A hardware refresh of the radars that watch for missile launches usually disappears into budget lines. The Space Force’s choice to make those sensors software-updatable is the part worth watching in a threat environment where jamming and cyber intrusion arrive before the missiles do.
What the digitization buys
Under the Ground-Based Radar Digitization program, Raytheon will replace or modernize the electronics inside long-serving early warning radars and stand up a common, open architecture for later improvements.
Work begins with prototypes before spreading to other sites. Sam Deneke, who runs Raytheon’s Air and Space Defense Systems unit, framed the effort as a hedge against increasingly complex global threats.
The substance is vendor independence. Fixed digital back ends lock a radar to whoever wrote its software; an open one lets the service swap in new signal processing, discrimination algorithms or security patches without renegotiating a contract.
Software is an attack surface
Radars that can be updated are also radars that can be compromised. The ground segment has become the softer half of America’s missile warning architecture, targeted through supply chains, contractor networks and unpatched firmware rather than through the sensor face itself.
An open architecture widens the aperture for patches. It also multiplies the number of people and pipelines touching code that feeds tracking data into missile defense.
Why the old sensors still matter
These radars provide launch warning, characterize objects in space and track activity in orbit. The service is modernizing them while adding newer sensors, including the Long Range Discrimination Radar accepted in Alaska in December 2025.
Space Fence, on Kwajalein Atoll, covers a different job entirely: cataloging satellites and debris in low Earth orbit.
Raytheon’s work starts this year in prototype form, with broader fielding to follow.
