Pulse

Ballistic missile tracking has been a feature of recent multi-national exercises, while the Royal Air Force received its third Rivet Joint RC-135. Meanwhile a new longer endurance and future ready satellite is available for launch.

- Andrew Drwiega

Radar

On 25 September, Thales tested its tower based SMART-L EWC Multi Mission (MM) radar system during exercise Formidable Shield 2017 (24 September to 18 October), detecting a ballistic missile launched from the United Kingdom Ministry of Defence’s Hebrides range located on the Western Isles of Scotland.

The SMART-L is sited on a test tower at Thales’ Hengelo facility in the Netherlands. Thales reported that the ballistic missile was detected and tracked at a range of over 1,500km.

Led by the US Navy’s Sixth Fleet, Formidable Shield was an international ballistic missile defence exercise held in order ‘to improve allied interoperability in a live-fire integrated air and missile defence (IAMD) environment, using NATO command and control reporting structures.’ Participating nations included Canada, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain, the United Kingdom, and the United States.

According to a company statement, ‘the system maintained a stable track for more than 300 seconds. The track quality was sufficient to enable Launch On Remote (LOR) by ballistic missile defence-capable warships.

Gerben Edelijn, CEO of Thales in the Netherlands commented that the SMART-L MM “can provide armed forces all over the world with a powerful sensor that enables the protection of nation states against the increasing threat of ballistic missiles.”

Another successful missile flight track test was achieved in September when Raytheon’s AN/SPY-6(V) air and missile defence radar acquired and tracked multiple threatrepresentative targets simultaneously during its third dedicated flight test at the US Navy’s Pacific Missile Range Facility, in Kauai, Hawaii.

The AN/SPY-6(V) detected and tracked a short-range ballistic missile target and multiple anti-ship cruise missile targets from launch throughout their flights.