Integrated NATO Air Defense System or INADS was the NATO response to the Russian development of long range bombers in the 1950s. The need to maintain a credible deterrence when early warning and intercept times were massively reduced led to the development of an improved air defence (AD) system.
Development was approved by the NATO Military Committee in December 1955. The system was to be based on four air defense regions (ADRs) coordinated by SACEUR (Supreme Allied Commander Europe). Starting from 1956 early warning coverage was extended across Western Europe using eighteen radar stations. This part of the system was completed by 1962. Linked to existing national radar sites the coordinated system was called the NATO Air Defence Ground Environment (NADGE).
From 1960 NATO countries agreed to place all their air defence forces under the command of SACEUR in the event of war. These forces included command and control systems, radar installations, and Surface-to-Air (SAM) missile units as well as interceptor fighters.
By 1972 NADGE consisted of 84 radar stations and associated control and reporting centres (CRC). During the 80's the Airborne Early Warning / Ground Environment Integration Segment (AEGIS) upgraded the original NADGE systems with the possibility to integrate the AWACS (the E-3 Sentry built by Boeing) information into its visual displays. (This AEGIS not to be confused with the U.S. Navy`s AEGIS, a shipboard fire control radar and weapons system.)
AEGIS processed the information through Hughes H5118ME computers, which replaced the H3118M computers installed at NADGE sites in the late 1960s and early 1970s.
NADGE's ability to handle data increased with faster clock rates. The H5118M computer had a staggering 1 megabyte of memory and could handle 1.2 million instructions per second while the former model had a memory of only 256 kilobytes and a clock speed of 150000 instructions per seconds.
NADGE/AEGIS were complemented, in West Germany by the German Air Defence Ground Environment (GEADGE), an updated radar network adding southern West Germany to the European system, and Coastal Radar Integration System (CRIS), adding data links from Danish coastal radars.
In order to counter the hardware obsolescence, during the mid-90's NATO started the AEGIS Site Emulator (ASE) program allowing the NADGE/AEGIS sites to replace the proprietary hardware (the 5118ME computer and the various operator consoles IDM-2, HMD-22, IDM-80) with Commercial-Off-the-Shelf servers and workstations.
In the first years 2000, the initial ASE capability was expanded with the possibility to run, thanks to the new hardware power, multiple site emulators on the same hardware, so the system was renamed into Multi-AEGIS Site Emulator (MASE).
The new system designed to replace MASE is Air Command and Control System (ACCS).
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