What does Thad mean?
The meaning of Sad
The full name of Thaad is Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (Thaad), which is a land-based theater anti-missile system under the US Missile Defense Agency and the US Army, and is generally referred to as THAAD anti-missile system.
Terminal high altitude area defense is the predecessor of theater high altitude area defense system, which ended in many failures. In 2004, the US Army redesigned the system and changed its name to its current name, similar to the Navy's Aegis combat system. It consists of command system, interception system, launching system, radar and its supporting equipment.
Introduction to Sadr
Sade missile defense system includes four launch vehicles, radar, cooling vehicle, control station, command module, communication unit and power generation vehicle.
Adoption? Kinetic energy killing? Technology, great destructive power. Mentioned kinetic energy killing, which is the most eye-catching part of Sadr system. Where did it come from? Star Wars? What is the destruction mechanism of a new technology starting from the scheme? Collision killing? . This method seems simple, but it puts forward high requirements for the vector technology of terminal guidance and space maneuver, which is as difficult as? Bullets hit bullets? . Previously, air defense and anti-missile missiles generally used high explosive fragments to kill, relying on thousands of fragments to destroy target missiles or warheads, and often only the so-called? The mission was destroyed? Instead of. Missile destruction? Generally, the warhead will not be completely destroyed, but will deviate from the original track, and the explosives or chemical and biological warfare agents in the warhead will still be scattered into the air. And then what? Collision killing? It can hit the target warhead at high speed, thus detonating the warhead or using the high heat of high-speed impact to disable the chemical and biological warfare agent. ? Kinetic energy killing technology? Another advantage is that its warhead is very small, and it does not need special killing parts, and it can be realized only by the quality of guidance or terminal moving parts? Collision killing? This effect greatly reduces the quality of the campaign department and makes it possible to increase the interception height of missiles.
Below is THAAD interceptor, the blue oval area behind the nose cone is the infrared tracking window, and the cylinder crossing in front of it is the nozzle of thrust vector transmitter.
Unique in the world: it can intercept missiles outside the atmosphere.
? Sade? The biggest highlight of the anti-missile system is the operational altitude, which can intercept incoming ballistic missiles more than 40 kilometers in the atmosphere and less than 180 kilometers outside the atmosphere. The only land-based system in the world that can intercept ballistic missiles inside and outside the atmosphere? .
This altitude is just the last stage of long-range and intercontinental missiles with a range of more than 3,500 kilometers, and the middle stage of short-range missiles with a range of less than 3,500 kilometers. At the same time, it can intercept the target repeatedly inside and outside the atmosphere, and also provide target indication information for the low-altitude terminal interception system.
Powerful: it can be used as a shield and can also obtain information.
An /TPY-2 radar has an antenna area of 9.2 square meters, 25,344 t/r units, and the uniform transmission power is 8 1 kW, which is nearly 1.5 times that of Burke-class An /TPY- 1 radar.
The search range of AN/TPY-2 radar deployed in south Korea shows that the diameters of the three circles in the figure are 2000, 800 and 600 kilometers respectively.
Many people used to think that anti-missile weapons were only defensive. It seems that if you don't attack it actively, it won't bother you. Actually, it's not. Anti-missile weapons first play a strategic deterrent role; Secondly, modern anti-missile weapons are not only shields, but also passively waiting for others to attack. They can get information, monitor and control each other in peacetime.
Like Sadr's anti-missile system, its radar is an X-band active multi-functional phased array system. A radar can complete many tasks such as detection, search, tracking, target recognition, etc., and its radar antennas are more than 500 kilometers apart. It is known as the largest and strongest land-based mobile radar in the world today. Some experts have even calculated that the radar detection interval of the Saad system is more than 2,000 kilometers.
? Sade? The coverage of the anti-missile system, especially the monitoring range of its X-band radar, far exceeds the defense needs of the peninsula. Going deep into the hinterland of the Asian continent will not only directly harm China's strategic security interests, but also harm the security interests of other countries in the region.
Sadr's role
Terminal high altitude area defense, as a special defense system for dealing with large-scale ballistic missile attacks, has the unique advantage of providing more flexible use options for combat troops while defending against large-scale missile threats. Its purpose is not to replace but to supplement the MIM- 104 air defense missile, the Navy Aegis ballistic missile defense system, the land-based midcourse defense system, and the early warning radar and sensors deployed by the United States around the world, so that the US military has multi-layer ballistic missile defense capabilities and is a strategic offensive weapon.
June 5438+October 2007 10, the terminal high altitude area defense successfully completed the interception test outside the atmosphere at the US Pacific missile range.
