Command and Control Underpinning
Written by Peter A. Buxbaum
On December 5, 2008, the U.S. Missile Defense Agency launched a long-range ballistic missile target from the Kodiak Launch Complex in Alaska. Twenty-nine minutes later the target was destroyed off the coast of California with an interceptor launched from Vandenberg Air Force Base. After flying into space, the interceptor released its kill vehicle, which tracked, intercepted and destroyed the target warhead. The target missile traveled 2,485 miles (4,000 kilometers) before being intercepted—625 miles (1,000 km) more than on any previous test.
This was the latest in a series of tests for the ground-based mid-course defense system (GMD), and represented GMD’s eighth intercept overall. It was also the third since September 2006 using an interceptor with the same design and capabilities as those protecting U.S. soil. GMD defends the United States against long-range ballistic missiles, with interceptors deployed in underground silos at Vandenberg and Fort Greely, Alaska, by intercepting and destroying targets toward the apex of their trajectory.
GMD also consists of radars, other sensors, command-and-control facilities, communications terminals and a 20,000-mile fiber optic communications network. Contributing to the success of the December GMD test was the exploitation of data from four different sensors, which were collected and combined by the GMD fire control system and conveyed to the interceptor. More than anything, the test validated the networking of several ground-based and sea-based sensors to track and destroy the target.
“What is a first-time event is that we actually networked different types of radars and different frequencies and sizes and geometries,” Lieutenant General Patrick J. O’Reilly, director of the Missile Defense Agency, explained at a Pentagon briefing later that same day. “We were able to form one very accurate track, and combining all that together, we were able to launch the interceptor out of Vandenberg Air Force Base.”
The sensors involved in the test were the Aegis Long Range Surveillance and Track system in the Pacific; the AN/TPY-2 radar temporarily located in Juneau, Alaska; the Upgraded Early Warning Radar (UEWR) at Beale Air Force Base, Calif.; and the Sea-Based X-Band Radar (SBX) in the Pacific.
The testing and deployment of GMD is of immediate concern to the U.S. defense establishment. The Bush administration negotiated agreements with Poland and the Czech Republic to station GMD assets in those countries. Those agreements have yet to be ratified by the Czech and Polish parliaments or the U.S. Congress. GMD advocates say that the central European location of those GMD assets would be important to the defense of the United States against a long-range ballistic missile directed at the United States by Iran and that action by the Obama administration and the new Congress is necessary in order to encourage Poland and the Czech Republic to follow through on the arrangement.
C2BMC: “The Glue That Holds the Network Together”
The key component involved in the tracking and interception of the target in the recent test was the Command, Control, Battle Management and Communications (C2BMC) system, which is equipped with two commanding control nodes, including the fire control node at Fort Greely. The December test “was the first time we had an intercept mission where the interceptor at Vandenberg was actually under the control of Fort Greely,” O’Reilly noted. C2BMC is the glue that holds the network together, explained John Daniels, program director for Ballistic Missile Defense System sensors at the MDA. “If the system detects a launch, all the sensor information is put through C2BMC,” he said. “It is a fairly elegant architecture that links sensors and shooters together.”
C2BMC integrates and synchronizes individual missile defense systems and operations to provide defenses against a range of threats. The C2BMC architecture allows data from disparate sources to be fused. In the case of the December test, the sequence of sensor data pickup was AN/TPY-2, Aegis, UEWR and SBX. That information was provided to the Fort Greely fire control node.
“The fire control node generates a task plan, which is sent to the interceptor,” said Greg Hyslop, vice president and program director at Boeing’s Missile Defense Systems Division, the prime contractor for GMD. Raytheon, Orbital Sciences Corp. and Northrop Grumman are the other principal partners in GMD.
“This was the first time an intercept was launched using integrated data from four sensors,” he added. “The warfighters at Greely were an operational crew and had no notion when the launch window would open. They had no prebriefing, and everything happened as it would in an operation.”
The progress that MDA has made in networking ballistic defense radars has been accompanied with enhancements to the radars themselves. The principal ground-based ballistic defense sensors are the AN/TPY-2 radar and the UEWR. The AN/TPY-2 radar is essentially a transportable, ground-based X-band radar, explained Daniels. Four transportable AN/TPY-2 forward-deployed radars are currently planned. Two were produced and deployed at the end of 2007. The AN/TPY-2 radar used in the December test was temporarily deployed to Juneau, Alaska, for that purpose.
“AN/TPY-2 is used both for terminal defense and forward-based defense,” said Steven Cummings, technical director for missile defense at Raytheon Corp. “In its terminal role,” meaning, when it tracks a missile as it is heading toward a target, “it is a theater-based asset that defends against tactical ballistic missiles. In its forward-based role it has been adapted to provide both theater missile defense as well as defense against intercontinental ballistic missiles.” Raytheon has been a lead contractor in the development of both AN/TPY-2 and UEWR.
The Upgraded Early Warning Radars, or UEWR, consist of three Air Force Early Warning Radars, at Beale Air Force Base, Calif.; Fylingdales, United Kingdom; and Thule, Greenland, as well as the Air Force COBRA DANE radar, located in Shemya, Alaska. These have been upgraded to modernize radar hardware and software and to integrate the radars into the Ballistic Missile Defense System. UEWR systems can detect objects out to 3,000 miles. Cobra Dane operates in L-Band, while Beale, Fylingdales and Thule operate in VHF.
