Of course some radars did physically move their dishes to stay locked on to a target. I'm in the middle of The Invention That Changed the World (spoiler alert: it was radar) and I was stunned to learn how well this worked with analog circuits. An SCR-584, paired with an M9 analog computer, could detect that a plane was moving out of the center of its conical scan, and then convert that into a signal to the motors that drive the dish (and its associated antiaircraft guns).
Thanks for pointing me to that book - it sounds like something I'd read.
Yeah phased arrays have probably been the rule for decades at that price-no-object level.
Even at the consumer level, there have been phased-array marine -sonars- (e.g. Interphase brand product line) for at least ten years for "only" 4-digit prices. Spatial resolution is of course tied to the number of elements but they do present more information that your typical 1-d "fish finder."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conical_scanning
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SCR-584_radar