Optimal Threshold Policies for Hard-Kill of Enemy Radars With High Speed Anti-Radiation Missiles (HARMS)

In modern network centric warfare (NCW) there is a dedicated platform (airplane) assigned to every group of aircraft that specializes in the hard-kill of the enemy guidance-radars by deploying high speed anti-radiation missiles (HARM)s. In this paper we consider the problem of optimal launch control of the HARMs. We formulate the optimal trade-off between the cost of the HARMs and the latency in performing the hard-kill of the enemy radar as a partially observable Markov decision process (POMDP). Next, by reformulating this POMDP as a Markovian search problem, we prove that optimal missile launch control policies are threshold-based policies in nature. We then present optimal threshold policies that unlike their POMDP counterparts are computationally efficient and inexpensive to implement in real time combat systems. Numerical results demonstrate the effectiveness of these threshold based missile deployment algorithms