The U.S. Army has begun deploying the heavy equipment that will transform the 18-hole Lotte Skyhill Seongju Country Club in north Gyeongsang province to the southeast of Seoul into the first base for the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) system.

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Earth movers and other heavy equipment trundled onto the elevated par 72 golf course to tear-up the greens and build the infrastructure that will see the country club transformed into a high-security military base.

The Lotte Skyhill Seongju Country Club is located atop a hill some 600 meters higher than the surrounding countryside. It's this high elevation that made the country club ideal for emplacing the THAAD missile battery and its powerful AN/TPY-2 radar that can peer into Chinese and Russian territory.

The X-band AN/TPY-2 has two configurations: a Terminal Mode with a range of 600 km and a Forward-Based Mode whose exact range remains secret but might be anywhere from 1,500 km to 3,000 km, according to experts

The transporter erector launchers for the THAAD interceptors -- and the hit-to-kill interceptors themselves -- arrived at the U.S. Osan Air Base to the south of Seoul aboard a U.S. Air Force Lockheed C-5 Galaxy military transport aircraft on March 7.

The first two launchers will soon be transported to Seongju where the THAAD system will be installed. THAAD is meant to intercept and destroy short- and medium-range ballistic missiles during the last part of their flights.

A THAAD battery consists of six mobile launchers (each with eight interceptors); 48 missiles; two mobile tactical operations centers (TOCs); battle management/command, control, communications and intelligence (BMC3I) units and the AN/TPY-2 X-band ground-based radar.

The X-band radar can detect missiles 2,000 kilometers away on a forward-based mode and 600 kilometers on a terminal mode.

THAAD was initially slated for deployment by November, and the sped-up deployment seems to have been accelerated by North Korea's continuing launch of ballistic missiles.