By Rikki Klaus
Engineers and production facility professionals are urgently working to restock Patriot Advanced Capability-3, or PAC-3, interceptor missiles, after troops fired hundreds in wars in the Middle East and Ukraine.
“We’ve shot off quite a lot of what we’ve been building up over the past few years, and so at this point, we’ve basically been told we need to build as many as we can,” said Hannah Bertelson, PAC-3 Test Engineer at Davidson Technologies.
The PAC-3 interceptor is one of the most advanced and coveted air defense systems in the world. The nonprofit Missile Defense Advocacy Alliance reports more than a dozen countries, including Taiwan, Israel and Sweden, have purchased the roughly $4 million missiles.
In January, the U.S. Department of War tasked defense industry partners with more than tripling PAC-3 production in the next several years, from about 600 to 2,000 missiles annually.
The increase is critical to national defense, said Michele Wilson, Davidson program manager for the Ground-based Midcourse Defense, or GMD, program.
“There are not many wartime-proven interceptors that can protect our troops and our air bases in other countries from incoming threats of all types,” she added.
In Huntsville, Alabama, Wilson and Bertelson are part of a team replenishing the stockpile of one essential component of PAC-3: the seeker.
“The Patriot missile cannot function without the seeker,” Wilson said.
The advanced radar system behaves like eyes. Using real-time measurements, seekers guide missiles to airborne threats, including hypersonic, ballistic and cruise missiles, along with drones and aircraft.
The defensive weapons then “intercept and destroy missiles by impacting them directly with kinetic energy- known as ‘hit to kill,’” the Congressional Research Service reported, citing a now unavailable NATO fact sheet.
The result? U.S. troops, allies, civilians and infrastructure are protected.
“The technology in the seeker is really one of a kind, and being able to protect people from incoming missiles – or whatever type of weapon – is a huge advantage,” Bertelson said.
In April, the Department of War announced a seven-year agreement with a major defense contractor to triple production of the seeker subsystem.
“The immediate goal is to expand our capacity to being able to build 750 seekers in a year,” said Bertelson, “with continued production increases to approximately 2,000 annually.”
To ramp up seeker supply amid multiple nations’ pressing demand for PAC-3s, a new factory is set to open in Huntsville in early summer. Bertelson is ordering test equipment now for the production line.
“The goal is to get the factory expansion up and running, get all of the duplicated test equipment in, validated and working, and then to hire more technicians so they can continue to build more seekers,” she said.
Wilson said the plan to scale up seeker production is working so far. She estimates her colleagues will double production this year.
“I’m proud to say they are way ahead of schedule,” she shared.
For both Wilson and Bertelson, their work on a lifesaving munition is not just mission-driven; it’s personal. Wilson’s late father, a widower who raised her from a young age, and Bertelson’s older brother, a pilot, both served in the military.
“I think any time we do anything for the warfighter, it has a special place in my heart,” said Bertelson. “Knowing that there are so many people who rely on this technology that can make the difference between someone coming home and back to their families, we take it very seriously.”
