The Diplomat:
Earlier this month, reports citing sources within the Japanese Ministry of Defense indicated that Japan’s deployment of the Aegis Ashore missile defense system will be built around a variant of Lockheed Martin’s still-in-development Long Range Discrimination Radar (LRDR), instead of the Raytheon SPY-6 radar.
While details of the precise LRDR variant Japan will use are unknown, it is likely that the radar will feature reduced range. In any case, the full-fledged LRDR, as described by Lt. Gen. Samuel A. Greaves, the director of the U.S. Missile Defense Agency, in testimony earlier this year is a “midcourse sensor that will provide persistent long-range midcourse discrimination, precision tracking, and hit assessment and improve BMDS target discrimination capability while supporting a more efficient utilization of the GMD interceptor inventory.”
Setting aside the suitability of LRDR for Japan’s midcourse interception needs for a moment, it bears interrogating whether the selection of LRDR might emerge as a new thorn in Sino-Japanese relations.
