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X-Band radar for defense

James T. Hackett
November 15, 2007

It is 28 stories high, floats on the sea and moves around the oceans under its own power. It carries a radar so powerful it can float off San Diego and track an object the size of a baseball over the East Coast. This engineering marvel is the Sea-based X-Band Radar (SBX), a key component of the national missile defense.

The radar's homeport is Adak in the Aleutian Islands, where it watches for missiles coming from North Korea or elsewhere. On Sept. 28, it was in the North Pacific when it detected and tracked an intercontinental ballistic missile launched from Kodiak Island, Alaska, in a test of the national missile defense system.

The radar was developed and built in the United States and installed in Texas on a high-tech oil-drilling platform, which was modified to carry the radar. It then sailed around South America to Hawaii, where it was further outfitted.

Normally, it will be anchored off Adak, but now it is sailing around the Pacific tracking flight tests and participating in exercises to become fully integrated in the missile defense system. The original plan was to base an X-band radar on Shemya Island in the Aleutians, but the advantage of a sea-based version that could go wherever the threat was greatest led to the innovative seagoing design.

The purpose of the SBX is to detect and track ballistic missiles more effectively and provide targeting information to both ground- and sea-based interceptors. The power and precision of its beam improves the ability of the interceptor to distinguish warheads from decoys and other penetration aids.

Anyone who followed the missile defense debate will remember the long and detailed arguments by opponents who claimed it would not work because long-range missiles could carry balloons and other decoys to hopelessly confuse the defense.

Theodore Postol and George Lewis, antimissile defense activists in the humanities department at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, spent years promoting the view that missile defense was useless because it could not distinguish warheads from decoys. But in a recent article they admit the much higher resolution of X-band radars makes it possible to distinguish warheads from other objects. X-band radars, working with other sensors, have gone a long way toward solving this problem.

A prototype X-band radar was installed on Kwajalein Atoll in the Pacific in 1998 as the primary fire control radar for the Pacific missile test range. In addition to it and the SBX, four smaller transportable X-band radars are being acquired. The first already is operational in Aomori Prefecture, northern Japan, providing very fast tracking and discrimination of launches from North Korea. Another will be based in southern Japan. Both will support Japan's growing network of land- and sea-based missile interceptors.

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