LINTHICUM, Md. – From atop a hill here overlooking the Baltimore-Washington International Airport the Marine Corps’ new expeditionary radar can detect air traffic from New York to Norfolk, Va., from the Appalachian Mountains to the Atlantic Ocean.
Spinning at varying speeds during a March 29 ceremony at Northrop Grumman’s [NOC] test facility here, the TPS-80 ground/air task oriented radar (G/ATOR) could track “many, many hundreds” of flying object within that massive aperture, or volumetric coverage, said Mark Smith, director of business development for Northrop’s global ground-based radar programs.
The Marine Corps has taken delivery of the first of 15 low-rate initial production (G/ATOR) systems, which will replace five legacy radar systems and consolidate the missions of counter-artillery and mortar, weapons cueing, air traffic control and air defense into a single system.
“It gives us the ability to detect, track and report threats as never before,” said Maj. Gen. Steven Busby, deputy chief of Marine Corps Combat Development Command.
The G/ATOR system will replace and perform the mission functions of five legacy radars. The Marine Corps already has divested two of those systems. The three that are left will retire as G/ATOR comes online. They are the TPS-46 counter-battery radar, TPS-63 air surveillance radar and the TPS-73 air traffic control radar.
Aside from its huge field of vision, the radar was built from the ground up to accept repeated software upgrades. G/ATOR’s hardware configuration must stay the same, per Marine Corps stipulation, but it has both “physical and computational room for growth.
“Most importantly you have delivered a system that can be upgraded to keep pace with future threats,” Busby said.
The radar system – array, base and electronics group – can be airlifted by an MV-22 aircraft slingload with 1,000 pounds margin, Smith said. It also is transportable by C-130 aircraft. When it arrives at its destination, the assembly is deployed in minutes, plugged into a legacy Marine Corps generator aboard a 7-ton truck and is ready to provide eyes in the sky.
While it primarily performs the four core mission sets, G/ATOR’s modular open-systems architecture and built-in growth margin provides room for future capabilities, including counter-unmanned aerial systems and detection and tracking of ballistic missiles, neither of which are currently required by the Marine Corps.
The active electronically scanned array (AESA) is the same radar technology used in fifth-generation fighter aircraft like the F-35 and the radar upgrade for F-16. Because the array is capable of precisely focusing energy on a particular target, the AESA capabilities include communication and data transfer between air and ground platforms. The particulars of those capabilities, including the possibility of disabling UAS with focused energy, are classified.
“The architecture supports functionality above and beyond the Marine Corps’ published requirements,” Smith said.
Col. Matt Culbertson, a representative for Marine Corps Headquarters Aviation explained that G/ATOR was one element in a “system of systems” that would establish a fifth-generation baseline for Marine Corps platforms.
“There are a number of systems that are being fielded to get the Marine Corps into a fifth-generation mode,” Culbertson said. “It’s a systems of systems that exploits the entire capability” of fifth-generation platforms. Maybe a system like TPS-80 is like having … fiber optic come into your house, but you don’t want to look at it with an old television. We have C2 systems that exploit it and that’s your ultra-HD television.”
Along with the F-35 strike fighter, V-22 tiltrotor and CH-53K heavy lift helicopter, the Marine Corps wants to consider all of its aviation platforms “as a sensor and a shooter and a contributor,” he added.
The Marine Corps will eventually acquire 45 G/ATOR systems, which consist of the array antenna, its base electronic unit and an offboard box containing associated electronics. Of those, 17 will field first to the Marine Corps air combat element (ACE). The remaining 28 go to the ground combat element (GCE).
The first several G/ATORs will be fielded for “extensive operational testing, according to John Karlovich, the Marine Corps’ ground-based air defense program manager. Two systems will deliver to Marine Corps ACE units in February 2018. Four more will field in August to ground combat units.
The GCE radars will go to artillery regiments while the ACE systems are bound for air control regiments both in the United States and overseas bases, Culbertson said. That means one each will be deployed to the East Coast, the West Coast and Okinawa, he said. The aviation units will receive the Block I G/ATOR configuration. Ground units will receive their Block II variants after the ACE units are fielded.
On top of the three low-rate initial production (LRIP) radars already built, Northrop will deliver six Block I gallium arsenide (GAs) arrays and six Block II gallium nitride (GaN) systems under its current $375 million LRIP contract. Both technologies meet the Marine Corp’s performance standards, but GaN provides more radar capability with less power input and therefore is considered a superior material. Sometime in the life-cycle, but not before 2023, the Marine Corps will have Northrop upgrade its GAs arrays to GaN, Karlovich said.
Northrop will build G/ATOR for the Marine Corps through 2024 when the system will reach full operational capability. International orders should come in that will keep the production line humming well past that date, Smith said.
“Our hope and our plan is that we will be selling G/ATORs to the appropriate international allies,” he said. “In this ground-based [radar] business area, history says there is a very large international market. If you look around the world there are a number of ground-based radars that are pretty old at this point – 20, 25, 30 years old – and approaching the end of their productive life.”
Seven or eight countries already have approached Northrop and the U.S. government about purchasing the systems. Smith said Northrop’s current radar production facility has capacity to build G/ATOR for the Marines and allied nations simultaneously.
“We have done two antennas a month here for the Air Force, but we don’t need that capacity for G/ATOR,” he said.