THE WATCH STAFF
The U.S. Missile Defense Agency (MDA) has completed installation of the ballistic-missile tracking Long-Range Discrimination Radar (LRDR) at Clear Space Force Station in Alaska.
The MDA noted the achievement in a December 6, 2021, ceremony at the base south of Fairbanks.
This “marks an extremely important milestone for U.S. homeland defense,” U.S. Navy Vice Adm. Jon A. Hill, director of the MDA, said in an agency news release. “The Long-Range Discrimination Radar has finished construction, and we can now begin the testing phase that will lead to the full operational use of this vital system. LRDR will allow [U.S.] Northern Command to better defend the United States.”
The early-warning radar is installed inside a new facility nearly five stories tall, pictured, and is expected to be fully operational by 2023, according to the Anchorage Daily News newspaper. Once testing is finished, control of the radar will change from the MDA to the U.S. Space Force.
The LRDR will have the ability to simultaneously search and track multiple small objects at long ranges, according to a news release from the Alaska Air National Guard. “For example, the sensors can track debris and decoy objects kicked out [high in the atmosphere] as a missile’s boosters drop away and a warhead descends back toward earth,” the Daily News said. The capability to differentiate between real threats and decoys also helps to preserve the U.S. military’s supply of interceptors, according to a December 6, 2021, story in the digital magazine Breaking Defense.
The LRDR was specifically put in Alaska because of its vantage point over the Indo-Pacific region to spot ballistic missiles that potentially could be launched by North Korea.
“Alaska gives us a field of view we need to do homeland defense,” said Lt. Gen. David A. Krumm, who heads Alaskan Command, the Eleventh Air Force and Alaska’s NORAD assets, according to the Daily News.
The price tag for the LRDR’s installation at Clear Space Force Station is about U.S. $1.5 billion, according to a December 7 article in Department of Defense (DOD) News. The construction and installation of the radar, which was built by Lockheed Martin, was slowed because of the pandemic, DOD News said.
Krumm said the LRDR will not replace the legacy network of long-range radars across Alaska but instead will complement those systems. In future iterations, the LRDR has the capability to be updated to track hypersonic weapons, according to Hill.
For now, the primary mission of the LRDR is detection of ballistic missiles.
“That is what the radar filters are designed to go after,” Hill told DOD News. “To bring in what I call a filter — which means you can then space your tracking and your timing to go to hypersonic — that’s not a big leap … that is a software upgrade, but it is not the driving requirement for LRDR today.”
IMAGE CREDIT: MISSILE DEFENSE AGENCY