Story
September 10, 2026
A military mechanically steered radar must physically reposition its antenna to scan different sectors, which limits how quickly it can shift attention between threats arriving from multiple directions. Today’s electronically scanned arrays and networked sensors are designed to overcome that constraint, enabling defense systems to track and respond to multiple threats across a much wider field of view simultaneously.
A single radar can no longer see today’s saturation attack coming by itself. During a saturation attack, the attacking side tries to swarm and overwhelm the defending side’s technological, physical, and mental ability to respond effectively. As hypersonic glide vehicles, sea-skimming cruise missiles, and coordinated drone swarms converge on a target from every axis at once, the defense industry is replacing single-mission, mechanically scanned radars with a networked layer of gallium nitride-powered sensors stretching from the battlefield to low Earth orbit.
Picture a carrier strike group within range of a peer adversary’s coastal batteries. Within just 90 seconds, it’s conceivable that a sea-skimming anti-ship missile clears the horizon at wave-top height, a ballistic missile arcs down from the edge of space, and a drone swarm scatters across three approach vectors.
The shift toward layered air and missile-defense radar starts with the antenna. Gallium nitride (GaN) transmit/receive modules run at higher voltages and temperatures than the gallium arsenide predecessors they’re replacing, packing more radio-frequency (RF) power into the same footprint while wasting less of it as heat. The U.S. Navy’s GaN-based AN/SPY-6(V)1 is estimated to be up to 30 times more sensitive than the AN/SPY-1D(V) passive array it replaces, according to figures compiled by the Missile Defense Advocacy Alliance (MDAA).
Layered on top is direct RF sampling: System-on-chip FPGAs [field-programmable gate arrays] now digitize signals at the antenna aperture itself, slashing the latency that matters most against a hypersonic weapon traveling faster than a mile per second, and opening the door to onboard machine learning (ML) that adapts a radar’s scan pattern to jamming in real time.
While that setup sees one sensor doing multiple jobs, it doesn’t solve the harder problem: getting a dozen sensors, built by different primes for different services, to agree on what they’re looking at.
Solving that problem belongs to the Northrop Grumman (Falls Church, Virginia) Integrated Battle Command System (IBCS), the software the Army relies on to link sensors to shooters across the joint force. Fusing sensor data without creating duplicate “ghost” tracks is nontrivial – two radars looking at the same missile from different angles can easily report it as two objects.
“IBCS uses multiple factors to associate and correlate track data from various sensors to create a single integrated air picture and prevent the creation of duplicate tracks,” a Northrop Grumman spokesperson says. “By rapidly fusing the right data from the right sensors, IBCS helps ensure the most effective engagement decisions are made at the speed of the threat.”
The architecture’s premise is built around IBCS’s “any sensor, best shooter” concept, so losing one node doesn’t blind the battery because networked sensors take over tracking without the operator losing the target, according to the MDAA.
Northrop Grumman’s AN/TPS-80 Ground/Air Task-Oriented Radar (G/ATOR) shows what a multimission node looks like in practice, replacing five legacy Marine Corps radars with one active electronically scanned array (AESA) array.
“G/ATOR’s multimission functionality replaces and enhances the capability of several legacy, single-mission radars,” says Mark Murphy, manager, business development and strategic growth, Northrop Grumman. “The radar continuously assesses the threat environment and optimizes where and when it looks, instead of being locked into a single, fixed radar function.”
It was also built to be upgraded through code rather than hardware: “G/ATOR was designed from the start as a multi mission, software reconfigurable radar,” Murphy notes. “That means we can introduce new modes, refine existing ones and tailor performance to different mission sets primarily through software.”
On mobility, Northrop Grumman’s G/ATOR “can be transported by plane, helicopter or truck and be operational less than 30 minutes after its deployment,” using air-cooling technology that “eliminates the need for refrigerant and other support that could complicate or delay G/ATOR’s mission readiness in the most austere environments.],” he explains.
Meanwhile, the RTX (Arlington, Virginia) Lower Tier Air and Missile Defense Sensor (LTAMDS) replaces the roughly 50-year-old Patriot AN/MPQ-65 radar with a three-face GaN array giving simultaneous 360-degree coverage; the Army awarded a $1.7 billion production contract to RTX for nine radars in September 2025, and has interest from Poland and Kuwait, according to a company spokesperson.
The Navy’s AN/SPY-6(V) family scales the same GaN approach across ship classes using a modular radar modular assembly building block, from the full four-face variant on Flight III destroyers to a scaled-down retrofit for older hulls, according to Raytheon.
Lockheed Martin developed the parallel AN/SPY-7(V)1 using Missile Defense Agency radar technology; the Navy chose SPY-6 for its own fleet, but SPY-7 is used by Japan, Canada, and Spain. RTX is also fielding the primary counter-drone sensor for the Army’s low-altitude defense system, pairing Ku-band radar with its Coyote interceptor family, according to a company release. Every sensor described so far shares one limit: It sits on the ground or a ship’s deck, capped by the curvature of the Earth. The newest layer is being built to eliminate that limit by leaving the ground.
During early summer of 2026, the U.S. Space Force’s Space Development Agency awarded L3Harris (Melbourne, Florida) a contract to build 18 satellites under the Accelerated Missile Defense Tranche 3 (AMDT3) program, supporting the Golden Dome homeland missile-defense initiative. (Figure 1.)
[Figure 1| The L3Harris AMDT3 satellites feature medium-field-of-view payloads designed to provide fire-control-quality data for missile defense. Image via L3Harris.]
