ROK Military Criticized for Green Pine Radar Maintenance Outages

Radars are extremely hi-tech and complicated pieces of equipment that require maintenance and some ROK politicians are using maintenance outages to criticize the ROK military:

The country’s two Green Pine antiballistic radar units, which play a key role in detecting North Korea’s ballistic missile launches, have malfunctioned 21 times in the past three years, according to a military report that was submitted to Rep. Lee Chul-gyu of the ruling Saenuri Party and exclusively acquired by the JoongAng Ilbo on Sunday.

Considering that the military operates one radar unit at a time biweekly and it takes two hours to turn on the other radar when one breaks down, 21 malfunctions means the South went 42 hours with neither radar working.

The Air Force acknowledged the malfunctions as well as the gap of 42 hours, but said there wasn’t a single time that both units were simultaneously broken.

The military said that the radars stopped working mainly when droplets of water formed inside the machine due to a temperature difference with the outside layer, which paralyzed the system’s transmission output.

According to Lee, the military has recently decided to spend an extra 13 billion won to build a dome that would cover the radars, decreasing the temperature difference to prevent future malfunctioning.

“I can’t help but doubt the military’s professionalism,” said Lee. “How could they pay 200 billion won for each radar and not have prevented dew forming?”  [Joong Ang Ilbo]

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