Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD)
The Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) element provides the Ballistic Missile Defense System (BMDS) with a globally-transportable, rapidly-deployable capability to intercept and destroy ballistic missiles inside or outside the atmosphere during their final, or terminal, phase of flight.
Overview
- Land-based element capable of shooting down a ballistic missile both inside and just outside the atmosphere.
- Highly effective against the asymmetric ballistic missile threats.
- Uses hit-to-kill technology whereby kinetic energy destroys the incoming warhead.
- The high-altitude intercept mitigates effects of enemy weapons of mass destruction before they reach the ground.
Details
- THAAD battery consists of four main components:
Launcher: Truck-mounted, highly-mobile, able to be stored; interceptors can be fired and rapidly reloaded.
Interceptors: Eight per launcher.
Radar: Army Navy/Transportable Radar Surveillance (AN/TPY-2) - Largest air-transportable x-band radar in the world searches, tracks, and discriminates objects and provides updated tracking data to the interceptor.
Fire Control: Communication and data-management backbone; links THAAD components together; links THAAD to external command and control nodes and to the entire BMDS; plans and executes intercept solutions.
- Rapidly-deployable by being globally transportable via air, land and sea.
Development
- State-of-the-art engineering ensures high standards and efficient production and maintenance.
- Comprehensive program of ground and flight tests, quality assurance, and design and development activities support mission success.
- Major events in the THAAD Program:
- Returned to flight test on Nov. 22, 2005 at White Sands Missile Range, New Mexico.
- Completed 13 successful tests, including 11 intercepts, and operationally-realistic tests in March 2009, June 2010, October 2011, October 2012 and September 2013.
- Continuing element development to incrementally improve missile defense capability.
Procurement
- First two batteries fielded at Fort Bliss, Texas. Total hardware for Batteries #1 & #2 includes six Launchers, two fire control & communications components, two AN/TPY-2 radars, and 48 interceptors. Delivered 50th operational interceptor in 2012.
- Battery #3-#5 completed delivery in 2013, 2014 and 2015, respectively.
- Battery #6 on contract and delivers in 2016.
- Battery #7 on contract in 2014.
Fielding
- Activated six THAAD batteries in 2008, 2009, 2012, 2014, 2015 and 2016.
- Received conditional materiel release of two batteries and transition of operations to the Army in February 2012 and urgent materiel release of another two batteries in December 2014.
- New Equipment Training (NET) for Battery #5 began in 2016. NET scheduled to begin for Battery #6 in late 2016.
https://www.mda.mil/system/thaad.html
AN/TPY-2 Radar
The THAAD Ground-Based Radar (GBR), now known as the AN/TPY-2, is an X-Band, phased array, solid-state, long-range air defense radar. It was developed and built by Raytheon at its Andover, MA Integrated Air Defense Facility, as the main radar for the US Army’s THAAD late midcourse ballistic missile defense system.
For THAAD, targeting information from the TPY-2 is uploaded to the missile immediately before launch, and continuously updated in flight via datalinks. The TPY-2 is always deployed with THAAD, but it can also be used independently as part of any ABM (anti ballistic missile) infrastructure. That flexibility, and ease of deployment, is carving out an expanding role for the TPY-2/ “FBX” that reaches beyond THAAD. If a recent NRC report is adopted, that role will expand again to include national-scale ballistic missile defense. Hence this separate article to cover its ongoing development.
The TPY-2/ FBX System
AN/TPY-2 system
(click to view full)
The radar uses a trailer-mounted, single-faced 9.2 square meter wideband phased-array antenna. In the antenna there are 72 transceiver modules in semiconductor technology, which supply a total of 25,344 antenna elements. In “forward-based” or volume search mode, the TPY-2’s high power output and beam/waveform agility lets it perform air surveillance to very high altitudes at ranges of up to 1,000 km (600 miles). In “terminal” (targeting) mode, it performs aerial target identification and tracking.
Those targets can include incoming ballistic missiles. While they’re adapted for end to end use against short range ballistic missiles, TPY-2 radars can be used against longer-range missiles as well. Their X-band frequency and narrow beam widths add the additional advantage of being able to tell the difference between smaller objects, such as a warhead vs. space debris (“range resolution”). The penalty is that they’re not as good as the huge SSPARS/UEWR radars at searching wide volumes of space, and of course they have a much shorter range. At present, their best use against long-range attacks is to observe the early stage of missile launches from a forward base, and relay that information to the national command to cue larger radars.
The entire AN/TPY-2 radar system includes:
- The phased-array Antenna Equipment Unit (AEU)
- A Cooling Equipment Unit (CEU) for use with the antenna array
- The Electronic Equipment Unit (EEU)
- A 1.3 MW Prime Power Unit (PPU)
- An Operator Control Unit (OCU) which lets soldiers see the radar’s results, monitor the system, and communicate. It has its own built-in power unit.
The FBX (Forward Based X-band) is a stand-alone AN/TPY-2 radar, with some additional communications for independent meshing with other missile defense elements. Normally, the THAAD system would handle that, but FBX deploys on its own, without the THAAD missile system.
Future proposals for FBX could field a much more powerful version.
The USA’s National Research Council submitted a 2012 report that recommended an improved FBX, as part of an enhanced GMD-E mid-course defense system for the continental USA. On the ground, 5 “GBX” twin-stacked and integrated, rotatable TPY-2 radars would be added, with X-band uplink and downlink modes. Four would be co-located with current SPSS ballistic missile early warning sites at Clear AFS, AK; Cape Cod, MA; Thule, Greenland; and Fylingdales, United Kingdom. The 5th would be placed at Grand Forks, ND, which currently houses the 10th Space Warning Squadron.
See “
Ballistic Missile Defense: Why the Current GMD System’s Radars Can’t Discriminate ” for an in-depth technical explanation of why even the huge UEWR radars aren’t suitable for discriminating between warheads and the decoys used by more advanced missiles, and why TPY-2’s X-band wavelength is a much better fit. Each GBX would have a 20 degree x 90 degree field of view, rotatable through an azimuth sector of 270 degrees, while providing electronic scan coverage from the horizon to the zenith over a traverse angle sector of 45 degrees from broadside. Output from the stacked TPY-2 radars would be combined coherently through a time-delay device that permits full instantaneous signal bandwidth to be used for range Doppler imaging, creating an elevation beam width half that of the AN/TPY-2 radar, with 2x the gain (4x times the 2-way gain) and 2x the peak and average power. Duplicate power supply and cooling units would be required, and an upload/download link would need to be added.
http://www.defenseindustrydaily.com/antpy-2-ground-radar-07533/
Shias back in the days forged alliances with the West...against Damascus rule( Sunni) and even at a time against jerusalem rule... yeah... that crusade thingy... 
. Germany trying to lecture the U.S on foreign policy? lol