The upgrades to these systems have included replacing back-end processing hardware, provided the systems with new communications equipment, and rewriting hundreds of thousands of lines of software code. These upgrades improve midcourse Ballistic Missile Defense System sensor coverage by providing early warning, tracking and cuing data.
“Radar modernization generally involves upgrading computer software and algorithms primarily by bringing up to date signal and data processing,” said Cummings. “In certain instances it also involves upgrading hardware such as the front-end antenna and individual transmitting and receiving elements.”
AN/TPY-2 radar is at a high state of maturity in terms of hardware, according to Cummings. “Software for the AN/TPY-2 is in the midst of spiral development, and we are planning a third leg of spiral development for fielding the capability in Japan,” he said. “We are moving to cutting-edge algorithms to make them common with other X-band radars, so that all of them will be able to perform forward-based, midcourse and terminal missions.”
Other Ground-Based Radars
The U.S. military’s capabilities in the area of ground-based radars are not limited to GMD. The Patriot system, a workhorse of U.S. ground-based missile defense capabilities, was developed over twenty years ago by Raytheon to counter short- to medium-range threats. The early development of the Patriot dates back to the 1970s, but its use during Operation Desert Storm in the early 1990s made the system’s reputation.
“We started an evolutionary technology refresh process early in the 1990s to make some quick enhancements as a result of lessons learned from Desert Storm,” said Ralph Acaba, Raytheon’s director of Patriot systems. “We have improved Patriot’s detection range, processing and memory, as well as its ability to reduce emplacement time.”
Since that time Patriot sensors have gone through several more configurations, including the ability to identify and track air breathing targets, fixed and rotary wing targets, as well as smaller cruise and tactical ballistic missiles. Patriot has also learned to discriminate between missile warheads and electronic counter countermeasures with which a warhead may be equipped.
Future Patriot developments are slated to meet current and emerging threats. “We are looking at upgrading processors to accommodate future capabilities and to lower life cycle costs with greater reliability and maintainability,” said Acaba. “We also intend to upgrade the man/machine interfaces to color displays.”
There has been a great deal of international interest in the Patriot system, with 10 foreign countries and the U.S. military deploying the system, and South Korea purchasing it as recently as 2008. The U.S. military projects holding Patriots in its inventory through 2028, and some see pushing that date out another 20 years, according to Acaba.
Research and development being sponsored by the Missile Defense Agency is looking at a next-generation radar development program, said MDA’s Daniels. “Our current set of sensors is very capable,” he added, “but we continue efforts to enhance their software and to better integrate and leverage each of the sensors.”
On the software front, the main effort is to improve embedded algorithms so that the software can extract the most accurate attributes of an incoming ballistic missile. As ballistic missile sensors become more networked, MDA wants to improve capabilities to fuse sensor data to better track incoming missiles. The MDA also wants sensor software simplified, so that there are no excessive lines of code and that all radars employ common software models where possible in order to reduce costs and ease the maintenance of the systems.
Along those lines, Raytheon’s Cummings sees missile defense radars and their associated systems becoming more network-centric, and to that end Raytheon is working on an initiative to develop a global enterprise sensor architecture. “This would be deployed at the operations level at MDA,” Cummings explained, “as well as for integrating the ballistic missile defense mission with tracking and intelligence gathering across all services and combatant commands. This concept is getting some good traction. Moving toward a more network-centric type of operation will increase the collaboration and sharing of assets among the armed services and military agencies and will get more value for the taxpayer dollars that go into the sensor systems.”
As far as the ground-based mid-course defense system, Boeing plans to continue to improve the system’s software in order to keep up with threats and improve capabilities for tracking and discrimination. “We have an ongoing software development program,” said Hyslop, “that will be used to upgrade the current suite of sensors once new hardware is proved out.”
Hyslop expects new and improved GMD capabilities to include the ability to deal with more complex threats and capabilities fielded by U.S. adversaries and the ability to distinguish warheads from decoys and other countermeasures. “We want to use ground-based systems to improve these capabilities and to stay in front of these threats,” he said. The MDA plans further tests of GMD later this year.
Hyslop is also hopeful the Obama administration will see the importance of the GMD system to the defense of the U.S. homeland. The pending agreement among the United States, Poland and the Czech Republic called for an early warning radar to be stationed in the Czech Republic and 10 interceptors in ground-based silos in Poland.
Hyslop argued that the high-tech jobs created by the GMD program are important to the economies of Arizona, Alaska and Alabama and that each job directly created by GMD is multiplied by two to four times in those local economies. In Alabama alone, according to a recent study by the University of Alabama, work on GMD contributed more than $700 million to Alabama’s economy in 2007 and supported 5,600 direct and indirect jobs.
Ultimately, the vision for the Ballistic Missile Defense System is “any shooter, any sensor,” Cummings noted. That vision requires a more decentralized flow of information mediated by a sophisticated command and control system.
“It also means that all sensors, whether ground-based, sea-based or airborne will be networked together to provide a single, integrated ballistic missile defense picture,” he said. “The sensor flows will be decentralized while command and control is managed from a central location.” That vision, Cummings estimated, is still five to 10 years out. ♦