By Emelie Rutherford
The Marine Corps effort to build the United States’ first ground-based multi-role radar is rapidly progressing toward an initial fielding in 2016.
Contractor Northrop Grumman [NOC] gave a live demonstration this month of the AN/TPS-80 Ground Air Task Oriented Radar (G/ATOR), which will replace five Marine Corps single-mission radars.
“For too many years, G/ATOR has been basically a paper system that existed on viewgraphs in the Pentagon and in piece parts on test benches all throughout Northrop Grumman and their web of support contractors and vendor-type suppliers,” Robert “Lee” Bond, the Marine Corps’ program manager for G/ATOR, said in an interview after the Linthicum, Md., demonstration. “But now here within the last few months we’ve got system No. 1 all put together, painted green, (it) looks tactical, looks like it’s ready to deploy.”
G/ATOR is intended to enhance troops’ ability to detect and track a wide variety of aircraft and weapon targets, while also providing air-traffic-control capabilities. The mobile radar uses Northrop Grumman’s Active Electronically Scanned Array (AESA) technology that is also used on F-35 Joint Strike Fighters and some F-22 jets.
Lt. Gen. George Trautman, the Marine Corps’ deputy commandant for aviation, said the difference between his first trip to Northrop Grumman about G/ATOR three years ago and one he took last month “was like night and day.”
“The strides that have been made are very impressive,” Trautman said in an interview. “In 2007 when I was new to my current billet I wondered if the United States Marine Corps and Northrop were up to this technological stretch, if putting an active electronically scanned array into a short-to-medium mobile-range radar was going to work, to be honest with you.”
After the latest meeting four weeks ago, he said. “I’m totally confident and optimistic that we are on the right path.”
G/ATOR will replace five legacy radars that combined impact all of the things Marine Air Ground Task Forces do. The three radar missions G/ATOR will take over aren’t traditionally viewed as complementary, Bond said, but “the electronics are so scalable and adaptable that now we can have the single system doing what used to be three very different things,” Bond said.
The initial operational capability for the first G/ATOR increment is planned for 2016. The initial fielding of increment 1 will be in the air-defense and air-surveillance mode, with the new G/ATOR replacing the AN/TPS-63 air-surveillance, AN/UPS-3 tactical-defense-alert, and AN/MPQ-62 continuous-wave-acquisition radars. Later G/ATOR increments will replace radars used for counter-battery and acquisition fires and for air-traffic control.
G/ATOR’s next big hurdle will come in early 2012, when Northrop Grumman is slated to complete all of the integration, tests, and performance demonstrations of the first two systems and deliver them to the Marine Corps for government testing, Bond said. In early 2013 the program will be reviewed to see if it is ready for low-rate-initial production.
Near-term challenges, Bond said, include demonstrating G/ATOR can perform in extreme weather conditions in simulated environments.
When G/ATOR is first fielded, likely to Afghanistan, it will provide troops with twice the range of the current radars, with much better capability against low-observable or low-radar-cross-section threats in the area, Trautman said.
Improving command-and-control capabilities is a major concern of Trautman’s. The five legacy radars G/ATOR will replace are either obsolete or have obsolete parts and cannot be supported by their manufacturers anymore, he said. And the aging radars have become far less reliable and available.
“One of the worst places you want to find yourself is in the battlespace with a radar that is supposed to contribute to your ability to fight and have it be down because it’s not working,” Trautman said. “But this AESA radar is going to go far beyond that and give us a capability to see smaller targets than ever before at distances farther out than ever before.”
Bond said years of development on G/ATOR are now coming together.
“This air-cooled active-electronic array that’s capable of performing across the temperature range weighs only a few thousand pounds and can do all these different radar functional things we think is a pretty slick solution, given the state of the technology today vis-a-vis the laws of radar physics, which as hard as we try to push on them seem to continue to push back,” he said.
Northrop Grumman’s Jeff Palombo, the vice president and general manager of the Land Forces and Self Protection Systems Division, wants services beyond the Marine Corps also to buy G/ATOR.
“The Department of Defense has said over and over and over again to its industry partners, ‘I need you to be innovative, I need you to come to me with … solutions for missions at 50 percent of the cost,'” Palombo said in an interview. “And G/ATOR absolutely does that in spades for a new requirement that is going to be coming out of the Air Force.”
The Air Force is replacing its legacy AN/TPS-75 air-defense radar. While Northrop Grumman was not one of the companies selected for technology-demonstration contracts for a replacement radar, the company has remained in contact with the air service about G/ATOR developments.