From Aviation Week's ARES Blog

 

Space Radar Chopped

Posted by Bill Sweetman at 4/2/2008 8:32 AM CDT

 

News that the Space Radar program had been cancelled was not surprising. It had already been reported that the project was being reconsidered, after many restructuring attempts, and the fact that the budget and schedule suddenly went black in the FY2009 budget didn't inspire confidence.

 

SR was eight years away from first launch, and as the GAO noted in its latest review of major programs, the technologies were far from mature. To a great extent it was a victim of requirements overload, with the intelligence community wanting high resolution (equals large antenna) and the tactical community wanting high revisit rates and (ideally) the ability to track moving targets - the latter being a nasty challenge, since synthetic aperture radar (SAR), the long-running technology behind most high-resolution radars, has a very hard time seeing moving targets at all.

 

Launched as an Air Force effort, joined by the NRO in 2005, and originally called Space Based Radar, SR was the follow-on to a DARPA/National Reconnaissance Office project called Discoverer II. In that case, the goal was to apply an emerging technology - space-based active electronically scanned array (AESA) radar - in a low-cost platform. The key advantage of AESA is its flexibility, permitting interleaved SAR and ground moving target indication (GMTI) modes.

 

That technology's still valid - but whether it can give the generals their response times, and the spooks their 10 cm resolution, at a price that even the Pentagon can afford, is open to question.

 

Meanwhile, this is more trouble for the national space imagery program. The NRO joined SR in 2005 because of the ghastly mess of the Future Imagery Architecture project, which was supposed to provide both electro-optical and radar reconnaissance. When FIA itself was restructured in 2005 - with the NRO essentially firing Boeing as the prime - Lockheed Martin was awarded the contract to produce the EO satellites and Boeing retained a rump of radar business, but only as a gap-filler between retirement of the existing Lacrosse/Onyx and the launch of SR.

 

This is where Northrop Grumman sees a potential niche for Trinidad, its proposal to produce a version of Israel Aerospace Industries' newly operational TecSAR for US users. Trinidad does not offer anything like the performance of SR, or match FIA or Lacrosse, but it delivers "under one meter" resolution, Northrop Grumman says - and its price tag will be a fraction of the $2 billion estimated for SR.

From Defense Aerospace

 

Op-Ed: Missing Ingredient In Weapons Decisions: Common Sense

(Source: The Lexington Institute; issued April 2, 2008)

By Loren B. Thompson, Ph.D.

 

Military expert Anthony Cordesman claims the Bush Administration has fielded "the worst wartime national security team in United States history." That's pretty harsh. LBJ and Nixon managed to squander over ten times as many American lives on a much less important piece of real estate, while destroying much of Indochina in the bargain. In the end America simply gave up, delivering millions of innocent lives into the hands of murderous dictators like Pol Pot. Nothing like that is likely to happen while Bush and Cheney are in charge.

 

But I come not to praise Caesar. The paradox of military coverage during the last eight years is that the Bush team has been continually attacked over its conduct of war policies for which critics had no clear alternative, while chronic incompetence in the performance of routine management chores at the Pentagon has gone largely unnoticed. That is especially true in the case of weapons purchases, where the real scandal isn't rising costs but a never-ending litany of dumb decisions. Here are some examples.

 

Littoral Combat Ship. The Navy decided in 2001 that it needed an agile, versatile replacement of cold war frigates that could counter mines, submarines and speedboats in the shallow waters along enemy coastlines. Its answer was a low-cost, modular vessel called the Littoral Combat Ship that made a lot of sense. But it tried to develop the cutting-edge warship in record time using smaller shipyards that had never built complex surface combatants before, and then failed to finalize construction standards until well after metal bending had begun. End result: canceled contracts, slipping schedules, and a promising program now in jeopardy.

 

Space Radar. Air Force radar planes have repeatedly demonstrated their value in tracking hostile aircraft and ground vehicles. But the cold war airframes on which the radars are carried have become hard to maintain, and aren't big enough for sensor arrays that can see very stealthy cruise missiles. The service wanted to buy a replacement plane dubbed the E-10, but Rumsfeld's gurus said the mission should be done with a hyper-expensive Space Radar that had already been rejected several times by Congress. End result: Space Radar is about to be canceled and there is no plan to replace the aging radar planes. [Emphasis mine].

 

Transformational Satellite Communications. This leap-ahead approach to communications would have enabled warfighters anywhere in the world to stay connected using foot-wide receiver dishes connected to a high-capacity "internet in the sky." But policymakers insisted on pushing the program forward at breakneck speed, even though a more modest successor to the existing Milstar constellation was already facing delays. A skeptical Congress refused to fully fund budget requests. End result: the program is undergoing yet another restructure, and probably won't survive despite serving a vital need.

 

Presidential Helicopter. When 9-11 raised awareness of threats to the President, the White House demanded quick replacement of its antiquated presidential helicopters. The only airframe that could carry necessary equipment and passengers to the desired range while still landing in tight spaces like the White House lawn was the US101. But White House urgency collided with the unbending construction standards of the Naval Air Systems Command, producing an overly aggressive development schedule. End result: more time and money required to build the final version of the helicopter, which should have been obvious from day one.