The Department of the Air Force’s uniformed leaders laid out two system examples of increased costs associated with a possible shift in those systems from the 3.1-3.45 GHz S-band to another part of the electromagnetic spectrum.
DoD may finish a study this fall that may shed insight on whether commercial spectrum use will conflict with military use of the 3.1-3.45 GHz S-band (Defense Daily, March 15).
“There’s a number of weapon systems that operate within that band,” Air Force Chief of Staff Charles Q. Brown said on May 3 in response to a question from Sen. Mike Rounds (R-S.D.) at a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing. “I’ll just give you one example–our C-130 Station-Keeping. If that band was moved, and we had to redesign, it would cost roughly $2 billion just for that one platform, and we have a number of platforms that operate within the S-band so it’s critical that we understand the impact on national security, not only for us to be able to operate but also, if we had to redesign systems, if we lost access to that part of the electromagnetic spectrum.”
Sierra Research, Inc.–now part of Leonardo DRS [DRS], a U.S. based subsidiary of Italy’s Leonardo–built the APN-169 and APN-243 Station-Keeping Equipment (SKE) radars. SKE is to enable the Lockheed Martin [LMT] C-130 to fly in close formation in low-visibility conditions and to locate downed aircrew with a location beacon.
For U.S. Space Force, the S-band “allows us to look into deep space,” Gen. B. Chance Saltzman, the chief of space operations told Rounds at the SASC hearing. “And we currently have a developmental radar that’s going to significantly enhance our ability to do space domain awareness. If we were not able to use that piece of [S-band] spectrum, not only would we lose the time that we’ve already invested in as much as several hundred million dollars in development, but it would also mean that we’d have to use a different portion of the electromagnetic spectrum which isn’t as capable in determining and discriminating capabilities in deep space.”
White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico is developing and testing the Northrop Grumman [NOC] Deep-Space Advanced Radar Capability (DARC) ground-based radar (Defense Daily, Apr. 14, 2022). The latter is to improve upon Northrop Grumman’s Ground-Based Electro-Optical Deep Space Surveillance System for tracking deep-space objects. In February last year, Space Force awarded Northrop Grumman a $341 million contract to build the first DARC radar, which is to field in the Indo-Pacific region in 2025.