The development origin of Sadr system
The "half-blood" of the "Star Wars Plan" —— Preliminary Technical Verification Stage In the late 1980s, the Reagan administration of the United States comprehensively reviewed the strategy of "ensuring mutual destruction" that originated in the 1960s, and found that it was difficult for the United States to gain an advantage over the Soviet Union in nuclear weapons. To this end, Reagan put forward the famous "strategic defense initiative" in his TV speech on March 23 1983, which is commonly known as the "Star Wars" plan, in an attempt to use the advantages of space technology to counter the advantages of nuclear weapons gradually gained by the Soviet Union. The ground-based missile interception weapons proposed in the plan are mainly "External Atmospheric Interception System" (ERIS) and "Internal High Altitude Defense Interceptor" (HEDI). These two systems cooperate with each other to form the so-called "layered interception". Among them, Eris has a range of 900 kilometers and an interception height of 270 kilometers. The warhead uses a "kinetic energy killing aircraft" (KKV); HEDI has a range of 80 kilometers and an interception height of 60 kilometers. The warhead adopts conventional explosive fragment killing technology. Although the development of these two missiles is not smooth, they have achieved certain technical results. Eris finally successfully intercepted the "militia" 1 target at 199 1, and HEDI also completed the preliminary verification test at1August 1992, preparing for the actual interception test. However, the disintegration of the Soviet Union in 199 1 made the United States lose its former enemy, and the "Star Wars" plan came to an abrupt end. 199 1 year, the bush administration began to focus on developing a "global defense limited attack system." The system is mainly composed of theater missile defense system, national missile defense system and global missile defense system. So the military merged Eris and HEDI, and formulated the plan of "Interceptor Bomb inside and outside the Atmosphere" (E2 1). This scheme used the KKV of Eris and the rocket booster of HEDI, and finally evolved into today's "Theater High Altitude Area Defense System" (THAAD).
In fact, another important reason why Americans merged Eris and HEDI was the Gulf War of 199 1 year. During the war, the Patriots made a splash, but they also showed Americans the shortcomings of low-level defense, so low-level interception systems like Patriots became the focus of development, while high-level defense was not very urgent at that time. From September 65438 to September 0992, the US Army Strategic Defense Command officially launched the merged high-altitude defense plan "Theater High-altitude Area Defense System"-"Sade". The system reduces the maximum interception altitude of Eris from 270km to150km, and that of HEDI from 60km to 40km. This covers most of the height of the atmosphere, 50 kilometers away from the atmosphere, which can be described as "high is not low." In the four years after the launch of the "Sade" project, Loma Company designed and produced 20 THAAD interceptors, 2 mobile operation management centers and 2 mobile launch vehicles.
After Clinton took office as president of the United States, he officially announced the cessation of "Star Wars" in May 1993 and renamed it "Ballistic Missile Defense Program", also known as NMD and TMD. Among them, TMD mainly deals with missiles with a range of less than 3,500 kilometers, mainly including low-level anti-missile systems-Patriot, MEADS and Naval Area Defense System (cancelled on February 14, 2000), as well as advanced anti-missile systems-Sade, Arrow system cooperated by the United States and Israel and NTW. Among them, "Patriot" and "Sade" constitute the high-low collocation defense system of the US military.
The forgotten "Sade"-In the planning adjustment stage of 1994, Lockheed completed the ground test of "Sade" and began the flight test. The project originally planned to carry out 14 flight tests, 1995 four times and 1996 twice. The experiments didn't go smoothly, especially the 8th and 9th experiments of 1998 and 1999, and the 5th and 6th actual interception experiments failed one after another, which attracted the attention of the US Congress and even proposed to punish Loma Company for 20 million dollars, which threatened to suspend the "Sade" project. However, the US Department of Defense insisted on the seventh interception test. In the seventh interception test conducted in June 1999, "Sade" hit the target bomb by collision for the first time, and then in the eighth interception test in August, "Sade" destroyed the target bomb again at the altitude of 100 km. However, some people think that success is accidental or because the examination conditions are relaxed. Although these two successes stopped the bad luck of "Sade" being stopped, people still questioned its feasibility. Therefore, Loma Company completely adjusted the development and test plan, suspended the flight test for four years, and forced the ground-based X-band radar developed for "Sade" to participate in the Patriot missile test to test its performance. The period when "Sade" gradually faded out of people's sight was the stage when the US missile defense plan was promoted with great fanfare, so many people don't know much about "Sade" today.
Rally-the engineering development stage after George W. Bush took office. Ballistic missiles in North Korea, Iran and other countries developed rapidly, and missiles with a range of 1500 km gradually appeared. Patriot and other low-level missile defense systems can not meet the requirements of protecting American allies and overseas troops. As a result, the high-altitude defense systems such as Standard 3 and Sade have once again become the focus of attention, and the almost stagnant Sade plan has once again successfully entered the Bush administration's "obstacle", that is, the development technology upgrade is carried out every two years. Under the guarantee of sufficient funds, the "Sade" experimental plan was fully restored in 2004.