Multistatic Discrimination Approaches for Ballistic Missile Defense Applications

This effort proposes a new and innovative approach for defeating ballistic missile defense discrimination countermeasures. The use of bistatic and multistatic radar signatures will be exploited to help the Ballistic Missile Defense System (BMDS) defeat many of the stressing discrimination threats and countermeasures facing the current and future BMD system. Bistatic refers to using a separate transmitter and receiver, in physically separate locations, to perform the traditional radar transmit and receive functions. Multistatic simply implies that there is more than one receiver being used. There are numerous benefits to using bistatic and multistatic approaches for discrimination. These benefits include having higher radar cross sections (RCSs) and achieving spatially diverse geometries to observe threats and countermeasures from multiple viewing angles. This is extremely important, given that radar signatures are very dependent upon the viewing geometry (aspect and roll angles) between the threat and the radar. The benefits that will be demonstrated during this phase I activity have great potential to impact the over-all BMDS as well as existing technology programs. As the BMDS evolves to a distributed "System of Systems", the opportunities to capitalize upon multiple viewing geometries will become increasingly important. Possible programs that could benefit from this work include: National Missile Defense (NMD)/Ground-based Midcourse Defense (GMD), THAAD, Forward Based Radar, PATRIOT, JLENS, Kinetic Energy Interceptor (KEI), High Altitude Airship, Project Hercules and the Advanced Discrimination Initiative.