Major procurement underway: 50 radars to monitor the entire Danish Realm
The Danish Armed Forces’ radars from Bornholm and all the way to the Faroe Islands and Greenland will in the coming years be streamlined and given a technological boost.
The current radar systems are up to around 20 years old. With the new radars, the Danish Armed Forces will improve the quality and accuracy of the surveillance of Danish waters and airspace. In the future, it should be easier to monitor maritime traffic as well as detect and track e.g. modern types of aircraft with a smaller “footprint” in the airspace or even smaller objects such as drones.
“Since the Cold War, being able to perform radar surveillance 24/7 has been a must. But in the future, we need to know what’s going on out there more precisely, and that’s why we are now upgrading all our radar systems to the latest technology,” says Henrik Swartz, chief of business at the Danish Ministry of Defence Acquisition and Logistics Organisation (DALO), who is responsible for the radar systems, among other things.
Once the project is completed, waters and airspace throughout the Danish Realm will be monitored by 50 radars. Some will be new acquisitions, some will be technologically upgraded, while others will be replacements of existing radars.
Illustration: Ingeniøren.
Keeping an eye on the Arctic and the Baltic Sea
The process is already well underway. In autumn 2023, DALO purchased five new ground-based mobile radars of the Ground Master 200 MM/C type under a government-to-government agreement with the Netherlands. The radars are manufactured by Thales Defense and are used for airspace surveillance. In Denmark, they will be used to monitor the lower portion of the airspace for planes, helicopters, drones, and missiles.
Last year, a contract was also signed to upgrade two TPS-77 radars from Lockheed Martin. It is a so-called DADR (deployable air defence radar), which has also been used in Iraq until 2019. The upgrade brings the two radars up to Mode 5 level within IFF (identification, friend or foe), which is an electronic system for distinguishing friendly from enemy combat aircraft based on radar signals.
In 2024 and the next few years, 40 surface surveillance radars will also be purchased to monitor the waters, including the Great Belt and Øresund. This includes the coastal radar surveillance system KYRA, VTS Storebælt, and VTS Øresund for monitoring ship traffic as well as surface surveillance radars for Greenland. The new radars will replace existing surface surveillance radars, and the goal is to end up with fewer suppliers than the seven or eight different ones that are behind the existing ones.
Finally, three new fixed air defence radars (FADR) are to be purchased, i.e. long-range radars for airspace surveillance. One of them will be placed in the Faroe Islands, which currently do not have a FADR, as part of the Agreement on Arctic Capabilities.
The other two new FADRs will replace an S-723 radar on Bornholm and a RAT31 DL radar in Skagen. The plan is for all three FADRs to come from the same supplier and to be of the AESA (active electronically scanned array) type.
Compared to a classic radar with a single rotating dish, an AESA radar consists of hundreds or thousands of smaller antennas that are electronically aligned to each other. In short, the technology makes it possible to track several targets simultaneously in several different directions without physically moving the radar.
“With the AESA technology, you can control each individual antenna element and follow targets in different volumes of airspace. This provides better quality surveillance, and you also get better resolution, making it easier to detect and track, for example, a drone or a modern aircraft with a smaller signature,” says Morten Sørensen, capacity centre manager for ground-based surveillance systems at DALO.
War in Ukraine makes radars more important
According to independent defence analyst Hans Peter H. Michaelsen, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022 has only reinforced the need for well-functioning and technologically modern radar systems in Denmark.
“Geopolitics are back, and we now need to know everything about what’s going on in the air and out on the sea. Radars are therefore at the very bottom of the Danish Armed Forces’ food pyramid. Without radars we have no surveillance, and without surveillance we have no way to assert sovereignty,” says Hans Peter H. Michaelsen.
According to the defence analyst, AESA is the major technological innovation in modern radars.
At the same time, radar manufacturers have started to use the semiconductor material gallium nitride (GaN) in transmitters, which makes it possible to transmit at higher power while keeping each transmitter compact. In Norway, the air force has invested in the Lockheed Martin TPY-4 radar, which uses AESA and GaN technology, in 2022.
The radar systems upgrade will be a step into the 21st century, where the radars are largely controlled by software. It opens up new possibilities for obtaining more and better radar data for analysis.
“We can carry out more intelligent data processing with AI to achieve a better quality of identification of both aircraft and ships. This gives us a better overall picture,” Henrik Swartz says.
The fact that radars are now highly software-defined potentially opens up new opportunities to tweak them in the future.
“This means that it will be possible to update the radars continuously to counter new threats. It could, for example, be radar data processing to counter jamming (of the radar signal, ed.). It’s a development we’re keeping an eye on,” Morten Sørensen says.
