Hardpoint (missile defense)
Proposed anti-ballistic missile system / From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Hardpoint was a proposed short-range anti-ballistic missile (ABM) system conceived by ARPA and developed by the US Army under ARPA's Project Defender program. Hardpoint was designed to exploit the relatively low accuracy that Soviet ICBMs had, which would make destroying missile silos difficult. The idea was to only shoot at warheads which would be expected to impact within lethal distance of silos, ignoring the rest and allowing them to hit the ground. This acted as a force multiplier, allowing a small number of interceptors to offset a large number of Soviet missiles.
In order to fulfill this mission, the Hardpoint concept relied on having extremely rapid and accurate tracking of the incoming warheads. This led to the development of the Hardpoint Demonstration Array Radar, or HAPDAR, a passive array radar system that was built at the White Sands Missile Range in the early 1960s. Hardpoint also relied on waiting until the absolute last second before launching on the incoming warheads, both to ensure the trajectory was accurate as well as to deal with the possibility of maneuvering reentry vehicles. This led to the HiBEX and UpSTAGE missile experiments that tested accelerations as high as 377 g.
There was some interest by the Army and US Air Force in the concept, which continued studying the basic concept under the name Hardsite. Ultimately, as had been the case several times in the past, the Air Force eventually rejected any Army involvement in "their" strategic role, and various follow-up studies did not yield results. A later development known as LoADS examined combining the missile and radar into a missile silo as part of the MX missile program, but was ultimately abandoned by Ronald Reagan.