The U.S. Defense Security Cooperation Agency has announced on Monday the possible sale of two complete Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) batteries, including two TPY-2 X-band missile defense radars, to Qatar for a total of $6.5 billion. The two THAAD batteries would include eight launchers and 150 interceptor missiles.
The announcement also stated that the sale would include “1 Early Warning Radar (EWR)” although no further details about this radar were provided.
Given the sale announced at the beginning of 2012 of two THAAD batteries to the UAE (including two TPY-2 radars), and recently announced plans to deploy a U.S. TPY-2 radar to Qatar, this brings the total planned number of TPY-2 radars for this small part of the Middle East to five.
mostlymissiledefense 
Allen Thomson
/ November 7, 2012I’m somewhat curious about the EWR. Several years ago there was talk about the AN/TPY-2 in its FBX-T version operating with a somewhat enigmatic “adjunct sensor”/”adjunct dish radar”, but it’s not clear that the EWR is that. What sort of EWR would make sense to complement the THAAD AN/TPY-2?
mostlymissiledefense
/ November 8, 2012Good question. I was wondering this myself, but haven’t seen anything else about it. It certainly will not be a dish radar like those proposed adjunct radars, which were primarily intended to fill in tracking gaps between the phased-arrays.
An interesting point of comparison is the sale in December to UAE of two THAAD batteries (including radars) with 96 missiles for $3.5 billion, or $3 billion less than the sale to QATAR. The Qatar sale has 50 more missiles, so add another $600 million or so for those. This at least raises the possibility that there is more than $2 billion available for the early warning radar (or possibly we got Qatar to pay a lot more for what they are getting than UAE did).
In order to add anything to the capabilities of the two TPY-2 radars, it would have to be a substantial radar. Given that reports on the PAVE PAWS-like radar we are building for Taiwan put its price at $1.4 billion, even something as large as that might be possible.
George