Iran has damaged a $300 million radar system critical to directing US missile defense batteries in the Gulf, putting the region's capacity to counter future assaults at danger, according to a US official.
According to commercial satellite images, an RTX Corp. AN/TPY-2 radar and related equipment used by US THAAD missile defense systems was damaged at Muwaffaq Salti Air Base in Jordan in the early days of the fighting, as reported by CNN previously. A US official verified that the equipment had been destroyed.
According to data compiled by the Foundation for Defense of Democracies think tank, two reported Iranian strikes in Jordan occurred on February 28 and March 3, respectively. Both were said to have been intercepted."If successful, an Iranian strike on a THAAD radar would mark one of Iran's most successful attacks so far," said Ryan Brobst, deputy director of the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies' Center on Military and Political Power. However, he additionally stated that "the US military and its partners have other radars that can continue to provide air and missile defense coverage, mitigating the loss of any single radar."
US Terminal High Altitude Area Defense, or THAAD, systems are designed to destroy ballistic missiles on the edge of the atmosphere, allowing them to confront more complex threats than shorter-range Patriot batteries. With the AN/TPY-2 radar out of function, Patriot systems will be responsible for missile interception, which already has a shortage of PAC-3 missiles.

The United States has eight THAAD systems worldwide, including those in South Korea and Guam. According to the Center for Strategic and International Studies, each battery costs over $1 billion, with the radar accounting for roughly $300 million."These are scarce strategic resources, and their loss is a significant blow," said Tom Karako, a missile defense expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. The current Army's "eight-battery force is still below the force structure requirements of nine set back in 2012, so there aren't exactly any spare TPY-2 lying around," according to him.
A THAAD battery includes of 90 personnel, six truck-mounted launchers, forty-eight interceptors (eight per launcher), one TPY-2 radar, and a tactical fire control and communications unit."If you want integrated air and missile defenses, this is just one of the things you'd put in the theater," said William Alberque, a senior fellow at the Pacific Forum research group who lives in Europe.
Earlier in the battle, an AN/FPS-132 radar in Qatar - a fixed installation as opposed to the mobile THAAD system - was damaged by an Iranian attack, according to the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies in Monterey, California.
That technology is an early warning radar, designed to detect threats from great distances but lacks the precision required to deliver weapons against them.
Iranian retaliation drone and ballistic missile attacks have tested and, at times, overwhelmed Gulf air and missile defense systems.