Defense News:
As Congress begins its review of the president’s fiscal 2016 budget, I recently witnessed a welcome sign of interest from congressional staffers who attended a standing room-only, roundtable discussion on missile defense. The questions and discussion were insightful, and brought clarity to the Missile Defense Agency’s (MDA’s) sound strategy to defend against a rapidly evolving missile threat.
During recent congressional testimony, both the Army chief of staff and the commander of US Northern Command cited ballistic missile defense as a key area for investment. Testimony by the director of the Defense Intelligence Agency to the House Armed Services Committee clearly states that our adversaries and competitors continue to develop air and missile systems to challenge the United States and its partners. The president’s budget reflects these points and fully funds MDA’s request for approximately $8.13 billion, after years of underfunding.
In 2014, North Korea launched more than 100 ballistic missiles and they continue launching them, as well as testing new cruise missiles. They appear to be developing a ballistic missile submarine and state that their KN08 road mobile missile launcher is operational. Meanwhile, Russia’s and China’s development of hypersonic glide vehicles seems to be moving forward too.
Iran recently declared itself the fourth greatest missile power in the world; put a satellite into space; unveiled a new cruise missile that can range across Europe; and says they are about to launch a second satellite.
Iran’s space program is making headway, so one has to wonder if the Director for National Intelligence’s 2014 Statement for the Record to the Senate’s Select Intelligence Committee will come to fruition soon: “…Iran’s progress on space launch vehicles…provides Tehran with the means and motivation to develop longer range missiles, including an ICBM.’
The threat is real and is becoming more challenging so we must sustain our investments in missile defense to deter and defeat it. MDA’s budget request applies $1.8 billion to the Ground-based Midcourse Defense (GMD) system, the US homeland’s sole defense against a long-range missile attack. That level of funding is critical to executing MDA’s well-thought-out set of GMD system priorities: increasing the interceptor inventory to 44 by 2017, improving sensor performance and reliability, developing and testing advanced kill vehicles, and developing a long-range discrimination radar.
Last June’s successful GMD flight test validated a modification and the lethality of the CE-II kill vehicle, as well as MDA’s system engineering model. The next step to further improvements should be a prudent, evolutionary path to a redesigned kill vehicle. MDA’s intent to pursue an open architecture approach in the redesign will simplify the integration of future enhancements and provide a low-risk approach for improvements. This focus should be a priority effort and not one clouded by competing PowerPoint-based better ideas…
