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FOB Salerno in Afghanistan is known as rocket alley. On that FOB C-RAM had AN/TPQ-48 radars (Lightweight Counter Mortar Radar-LCMR) and the long range AN/TPQ-37 radar(s). The Taliban were firing long range rockets out of Pakistan onto Salerno. A 122 mm rocket was detected by a Q37 radar from a known area of interest. C-RAM was setup where it took at least two sensors to sound an alarm (confirm a possible rocket track); however the operator has the option to manually confirm incoming rockets. Based on an input state vector from the radar, the C2 terminal (FAAD) coasted the 122 mm rocket track (for about twenty seconds to the predicted point-of- impact). The operator asked the Battle Captain if he could confirm the track; he said no. Well the low power Q48s never sent a state vector to FAAD. The rocket slammed onto the FOB killing a Lt. from TX. That is a no warn event. Since the rocket came from an area of interest and will impact the FOB he should have had permission to manually confirm this track.
FOB Salerno in Afghanistan is known as rocket alley. On that FOB C-RAM had AN/TPQ-48 radars (Lightweight Counter Mortar Radar-LCMR) and the long range AN/TPQ-37 radar(s). The Taliban were firing long range rockets out of Pakistan onto Salerno. A 122 mm rocket was detected by a Q37 radar from a known area of interest. C-RAM was setup where it took at least two sensors to sound an alarm (confirm a possible rocket track); however the operator has the option to manually confirm incoming rockets. Based on an input state vector from the radar, the C2 terminal (FAAD) coasted the 122 mm rocket track (for about twenty seconds to the predicted point-of- impact). The operator asked the Battle Captain if he could confirm the track; he said no. Well the low power Q48s never sent a state vector to FAAD. The rocket slammed onto the FOB killing a Lt. from TX. That is a no warn event. Since the rocket came from an area of interest and will impact the FOB he should have had permission to manually confirm this track.


When C-RAM first went into Afghanistan they fielded: Q48 radars, AN/TPQ-53 (two radars) and Q37 radars on the FOBs. Then the AN/TPQ-49 (LCMR) replaced the Q48 radars. However, the program office had a hard time maintaining the Q49 radars on the FOBs-Logistics problem. Within three months 22% of the installed radars were NMC (non-mission capable). The problem was the operators on the FOBs were to provide basic maintenance. However they only had 4 days training on the old Q48 radars. Moreover there was limited (inadequate) spare parts and no depot support. Solution: Give the Q49 radars to the Marines and field the Ku band MFRFS (Ku Band Multi-Function RF System) radar to the units on the FOBs. Note that the primary reason for fielding the Raytheon MFRFS radar was to counter the current threat in Afghanistan; that is the short range low QE 107 mm rocket-its reliability MTBF is 425 hours. Lastly, this radar is currently deployed in Afghanistan (every FOB), Iraq and the joint FOB in the Sinai.
When C-RAM first went into Afghanistan they fielded: Q48 radars, AN/TPQ-53 (two radars) and Q37 radars on the FOBs. Then the AN/TPQ-49 (LCMR) replaced the Q48 radars. However, the program office had a hard time maintaining the Q49 radars on the FOBs-Logistics problem. Within three months 22% of the installed radars were NMC (non-mission capable). The problem was the operators on the FOBs were to provide basic maintenance. However they only had 4 days training on the old Q48 radars. Moreover there was limited (inadequate) spare parts and no depot support. Solution: Give the Q49 radars to the Marines and field the Ku band MFRFS (Ku Band Multi-Function RF System) radar to the units on the FOBs. Note that the primary reason for fielding the Raytheon MFRFS radar was to counter the current threat in Afghanistan; that is the short range low QE 107 mm rocket-MFRFS's measured reliability MTBF is 425 hours. Lastly, this radar is currently deployed in Afghanistan (every FOB), Iraq and the joint FOB in the Sinai.


