Company plans a completely new radar to answer US Army Low-Tier Air and Missile Defence Sensor acquisition

Raytheon has shared with Monch details regarding the company’s Lower Tier Air and Missile Defence Sensor (LTAMDS) offering for the US Army’s for its Low-Tier Air and Missile Defence Sensor (LTAMDS) requirement. The LTAMDS will provide low- and mid-tier air defence for the force, and Raytheon has been selected, alongside Lockheed Martin, to develop a new radar to satisfy this requirement.

Speaking during the Association of the United States Army (AUSA) exhibition being held in Washington DC between 8 and 10 October, officials from Raytheon told Monch that the company is currently in discussions with the Department of Defence’s Ordnance Technology Consortium (DOTC), which is managing the contract, regarding timelines, schedules and scope for the LTAMDS programme. This initiative will see a “one for one” replacement, according to Raytheon sources, of the existing US Army’s AN/MPQ-65 C-band (5.25 gigahertz/GHz to 5.925GHz) ground-based air surveillance and fire control radars which equip the force’s MIM-104 Patriot family surface-to-air missile batteries. Raytheon continued that its LTAMS radar is a completely new design which will use an active electronically scanned array radar incorporating Gallium Nitride in the radar’s transmit/receive modules. That said, the company has declined to provide additional details regarding the radar’s instrumented range, and general performance, sighting commercial sensitivities. Raytheon added that it had originally considered upgrading existing AN/MPQ-65 radars in the US Army’s inventory to meet its requirements but instead settled on the design of a completely new radar to address the wide panoply of threats that the deployed manoeuvre force is expected to encounter in the future from rocket, artillery and mortar threats up to theatre ballistic missile threats, and fifth- and sixth-generation combat aircraft adding that whichever radar is selected is expected to equip the force from the early 2020s, when the radar will start to enter the force, up to 2050. Moreover, it is expected that the radar will be capable of performing surveillance in a heavily contested electromagnetic environment, and will be capable of working in a stand-alone capacity as well as accompanying MIM-104 batteries.

Company sources continued that it expects the DOTC to make its final decision on which radar will fulfil the LTAMS requirement by the third quarter of 2019.