Precision Targeting System
Radar (active) guidance technology prevailed in anti-ship and surface attack weapons during the 1980s. This guidance technique was recently adapted to land attack missiles. After the missile flies to a pre-designated location where line of sight to the target is expected, it activates its radar in a scan mode, and will home in on the signal expected to be the target. Such signal can be the strongest in the area, or one that emits a characteristic signature. Radar guided missiles are highly vulnerable to countermeasures and deception, which sometime necessitate human intervention for target verification and intervention at terminal phase. When used over land, radar seekers can be augmented by other elements (such as EO, GPS, LADAR etc).
Other applications of much smaller radar guidance use millimeter wave radars, to locate, classify, identify and engage armored vehicles and other priority targets. The use of millimeter wave seekers provides very high resolution, all weather capability and high immunity to current conventional countermeasure techniques employed by armored vehicles.
