FEATURE ARTICLE

November 2004

Army Revives Anti-Missile System With Novel Maintenance Approach

by Roxana Tiron

After seeing more failures than successes in its dozen years of development, a newly redesigned and renamed missile defense program now is racing toward its first flight tests.

The Terminal High Altitude Area Defense system—formerly known as the Theater High Altitude Area Defense—has undergone a complete overhaul to emulate the kind of “pit-stop” maintenance that racecars receive on NASCAR tracks.

The U.S. Army’s THAAD is a mobile, land-based weapons program that is intended to destroy short-and medium-range ballistic missiles in their terminal phases, just seconds before they explode. The system is intended as one of the last lines of defense against incoming enemy missiles.

THAAD is the only missile system specifically designed to intercept and destroy incoming ballistic missiles both inside and outside the earth’s atmosphere, according to the Missile Defense Agency.

The system has been under development since 1992 at White Sands, N.M., and failed, on six successive tests, to intercept incoming missiles in the late 1990s. Those failures prompted THAAD engineers to completely rework the program in an effort to find a way to fix problems on the go. For that, they requested the help of NASCAR consultants.

Now, the souped-up system is readying for its initial demonstration this year and the first flight test next spring, said Army Col. Chuck Driessnack, THADD project manager.

“If you think of a NASCAR race, the person who wins is the person who can keep the car on the track as long as possible and spend the minimum amount of time working repairs,” Driessnack told National Defense.

A missile defense mission has similar requirements, he contended. “There is a lot of synergism between the philosophy of a pit-stop crew and THAAD,” he said. Missile defense systems have to stay operational at all times, and therefore need quick and reliable fixes, he added. “If our system goes down, there no longer is any capability to defeat the ballistic missile, and they can attack a region at any time.”

Add to that the need to deploy in extremely harsh environments worldwide, he said. Therefore, “the Army can’t have a huge crew deployed to keep the system up,” he said. “We are trying to reduce the amount of support to keep a fire unit operational.”

The basic premise behind the design changes was to reduce the soldier maintenance tasks and the tools for the job, said Tom McGrath, Lockheed Martin’s vice president and program manager for THAAD. Lockheed Martin, the program’s prime contractor, is working with Raytheon, BAE Systems, Boeing, Honeywell and Pratt & Whitney Space Propulsion.

The mastermind of the redesign is Carlson Technology, an engineering company that supports NASCAR racing and has worked with the Defense Department on a series of other projects, such as sentry units and battery cases. Other participants with hands in the redesign are Kulick Enterprises and PEI Electronics Inc.

“We went to Carlson Technology and asked it to evaluate us, just like they do NASCAR crews, [on] how we do our jobs,” Driessnack said.

“[Dennis Carlson] filmed our soldiers and equipment and made the same type of recommendations on how to reduce time to repair parts and organize the equipment.”

Lockheed Martin implemented the pit-stop technology for all four major components of THAAD: the X-band radar, the command-and-control and battle management communications unit, the mobile launchers and interceptor missiles, McGrath explained.

“As an example, the time needed to remove and replace all the equipment in a battle management communications unit—an unlikely event, but a good test case—was reduced from half a day to less than half an hour,” he said in an e-mail interview.

The THAAD maintenance process was redesigned to rely on fewer soldiers, and not necessarily trained maintenance personnel, he said.

Each piece of equipment is outfitted with red and green lights, to indicate whether it is functioning properly. The equipment is outfitted to do self-tests and internal fault identification, Driessnack said. In the old system, 60 percent of identified equipment faults were false. But the new system is up to 99 percent accurate, he said.

Furthermore, soldiers have better visibility when something goes wrong, he said, and can get to problematic hardware quickly. With the red light blinking, the operator would know exactly which piece needs fixing, he added. Colors and numbers also are used to identify where the replacement component fits on the hardware rack.

“He can immediately pull it out, mount the equipment on racks, which pull out, so that he can take the part out and put the new one in rapidly,” Driessnack said.

Some parts can be removed and replaced by hand, he explained. In other instances, the operators have a set of approximately 16 tools that can be used for all equipment, replacing hundreds that were previously needed, he said.

“The operator can put the tools in his back pocket and immediately identify what the item was that needed to be fixed, and fix it either without tools or with one of the 16 tools,” he said.

With the refined prognostics system and the reduced tool set, the time from when the fault is identified to when it is repaired has been reduced from hours to minutes, Driessnack said. Because of the way faults used to be identified, it took hours and sometimes days to complete maintenance on THAAD, he added.

“A small example of a change that contributed to the success is moving the cable connections from the rear of the units to the front,” said Lockheed Martin’s McGrath. “Remember what a pain it is to connect up your computer. Imagine how much easier it is if the back panel were in the front.”

That change, combined with handles, pull-down racks and lumping functions together in single components, led to the ease in maintenance, he added.

The time between failures increased to hundreds of hours, he said, because equipment can be replaced correctly.

Just as a racecar pulls into a pit stop for repairs, THAAD operators, too, can go right to faulty equipment, knowing what is broken and what tools they need to use, Driessnack noted. In addition, a vehicle carrying spare parts travels together with the THAAD batteries, he said.

Previously, the Army had spent $17 billion on a system that was ergonomically undesirable and failed to meet a directive for a 96-hour deployment, said an official from the Industrial Designers Society of America. The redesign eliminates potential hazards and complexities, according to IDSA.

In the old system, many parts had to be sent back to base for repairs or relied on a designated maintenance operator to fix them, Driessnack said. A simplified maintenance process now allows for fewer personnel “because if the operator can do it you do not need special maintainers,” he said.

It took about five years to redesign THAAD, said Driessnack, and now the Army is getting ready to demonstrate the changes. “If all I want to do is demo the identification of faults, I can do it now,” he said.

However, more flight-tests need to be conducted, he added.

Flight tests are scheduled for early 2005 at White Sands, N.Mex., before the program moves for advanced testing at the Pacific Missile Range in Kekaha, Hawaii. So far, the Army has spent about half of the $4 billion contract it designated for THAAD, said Driessnack. But putting an exact price tag on the NASCAR-like repairs is difficult. “The price is hard to separate from, say, how much money was spent specifically for the pit-stop technology,” he explained.

Initially, THAAD was intended to replace the Army’s Patriot missile, which has been in service since 1981. The new Patriot Advanced Capability-3 missile was meant as an interim upgrade until THAAD was ready. Under new plans, THAAD will operate in concert with the lower-tier PAC-3 system to provide increased levels of effectiveness, a Lockheed Martin official said.

The Army intends to build between 80 and 99 THAAD launchers, 18 ground based radars and 1,422 interceptor missiles. Initial deployment is scheduled for 2008. The Army hopes to load THAAD systems onto C-130 cargo planes, rather than the much larger C-5s needed for Patriot systems.

THAAD’s design approach also is being applied to Lockheed Martin’s Medium Extended Range Air Defense System (MEADS) program—an international effort that also involves Germany and Italy, McGrath pointed out.

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