By Geoff Fein
Northrop Grumman‘s [NOC] Ground/Air Task Oriented Radar (G/ATOR) is expected to begin critical design review (CDR) early next year, a company official said.
The company has been conducting an internal CDR in advanced of the Marine Corps’ effort in the first quarter of 2009, Mark Smith, business development director for tactical radars, told Defense Daily this week.
“We are on schedule, exactly on schedule, in terms of major program milestones, and having passed them,” Smith said. “This upcoming CDR…we are very confident we will pass that on schedule.”
G/ATOR will replace five of six ground radars the Marine Corps is currently fielding, he added.
“If you went out into the operational Marine Corps today, you would find they use six entirely different types of ground based radars and each of those is a single mission radar. G/ATOR will replace the functionality of five of those six types of radars with much better sensitivity, much better reliability.”
Additionally, one of the other major benefits is that moving to a single ground radar will ease the Marine Corps’ logistics chain for its ground based radar systems.
“The Marines have had these five separate logistics trails they have to fund. There are basically no commonalities of any significant dollar size amongst any of those five radars G/ATOR will replace,” Smith said. “So G/ATOR will drive five very unique and very expensive logistics trails into a single much less expensive and much higher degree of commonality logistics trail. That will save the Marines hundreds and hundreds of millions of O&M (operations and maintenance) dollars over the multiple decade service life that G/ATOR will be in inventory.”
Northrop Grumman won G/ATOR and was placed on contract initially in September ’05. Shortly thereafter, Lockheed Martin [LMT], Raytheon [RTN] and Technovative Applications protested the service’s contract award.
In November ’05, the Marines issued a slightly modified request for proposal (RFP). Smith said none of the fundamental requirements of the contract changed from the first RFP to the modified version.
“No sensitivity changes, no range changes, no mobility changes,” he said.
What changed, Smith added, was that the Marine Corps asked the competitors to substantiate performance claims they made, with proven operational results or robust analysis and modeling.
“That comment did not apply to us because we had supplied all of that backup in our first proposal, so it was really directed at some of our competitors,” he added.
In March 2007, the Marine Corps again awarded G/ATOR to Northrop Grumman.
“In fact we won by a wider margin the second time around than we did the first time,” Smith said. “We were basically judged outstanding in most of the technical categories, and low in risk.”
He added there was no surprise there because Northrop Grumman had been working G/ATOR five years ahead of time and had made all of the appropriate internal research and development investments.
“Even in the protest period we kept our team together, Smith said. “That was not an inexpensive proposition. But thanks to our executive management here, we kept the core team together and kept working on the program. That is part of the reason why we were able to execute, even after that 18-month test period, on schedule.”
Northrop Grumman leveraged the architecture and technology work it was doing on radars for the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter (JSF) G/ATOR, Smith said.
“G/ATOR is really the first system that has changed the paradigm, and the paradigm is historically airborne radars have really cosmic technology the ground based radars have less cosmic technology,” he said.
“The architecture for G/ATOR, for example, is much more similar to that of the JSF radar…APG-81…than G/ATOR is like any of the current ground based radar systems and architecture,” Smith said. “G/ATOR is really and truly the system that is changing that paradigm, and so as a result of G/ATOR, the ground-based folks in Marine Corps and DoD will now have technology and performance that is right up there with that of the best fire control radars in the world.”
Just as with the effort to fit as much radar capability into the nose of an aircraft, Northrop Grumman is doing the same with G/ATOR, Smith noted.
“Every pound matters just as it does in the airborne world. We are trying to fit a tremendous amount of performance into a radar that’s physically small and amazingly light weight and amazingly mobile for the performance it has, ” he said. “In that context, this high performance, high efficiency light weight tech base that we own, because of the airborne radars, is very much a benefit in G/ATOR.”
And Northrop Grumman designed G/ATOR to the worst-case scenario, Smith added. “I am talking weight and volume.”
“G/ATOR was originally intended to go on a Humvee, and we designed G/ATOR to go on a single Humvee,” he said. “Since that time, and this is not just a Marine Corps issue, because of the IED threat in theater, basically all of the DoD vehicles, including Humvees, have undergone mandatory uparmoring.”
Most people would be surprised to know how much these uparmoring Marine kits weigh, he added.
“It actually got to the point where while we could fit both physically and weight-wise on a single Humvee, that Humvees has little weight capacity left,” Smith said.
Now, the Marines are in the process of evaluating which vehicle G/ATOR is going to go on the future, Smith added.
“That maybe a MTVR, JLTV…but what we told the Marines and other folks interested in G/ATOR, as we’ve already designed for the worst case scenario for the Humvee, anything larger than that, that has additional load capacity as compared to a Humvee is a piece of cake for us,” he said.
The initial Marine Corps contract is for 63 radars. Since then, Smith said, the quantity has increased.
“I don’t know if the Marine Corps has formalized that yet,” he said. “The news is good that quantities for the Marine Corps are growing…have grown.”
There are also a handful of foreign countries interested in G/ATOR, Smith added.
“Canada has definitely expressed interest in G/ATOR, and has an upcoming program that will probably go to tender perhaps a year or so from now…this is for the Canadian Army,” he said. “G/ATOR is a very good match we think for their requirements.”
Additionally, Australia has expressed interest and Singapore has requested a country-to-country briefing, Smith said.
“We will have to work some releasability issues, everyone does these days. But in time we think there is a very significant international market for G/ATOR,” Smith said. “Our focus now is on the Marine Corps and meeting their needs and bringing the program in on schedule.”