One of the most vexing challenges U.S. military planners face in figuring out what to do about the growing nuclear threat posed by North Korea is the vulnerability of South Korea's capital to non-nuclear retaliation. Seoul is a mere 35 miles from the demilitarized zone separating the two countries, putting it within range of North Korean artillery and short-range rockets. The North has deployed thousands of guns and rocket launchers along the border, in effect holding 25 million South Koreans -- half the country's population -- hostage.
The U.S. and its South Korean ally have several defensive options for dealing with longer-range missiles, including the land-based Patriot air and missile defense system, the sea-based Aegis air and missile defense system carried on U.S. warships, and the land-based Terminal High-Altitude Area Defense (Thaad). The latter system, built by Lockheed Martin, is especially well-suited to defending urban areas against ballistic missiles, having achieved a perfect testing record of 15 kills in 15 attempts. Highly mobile and quickly reloadable, truck-mounted Thaad batteries began deploying in South Korea earlier this year.
But none of those systems is configured to deal with artillery shells, and the rocket launchers located right over the border from Seoul don't loft their munitions to an altitude where systems like Thaad could be effective. So protecting Seoul against short-range threats is difficult, even if nuclear weapons never come into play. Last week, though, Massachusetts-based Raytheon displayed an effective solution at the annual exposition of the Association of the U.S. Army in Washington that could be available for deployment within months.
Raytheon (a contributor to my think tank) calls the system SkyHunter, but longtime military observers will know it as Iron Dome -- the short-range air and missile defense system that Israel activated in 2011 to counter rockets being fired into the Jewish state by Hezbollah forces in neighboring Lebanon. Initially funded by the Israeli government and later by the U.S., Iron Dome has an impressive success rate of over 90% in countering short-range ballistic threats, and can also cope with air-breathing threats such as unmanned aircraft (drones).
Iron Dome has successfully intercepted over 1,500 hostile munitions headed for Israel, and is designed to defend precisely the kind of target the South Korean capital represents -- a densely populated urban area where incoming threats must be quickly sorted out and prioritized to prevent major loss of life. Its radar, built by Israeli company Elta, can track the trajectories of over a thousand targets simultaneously, directing fast-responding interceptor missiles to destroy the targets that pose the greatest danger.
Raytheon was already teamed with Israeli defense firm Rafael to make components for Iron Dome, but what it has now done is repackage the system for sale to the U.S. military as SkyHunter. The company says it can deliver a full-up system in as little as four months; given two years, it can produce all the necessary parts -- the radar, the interceptor missiles, the battle management equipment -- in the U.S. This is years earlier than other U.S.-made solutions would be available for use in combat.
A single SkyHunter battery can protect most of metropolitan Seoul, scattering its truck-mounted launchers to provide optimum coverage with 120 interceptors. The whole system is managed using secure wireless links, and its radar can detect short-range threats to a distance well beyond the DMZ. Raytheon says that the cost per interception is less than any comparable system, and there are few defensive systems in the world that could accomplish SkyHunter's missions at any cost.
Critics might argue that a few defensive batteries would be overwhelmed by the North's artillery and rocket forces, which reportedly are the biggest in the world. However, the vast majority of North Korea's short-range fires cannot reach Seoul either because of their limited range or because of where they are deployed. The role of SkyHunter in a Korean conflict would be to counter incoming weapons headed for the highest-value or most heavily-populated targets while U.S. and South Korean air power is applied to suppress the North's fires, supply lines and command links.
Combined with longer-range defensive systems such as Patriot and Thaad, SkyHunter could provide Seoul with layered protection sufficient to intercept virtually any type of weapon Pyongyang might launch against the South Korean capital. The availability of such protection would greatly simplify the military challenge of dealing with the larger threat posed by the North. At the very least, it would raise doubt among North Korean leaders about their ability to hold hostage a large fraction of the South's population.
Obviously, Raytheon has ideas for how SkyHunter might assist U.S. and allied forces in other places, such as Europe. However, the most urgent threat today is on the Korean Peninsula, and SkyHunter looks to be the only combat-proven option that could be on the ground and in action there by next spring. So chances are, U.S. investment in Israel's defense is going to pay dividends few observers could have imagined when Iron Dome was first conceived.
