Some in Congress want to move the Sea-Based X-Band Radar, otherwise known as the floating golf ball, from Pearl Harbor to the East Coast to provide greater missile defense over the Atlantic and a hedge against attacks from Iran.

The House Armed Services Committee’s Strategic Forces Subcommittee is requiring in its version of the 2016 National Defense Authorization Act that the giant radar, known as the SBX, be moved to the East Coast no later than 2020.

Before relocation the Missile Defense Agency would be required to certify that the move would not "impact the missile defense of Hawaii."

At the same time, the SBX has been called a "$2.2 billion flop" by the Los Angeles Times and has been vigorously defended by a missile defense advocacy group. The U.S. military, meanwhile, is pursuing a land-based Alaska radar to discern North Korean warheads from decoys.

Navy Vice Adm. James Syring, director of the Missile Defense Agency, told a Senate subcommittee last month that the SBX "is fulfilling a very important role today in the Pacific with all the (missile defense) testing that we do" as well as providing a "surge capability" for real-world threats.

But the agency is pursuing a new $1 billion "long-range discrimination radar" in Alaska by 2020.

Syring noted the request for the Alaska radar "and some thinking about an additional sensor capability in Hawaii."

He added, "I think in that priority order, when those are complete, you will see us offer the option (to the) Northern Command commander to move SBX to the East Coast."

The Northern Command, based at Peterson Air Force Base, Colo., is responsible for coordinating homeland defenses.

Syring noted that the threat from North Korea is now short-range missiles but increasing in complexity, "and we have to assume that technology at the short- and medium-range level will eventually migrate to the longer-range level."

"So, the complexity of the threat must be accounted for and the potential for that to increase, and we must be prepared for that, and that’s the whole premise of the (long-range discrimination radar), is to better defend against a more complex threat," he said.

Since the 280-foot-tall ballistic missile defense radar arrived in Hawaii in January 2006, it has become a permanent transplant, shunning its initially designated foul-weather home port in the Aleutians so completely that it never even moored there.

Some airline pilots even point out the eye-catching golf ball to passengers on approach. The phased array radar inside the inflatable dome tracks ballistic missiles with 45,000 transmission and receiving elements.

The Los Angeles Times recently knocked the SBX, saying its field of vision is so narrow it would be of little use against a fusillade of missiles and decoys.

But the Missile Defense Advocacy Alliance, a nonprofit group, said SBX has been a "key asset" in 13 real-world engagements, including as the central fire control sensor when the former Pearl Harbor cruiser USS Lake Erie shot down a failed U.S. spy satellite in space in 2008.

The missile defense group said the SBX’s powerful "soda straw" view is needed to discriminate debris and decoys from a warhead in tandem with conventional radars that have a wider field of view.