LPWS is only about 30 percent effective in destroying rockets and mortars. Another issue is the very limited range of the gun; mainly a point defense centered within a small defended area. In addition this system is a Logistics nightmare. In the beginning C-RAM had a difficult time maintaining readiness (Operational Availability in the mid nineties) of all gun systems in Iraq. Namely, at first certain people in Logistics did not want to admit there was readiness problem. It took about one year for upper management "to get on the stick". They in the program office had no demand history of spare parts or tried to create one. Note spares analysis using reliability was completed and was used with limited success. Component Reliability: total operating time per gun components divided by the number of failures. Time terminated test.
LPWS is only about 30 percent effective in destroying rockets and mortars. Another issue is the very limited range of the gun; mainly a point defense centered within a small defended area. In addition this system is a Logistics nightmare. In the beginning C-RAM had a difficult time maintaining readiness (Operational Availability in the mid nineties) of all gun systems in Iraq. Namely, at first certain people in Logistics did not want to admit there was readiness problem. It took about one year for upper management "to get on the stick". They in the program office had no demand history of spare parts or tried to create one. Note spares analysis using reliability was completed and was used with limited success. Component Reliability: total operating time per gun components divided by the number of failures. Time terminated test.

Revision as of 13:21, 10 November 2018

File:Flickr - Israel Defense Forces - Iron Dome Intercepts Rockets from the Gaza Strip.jpg
Israeli Iron Dome air defense and C-RAM system.
2010 test-fire of a C-RAM. Balad, Iraq
Nächstbereichschutzsystem MANTIS of the German Air Force

Counter Rocket, Artillery, and Mortar, abbreviated C-RAM or Counter-RAM, is a set of systems used to detect and/or destroy incoming: rockets, artillery, and mortar rounds in the air before they hit their ground targets, or simply provide early warning.

C-RAM is effectively a land version of weapons such as the Phalanx CIWS radar-controlled rapid-fire gun for close in protection of vessels from missiles.

Description

Centurion C-RAM

C-RAM is an initiative taken in response to an operational needs statement made by the Multinational Force Iraq (MNF-I). The directive arose in response to the increasing number of casualties caused by attacks using rockets, artillery, and mortars in Iraq. The land-based Phalanx B (also known as the Land-based Phalanx Weapon System-LPWS) was subsequently deployed in Iraq in the summer of 2004. It protected the Green Zone and Camp Victory in Baghdad, Joint Base Balad near Balad, Iraq, and by the British Army in southern Iraq. In 2012 the LPWS radar directed gun systems were deployed to Bagram Airfield in Afghanistan.

General Interest-Sensors and LPWS: FOB Salerno in Afghanistan is known as rocket alley. On that FOB C-RAM had AN/TPQ-48 radars (Lightweight Counter Mortar Radar-LCMR) and the long range AN/TPQ-37 radar(s). The Taliban were firing long range rockets out of Pakistan onto Salerno. A 122 mm rocket was detected by a Q37 radar from a known area of interest. C-RAM was setup where it took at least two sensors to sound an alarm (confirm a possible rocket track); however the operator has the option to manually confirm incoming rockets. Based on an input state vector from the radar, the C2 terminal (FAAD) coasted the 122 mm rocket track (for about twenty seconds to the predicted point-of- impact). The operator asked the Battle Captain if he could confirm the track; he said no. Well the low power Q48s never sent a state vector to FAAD. The rocket slammed onto the FOB killing a Lt. from TX. That is a no warn event. Since the rocket came from an area of interest and will impact the FOB he should have had permission to manually confirm this track.

When C-RAM first went into Afghanistan they fielded: Q48 radars, AN/TPQ-53 (two radars) and Q37 radars on the FOBs. Then the AN/TPQ-49 (LCMR) replaced the Q48 radars. However, the program office had a hard time maintaining the Q49 radars on the FOBs-Logistics problem. Within three months 22% of the installed radars were NMC (non-mission capable). The problem was the operators on the FOBs were to provide basic maintenance. However they only had 4 days training on the old Q48 radars. Moreover there was limited (inadequate) spare parts and no depot support. Solution: Give the Q49 radars to the Marines and field the Ku band MFRFS (Ku Band Multi-Function RF System) radar to the units on the FOBs. Note that the primary reason for fielding the Raytheon MFRFS radar was to counter the current threat in Afghanistan; that is the short range low QE 107 mm rocket-MFRFS's measured reliability MTBF is 425 hours. Lastly, this radar is currently deployed in Afghanistan (every FOB), Iraq and the joint FOB in the Sinai.

LPWS is only about 30 percent effective in destroying rockets and mortars. Another issue is the very limited range of the gun; mainly a point defense centered within a small defended area. In addition this system is a Logistics nightmare. In the beginning C-RAM had a difficult time maintaining readiness (Operational Availability in the mid nineties) of all gun systems in Iraq. Namely, at first certain people in Logistics did not want to admit there was readiness problem. It took about one year for upper management "to get on the stick". They in the program office had no demand history of spare parts or tried to create one. Note spares analysis using reliability was completed and was used with limited success. Component Reliability: total operating time per gun components divided by the number of failures. Time terminated test.