“In defending against hypersonic missiles that can travel at speeds of more than 3,800 miles per hour, our nation must have the capability to detect, track, and defeat threats in a matter of seconds,” says Paul Wloszek, VP/GM, Spectral Solutions, L3Harris Technologies. “Space is the high ground that can provide that perspective.”
The program builds on L3Harris’s already-orbiting hypersonic and ballistic tracking space sensor payload. The company said in its July 2026 announcement that it now has more than 70 missile tracking and defense satellites on order, including five already on orbit.
A ground radar, a destroyer, and a satellite can’t contribute to one picture unless the processing hardware inside each can trade data on common terms – which is where the prime contractors hand the problem down to a different tier of the supply chain.
For years, each prime contractor built its backend processing as a proprietary system, which was expensive to swap out. The Pentagon has since pushed a modular open systems approach (MOSA) for new sensor procurement, implemented through standards like the Sensor Open Systems Architecture, or SOSA, Technical Standard, which guides the refinement of the commercial OpenVPX backplane for military use.
“We see solicitations that call out SOSA, and there are other ‘SOSA-like’ standards including the Army’s CMOSS standard which very closely aligns with SOSA,” says Jason DeChiaro, solutions architect and technical fellow at Curtiss-Wright Defense Solutions (Ashburn, Virginia). “DoD [U.S. Department of Defense] representatives regularly contribute to the SOSA standard, so the U.S. government takes it very seriously.” (Figure 2.)
[Figure 2 | The Curtiss-Wright VPX3-656 is a SOSA aligned 3U VPX Ethernet switch designed for deterministic networking in rugged defense and aerospace systems. Image via Curtiss-Wright.]
Mark Littlefield, director of system products at Elma Electronic (Fremont, California), says the payoff shows up at technology-refresh time.
“It’s all about ease of integration and faster time to deployment, and SOSA is arguably the premier, most mature MOSA-aligned standard out there from a hardware standpoint,” Littlefield says, pointing to interoperability “Plugfests” between competing vendors as proof. “So long as the supplier follows the standard … their products will work when integrated into the system.”
DeChiaro cautions that compatibility has limits: “Custom integration of a system still exists at higher levels: the application, specific data flows, etc.”
The same backplane is now also carrying artificial intelligence (AI) processing and time-sensitive networking (TSN) for precise time stamp coordination between sensors.
“If we want to compare and use the data from two different parts of the sensor, it is essential that they are both using the same time stamps,” DeChiaro says.
None of the programs previously listed – G/ATOR, IBCS, LTAMDS, SPY-6, SPY-7, AMDT3 – is designed to win a saturation fight alone.
Where does this technology go next? Noah Donaldson, chief technology officer at Annapolis Micro Systems (Annapolis, Maryland), points to adaptive, AI-driven radar behavior.
“A traditional radar is essentially programmed in advance to detect, process, track, and report,” he says. “Alternatively, emerging adaptive systems can change their behavior based on what they are seeing.”
Donaldson cites the DARPA [Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency] Adaptive Radar Countermeasures program, designed to “automatically identify previously unknown radar signals, infer the threat, synthesize an appropriate response, and assess whether that response worked.”
That kind of real-time adaptation, he says, depends on direct RF’s “ultra-wideband and high-rate capability.”
Better interoperability in air and missile-defense radar systems doesn’t solve an underlying problem: That is, the boards run hot. “Heat management is the number-one problem, not only with new radar-processing cards, but in all high-performance military sensor processing systems,” says Mark Littlefield, director of system products at Elma Electronic (Fremont, California). “It’s not uncommon to see OpenVPX cards north of 100 watts, which many existing conduction-cooled chassis simply cannot cool … there are no easy answers.”
Elma produces a rugged VITA 48.4 Liquid Flow-Through (LFT) platform that the company says can support a backplane loaded to 300 watts per slot. (Sidebar Figure 1.)
[Sidebar Figure 1 | The Elma Electronic rugged VITA 48.4 Liquid Flow-Through (LFT) ATR platform is designed to cool circuit boards and electronic components. Image via Elma Electronic.]
Noah Donaldson, chief technical officer at Annapolis Micro Systems (Annapolis, Maryland), points to the same conduction-cooling logic that drives the same design choice industry-wide.
“For rugged VPX systems, conduction cooling is typically the most attractive because the card can conduct heat directly into the chassis rather than relying on airflow through the electronics,” he says. “Because the chassis is part of the thermal architecture, a VPX system can survive environments where a conventional commercial server would quickly overheat.” (Sidebar Figure 2.)
[Sidebar Figure 2 | The Annapolis Micro Systems WILDSTAR 3E30 is a rugged 3U OpenVPX switch featuring ultra-high-speed RT4 backplane connectors. Image via Annapolis Micro Systems.]
For the hottest boards, Donaldson says, “we use LFT – ANSI/VITA 48.4,” adding that minimizing data movement – at the sensor, as above – is itself a thermal-management technique.
Littlefield asserts that the next fix isn’t a single new material or coating, but a change to the mechanical standard itself. “VPX-100 is also taking this into account – it is introducing different rail geometries and a new 4U board size that should help this – but there are still real challenges to overcome at the chassis level,” he says. Much of the yet-to-be completed and ratified VPX-100 standard remains in draft form, and the industry still needs time to build and test backplanes and fixtures before VPX-100 reaches fielded hardware.
Whatever standard wins out, the physics underneath it do not change: Packing more RF power into a smaller box generates more heat, and no version of a rugged chassis – whether AFT, conduction-cooled, or otherwise – makes that tradeoff disappear.
