a non-threatening civilian ship or a non-threatening civilian aircraft, uses the disguise to get close, and then fire when it is too late. Of course, immense paranoia can fend off most of those threats, but at the risk of starting new hostilities and making narrow seaways impassible.
This also all gets much harder near shore, for subsonic threats, as one has to distinguish between civilian fixed wing aircraft on one hand, and ground based missiles and fighters, on the other, with little advance warning.