Certain fielded LPWS systems on the FOBs had back power issues. The maintainers on the FOBs thought it was due to external radiation. Back power will shut off the transmitter to prevent damage to the Ku band Tube; this became a big issue for a couple of years. The origin of the back power was internal to the radar. High VSWR. Both these back power issues and BIT false alarms that occurred with these guns were quickly cleared by the operators on the FOBs. That is by taking the gun system to standby and then up again can clear these faults within two minutes. Note these faults were not used to calculate the LPWS reliability. The LPWS hardware MTBF is 356 hours. Moreover, in Iraq the Mean Time To Restore (Mean Time To Repair plus logistics delays) a gun system was 8.6 hours.

Rafael Counter Rocket, Artillery, and Mortar (C-RAM) and Very Short Range Air Defense system (V-SHORAD) at static display Aero India 2013

RAM Warn: The RAM warn system fielded in Iraq and Afghanistan is WAVES (Eaton's Wide-Area Mass Notification System). WAVES uses outdoor towers covering a wide-area via wireless radios to sound alerting messages (between 5 to 10 seconds warning before impact-ideal) . An issue with this system is that it operates in the 2.4 GHz wireless band. In Iraq C-RAM had some interference issues with this system on the FOBs. A work around was RF over fiber; namely fiber interconnecting the WAVES towers; the final solution was a completely new system operating in the 5 GHz band. This new Northrop Grumman system uses mesh radios (forming a mesh network of warning towers) from Rajant with NSA Suite B authenticated encryption. Currently PM C-RAM is fielding this system to the units.

Moreover Suite B includes two authenticated encryption protocols- such as 802.11i. Both of these use AES for encryption and the CTR mode (counter mode) of operation. An issue with CTR mode is that it changes a block encryption to a stream encryption. Namely, AES encryption acts as a random number generator for stream encryption of the data. Note: NSA Suite B recommends using AES with 256 bits of encryption key. The main issue however with all encryption is key management and generation. Reading NIST (National Institute of Standards and Technology) documents do not bring these issues "home". Lastly, a couple of years ago NSA recommended not using its Suite B protocols. However according to Peter Shor (expert) NSA is full of BS.

PM C-RAM will be fielding the following systems to the units: Sensors AN/TPQ-50 (LCMR) and AN/TPQ-53 radars, Intercept LPWS and the new RAM warn system using the Rajant mesh radios (named Huntsman radios).

AN/TPQ-53: Finally the Army Test and Evaluation Command-June 2015 report details the testing of AN/TPQ-53 radar. Three interesting results from this report are its reliability, the point-of-impact errors and false targets generated by the radar:

1) The radar did not meet its reliability requirement. The Army requires an 80 percent confidence that the average time between system aborts is greater than 185 hours. With eight failures in 500 hours, the achieved Mean Time Between System Abort (MTBSA) was 62.5 hours with an 80 percent confidence interval of 38 to l07 hours. The Army developed a new requirement of 91 hours MTBSA and the updated requirement is in joint staffing. Comment: The one issue with this reliability test is its short duration, i.e., 500 hours.

2) The point-of-impact error assesses the radar's ability to identify the point of impact of the detected projectile, and is used to warn troops of incoming projectiles and prioritize counter-fire missions. Threat missions affecting near-friendly units are given a higher counter-fire priority. The accuracy of the point-of-impact estimate is not as critical, since knowing a general location of the impact suffices for both warnings and prioritizing counter-fire missions. For rockets and mortars the point-of-impact errors are several hundred meters. Comment: This error is well within a sector area of a RAM warn tower.

3) The radar will report false targets when no projectiles are in the search area. A false target occurs when the radar determines that a threat weapon is firing, when none is present. The radar may do this when there is nothing known in the air, or the radar may classify an aircraft as a ballistic trajectory. The false target rate improved from previous operational testing and met requirements for 90-degree Normal and 360-degree modes, but not for the 90-degree Short-Range Optimized Mode (SROM). When the radar reports a false target as a normal target, the operator is not able to distinguish the false target from an actual target generated by a threat. False. targets can lead to units wasting time and resources by reacting to false warning and firing at non-enemy locations; be disruptive to units if they cause the Sense and Warn system to generate false alarms in defended areas; and can lead units to perceive the Q53 radar as not reliable. The false targeting rate for aircraft remains a significant concern and warrants further investigation and corrective action.

