RADINT
Radar Intelligence — the MASINT sub-discipline covering active and passive radar-derived intelligence
RADINT — radar intelligence — is the MASINT sub-discipline covering intelligence derived from active and passive radar collection on foreign aircraft, missiles, ships, and other moving targets. The discipline is operationally distinct from ELINT, which characterises the foreign radar emitters themselves; RADINT uses radar (typically US or allied radar) to produce intelligence about the targets the radar tracks. The category includes radar-derived kinematic data on missile and aircraft trajectories, radar imagery of distant targets (including over-the-horizon radar imagery and synthetic-aperture radar imagery in some operational definitions), and the radar-cross-section characterisation of foreign targets.
The institutional infrastructure for US RADINT is distributed across several missions and collection systems. The US Space Force's space-surveillance radar network — including the Cobra Dane phased-array radar at Eareckson Air Station, Alaska, and the Cobra Judy ship-mounted phased-array radar (now succeeded by the Cobra King system) — has the principal mission of tracking foreign ballistic missile and space-launch vehicles in flight. The Aegis Ballistic Missile Defense System, the Sea-Based X-Band Radar (SBX), and the forward-deployed Army Navy/Transportable Radar Surveillance and Control Model 2 (AN/TPY-2) radars in Japan, Israel, Qatar, and Turkey contribute to missile-tracking RADINT. The over-the-horizon radar systems (the Australian Jindalee Operational Radar Network, the US Air Force Relocatable Over-the-Horizon Radar before its 2002 closure) have provided early-warning and broad-area RADINT product against airborne and surface targets.
The principal operational product of RADINT in the strategic-warning context is the kinematic and signature data on foreign ballistic-missile test flights — the radar-tracked trajectory data that complements FISINT telemetry and NUCINT signature analysis to produce a complete characterisation of a given test event. The Cobra Dane and Cobra Judy/King systems have produced the substantial body of US RADINT product on Soviet, Russian, Chinese, North Korean, and Iranian missile programmes since their introduction in the 1970s. The post-2017 acceleration of North Korean test activity has kept the system in continuous operational use against a programme whose rapid maturation has been the principal RADINT analytical priority of the late 2010s and early 2020s.
RADINT's analytical relationship with GEOINT is close: synthetic-aperture radar imagery, increasingly produced commercially since the 2010 deployment of the COSMO-SkyMed and TerraSAR-X commercial constellations and now also by the Capella Space and ICEYE constellations, has produced an expanding category of radar-derived imagery that is sometimes categorised as RADINT and sometimes as imagery RADINT (within GEOINT). The disciplinary boundary is unsettled in a way that reflects the broader convergence of geospatial and signature-based intelligence at the technical-collection level.