U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) has used artificial intelligence/machine learning (AI/ML) algorithms developed for the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD)/U.S. Northern Command’s (NORTHCOM) Pathfinder initiative to identify drone targets, CENTCOM’s deputy said on July 26.
That Pathfinder “takes radar data that is considered clutter, that our radars see and throws aside so it doesn’t confuse the operator–machine learning and artificial intelligence can go through there and find valid tracks that we might otherwise be overlooking that could be a threat to our homeland,” Air Force Lt. Gen. Gregory Guillot, the CENTCOM deputy said at his Senate Armed Services Committee nomination hearing to become the new head of NORAD/NORTHCOM.
“With NORAD/NORTHCOM’s permission, we’ve used those algorithms in the Middle East and run some of the one-way [“kamikaze” drone] attack that we’ve had in Iraq and Syria, taken our radar files, run it through that algorithm, and we’ve been able to see the UAVs that attacked our positions that we couldn’t see real time,” Guillot said. If the Senate confirms him as the new commander of NORAD/NORTHCOM, Guillot said that he’d “like to see” that AI/ML application continue for defense of North America.
Air Force Gen. Glen VanHerck, the current head of NORAD/NORTHCOM, said in 2021 that the AI/ML Pathfinder is critical to efforts to modernize analog processes.
VanHerck said then that the Pathfinder had analyzed raw data from the North Warning System (NWS). The AI/ML in Pathfinder has led to significant improvements for NWS’ advance warning, he said then.
A successor to the 1950s Distant Early Warning (DEW) line, NWS, first fielded in the late 1980s, consists of 25 Lockheed Martin [LMT] AN/FPS-117 long-range radars and 36 short-range AN/FPS-124 radars. NWS provides early warning of possible incursions into U.S. airspace and covers nearly 3,000 miles across North America from the Aleutian Islands in southwestern Alaska to Baffin Island in northeastern Canada.
NWS was designed to detect relatively high-flying Soviet bombers, and VanHerck said in 2021 that “ideally, we would like to go to an advanced system–over-the-horizon radar” (Defense Daily, Aug. 17, 2021).
“The North Warning System is limited in its distance…which doesn’t allow us to see far enough out away from the homeland,” he said. “There’s proven technology today that would give us domain awareness. I think it’s crucial, as we create new systems, that we don’t make them singularly focused. Any new systems that we create must be able to not only detect bombers, but cruise missiles and even small UAS, to be affordable and usable.”
The House Armed Services Committee’s draft version of the fiscal 2024 defense authorization bill funds a $55 million wish list request by NORTHCOM to accelerate testing of the Over the Horizon Backscatter (OTH-B) radar to field OTH-B radars within the next five years rather than within a decade (Defense Daily, March 30).
A month before VanHerck’s discussion of NWS in 2021, Air Force Lt. Gen. Clinton Hinote, the service’s deputy chief of staff for strategy, integration, and requirements, said that the U.S. and Canada needed to modernize NWS and had delayed that modernization “for too long” (Defense Daily, July 27, 2021).
The Air Force has said that it is considering reuse of the previous OTH-B radar sites to augment NWS.
In fiscal 2024 the Air Force requests $360 million to fund the first two OTH-B sites in the U.S.
OTH-B is to have transmit and receive arrays 40 to 120 miles apart in four areas of the country–the Northeast, Northwest, Alaska and the South–and two sites in Canada. RTX [RTX] has been investing in over-the-horizon radar technology and received a five-year Canadian contract in 2019 for an experimental polar, over-the-horizon radar in 2019.
NORAD modernization has been a topic of conversation between President Biden and Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.