The US Air Force has awarded a $200 million contract to Northrop Grumman for the design, completion and testing of the second ground-based space surveillance facility, as part of the Deep Space Advanced Radar Capability (DARC) program. This facility, or Site 2, will be built on British soil at the Cawdor Barracks base in the Pembrokeshire region of Wales, where the 14th Electronic Warfare Regiment was once based, with European space as its area of responsibility. The project is expected to be completed by February 4, 2030.
The DARC program, as it is called for short, is one of the numerous joint between the USA, the UK and Australia, within the framework of the tripartite defense cooperation AUKUS and its object is the tracking, recognition and identification of objects in geosynchronous orbit, thus ensuring the security of the three countries, as well as the protection of their critical space infrastructures 24 hours a day and under any weather conditions.
The first part of the contract has already started execution from February 2022, with the construction of Site 1, which will be completed in 2026 in Western Australia, covering the Indo-Pacific zone, while the third facility (Site 3) is to be built in the USA.
AUKUS is evolving
The signing of the tripartite AUKUS on September 15, 2021, was a small geopolitical earthquake, as it laid the foundations for an even greater deepening of relations between the contracting parties. On the purely defense side there was a clear separation of the areas of cooperation into nuclear and non-nuclear objects.
Thus the Pillar 1 sector focuses on the development and construction of nuclear-powered attack submarines for the Australian Navy and the rotational re-stationing of corresponding US and British submarines in Australia.
Accordingly, Pillar 2 envisages the development of advanced capabilities in six areas:
- underwater technologies,
- the polyphonic and their countermeasures,
- the quantum,
- artificial intelligence,
- cyberspace and
- electronic warfare.
Part of Pillar 2 is also the rather interesting formulation of wider cooperation in innovation and information sharing, with DARC being a product of this strand.
