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| Photograph provided by Boeing, the Sea-Based X-Band Radar, a key component of the U.S. Missile Defense Agency's Ground-based Midcourse Defense system |
It was the most powerful radar of its kind in the world, they told Congress. So powerful it could detect a baseball over San Francisco from the other side of the country.
If North Korea launched a sneak attack, the Sea-Based X-Band Radar — SBX for short — would spot the incoming missiles, track them through space and guide U.S. rocket-interceptors to destroy them.
Crucially, the system would be able to distinguish between actual missiles and decoys.
In reality, the giant floating radar has been a $2.2 billion flop, a Los Angeles Times investigation found.
Although it can powerfully magnify distant objects, its field of vision is so narrow that it would be of little use against what experts consider the likeliest attack: a stream of missiles interspersed with decoys.
The project not only wasted taxpayer money but left a hole in the nation's defenses. The money spent on it could have gone toward land-based radars with a greater capability to track long-range missiles, according to experts who studied the issue.
Over the last decade, the agency has sunk nearly $10 billion into SBX and three other programs that had to be killed or sidelined after they proved unworkable,
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