Comments: Most of these false targets and/or false tracks are due to miss classification of targets; but others are due to radar internally generated ghost tracks. Namely ghost tracks can occur when the radar resolves range and/or Doppler ambiguities for example such as from a medium PRF waveform. When this Q53 radar scans over an air field on a FOB it can produce false tracks. Note: When the operator does not know the origin of the track he classifies it as a ghost.

Operation

  • Phalanx: 20mm LPWS (Land-Based Phalanx Weapon System), a land based variant of the US's Phalanx Close-in weapon system;
  • Iron Dome: an Israeli missile system featuring multiple-target tracking and self-guided missile interceptors. Due to the ongoing increase of its engagement range and new missile and interception improvements, plus Surface-to-air missile capability, it has developed into a fully-fledged air defence system. By November 2012, the system had intercepted over 400 rockets fired into Israel by Gaza Strip militants. Based on operational success, defense reporter Mark Thompson estimates that Iron Dome is currently the most-effective and most-tested counter missile system in existence. Note: PM-CRAM developed and successfully tested a system similar to Iron Dome. It was the Accelerated Improved Intercept Initiative program - known as AI3. [1]
  • Nächstbereichschutzsystem MANTIS: 35mm fully automated C-RAM system, produced by Rheinmetall based on Oerlikon's Skyshield and ordered by the German Air Force in use from 2011.
  • Porcupine: A typical Porcupine configuration for the Italian Army consists of four firing units, one central control post for target designation and weapon control and a 3D radar system "track while scan type" for surveillance and target tracking. Each remote firing unit consists of a 20 mm M61A1 Gatling cannon, its ammunition handling system and a stabilised optronic infra-red (IR) tracking system.[2]
  • DRACO: The DRACO is a multipurpose weapon station operating against Air, R.A.M. and Surface targets, designed for the Italian Army. The main armament consists of a high rate of fire 76/62mm gun with an automatic ammunition loading system; the 76/62mm gun is electrically controlled for elevation and traversing, and is stabilized in elevation. DRACO can be installed on 8x8 wheeled platforms, for combat support operations or convoy defence, as well as on tracked vehicles or on shelters for point defence. The main 76/62mm gun and the automatic loading system are fully compatible with all in service 76mm rounds and also with 76mm DART guided ammunition. DRACO can be completely controlled by two Operators (the Commander and the Gunner) from a remote position, located inside the hull for mobile installation or inside a protected command shelter for fixed installation.[3]

Development

Raytheon is developing a laser-based variation where low cost focused lasers will provide increased range and decreased time-to-intercept over the gun. A proof of concept was demonstrated on a 60 mm mortar round in 2006.[4] s Rafael Advanced Defense Systems is also building a laser-based variant known as the Iron Beam. Comments: An issue with laser based C-RAM systems is the time it takes to destroy a target. For example the time of flight of a 107 mm rocket is under 15 seconds. However, this would make it an excellent defense against Unmanned Aerial Vehicles.


Operators

See also

References

  1. ^ Thompson, Mark. "Iron Dome: A Missile Shield That Works". Nation.time.com. Retrieved 21 January 2018.
  2. ^ a b "PORCUPINE C-RAM - DETAIL - Leonardo - Aerospace, Defence and Security". Otomelara.it. Retrieved 21 January 2018.
  3. ^ a b "DRACO - DETAIL - Leonardo - Aerospace, Defence and Security". Otomelara.it. Retrieved 21 January 2018.
  4. ^ "A Laser Phalanx?". Defenseindustrydaily.com. Retrieved 21 January 2018.
  5. ^ "Royal Artillery Careers". Ministry of Defence. Archived from the original on 31 March 2009. Other operational commitments are conducted (in the tertiary role) using C-RAM - a new and highly sensitive self defense system which destroys rockets and projectiles in flight. Applicable to Gunner Rapier applicants only. {{cite web}}: Unknown parameter |deadurl= ignored (|url-status= suggested) (help)
  6. ^ "16th Air Land Regiment, RAA". Australian Army. Archived from the original on 29 March 2013. Retrieved 13 September 2012. {{cite web}}: Unknown parameter |dead-url= ignored (|url-status= suggested) (help)
  7. ^ "Flugabwehrgruppe 61" [Air Defence Group 61] (in German). Luftwaffe (German Air Force). Retrieved 5 September 2017.
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