Thales has signed a subcontract for the verification of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) Ballistic Missile Defence (BMD) architecture on the Integrated Test Bed in The Hague. The work is part of the contract awarded to prime contractor Leidos by NATO earlier this year.
Under the contract, US-based Leidos and its eight teammates from Canada, France, Germany, The Netherlands, Turkey, the UK, and the US, will support NATO’s BMD programme by working together as an integrated product team to deliver BMD capability.
In this scope, Thales will perform the testing and integration activities required for the verification of the NATO BMD architecture. The team is responsible for the design, development and test of the interfaces with NATO’s and national weapons and sensors. The Integrated Test Bed relies on Thales’s vast experience with naval defence systems and knowledge of long-range sensor technology.
The contract has a duration of four years with options for extension. It is a follow-on to the Active Layer Theatre Ballistic Missile Defence contract.
This contract reinforces Thales’s activities in ballistic missile defence. The first success in this field came in 2006 with the modified Thales SMART-L volume search radar tested on board of HNLMS Tromp. The radar tracked a ballistic missile from moments after being launched and provided a real-time uplink of the missile’s trajectory.
In 2014, Thales was awarded contracts to update the four SMART-L radars on board of the Royal Netherlands Navy’s “De Zeven Provinciën” class vessels. This update will give the radars true BMD capabilities. The Royal Netherlands Air Force ordered two such radars for surveillance of the national air space. The radars will be installed on towers in two locations of the country.
In October this year, the At Sea Demo organized by the Maritime Theatre Missile Defence (MTMD) Forum demonstrated that Thales’s sensor technology is capable to detect and track extra-terrestrial objects and provide a cue to the NATO BMD organization for the elimination of the threat.
“We have reached this important milestone together with our partners and see this as an appreciation of our efforts in the field of ballistic missile defence technology for more than a decade,” said John Alfrink, Thales VP in charge of Above Water Systems activities.
