“Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen, from a hot, humid day here in Virginia, Alexandria, Virginia. I’m Riki Ellison. I’m the founder and chairman of the Missile Defense Advocacy Alliance. It’s an alliance that we founded 20 years ago, and its sole purpose is to advocate, educate for the deployment and evolution of our missile defenses to make our nation and the world a safer place. We’ve obviously seen some tremendous capabilities of our warfighters in that mission set this past month. This is our 79th Congressional Roundtable.
It’s on the future of Army and Air and Missile Defense. The U.S. Army has been very close to me, and the love of the U.S. Army has come all the way back from 1968, where I grew up with a Sherman tank commander, non-commissioned officer for General Patton, and Fred Letter, another non-commissioned officer, got drafted in Vietnam that went and pulled those 105mm howitzers from hill to hill on it. We, as an organization, have been driven by the Army mission.
We created our Missile Defender of the Year in celebration of the January 18, 1991, first intercept. We’ve awarded over 1,000 awardees, most of them being Army soldiers. We’ve been to 793 bases. The majority of those base visits have been Army bases, with Patriots, with THAAD. We were just in Hohenfels, Germany, last Tuesday, watching the maneuver formations and dismounted and mounted counter-UAS. We’re in Sembach with the 10th AAMDC.
We met with the 5-7 ADA Battalion for Europe. It’s a phenomenal mission, and what the U.S. Army has done with it against Iran last April in their coordination with their capabilities with Israel to defeat Iran was remarkable. Then the showing that happened a week ago in response to Iran over at Qatar Air Base.
We are here now to look at the future, because this missile defense capabilities that we have are not enough. They’ve never been enough. We don’t have the capacity. We don’t have the capability. The mission set is so big, and so many bases, and so many things to do with Army air and missile defense mission set. We prospered in the area of CENTCOM, the Middle East, over the past 20, 30 years.
Army missile defense has been designed and has been built to win that fight, and they have won that fight against terrorists, against Iran in that warfare. We have tremendous support from our Middle Eastern allies that subsidize our missiles and our ability to do it, but the world’s changed. The world has changed.
Now we’re in for a combat fight against a maneuvering force, against a superior force, much more superior than Iran would ever be, the Russians, and potentially the Chinese. We have to change the way we do air and missile defense for specifically the maneuvering force. We have to have capability like we did in the 70s and the 60s and all the way back to World War II, where those combat divisions and the combined arms team at the point of the spear have to capability now, else they’re useless.
To be able to take on fiber optic drones, to be able to take on—that whole movement has to be done. We have to relook at that. We have to relook at the combination of offensive fires with defensive fires now. A lot of the same data transfer, a lot of the same technology, a lot of the same radar capabilities of mixing that into the fight, which we have to do now. As you’ve seen it, we have to go offense and defense together on that. So this is a discussion on how we make our Army missile defense better.
And I think we all know—I think there’s only 15, and Dan, you’ll get into that, 15 battalions, but out of the 15, there’s really only six or seven, and they’re operating because they got to rest, recoup, and go forward. And I would say that most of those ones forward are not even fully manned at the capacity they’re supposed to be manned. So we’ve got some big changes that have got to happen. We’ve got weapon systems that have taken 20 years to come into fruition. The IBCS, which was, I think, 2002, is now finally in operations combat 2023. We’ve got IFPC that’s not even—that’s 2014.
We’re not fighting the Middle East like we have to fight with Russia. So I think there’s a lot here that I’d like to explore with two experts. We’ve got two of the best, I think, one reflecting the maneuvering force, the combined force, the warfighter force, and another one that is the expert on U.S. Army air and missile defense aspects of it. So that’s a discussion we would like to go with and like to flow with it and look at a credible future, because we do know the Golden Dome’s coming. We do know that’s a part of it. But besides the Golden Dome, you still got to address Army air and missile defense capabilities.”
Closing Remarks:
“Thanks, Jamie. Thanks. Thanks, Dan. I think, again, we’re in one of the most historic changes for air and missile defense, and Golden Dome is the forcer. Golden Dome is three years, they’re going to spend $175 billion to get data, move quicker, jointly, all domain. And we’ve got to leverage that, that speed and what they’re going to develop and apply it to Army air defense for sure. But we have to be much more aggressive in getting our resources, more resources, more capability and capacity, especially for our maneuvering force. And we got to relook at that issue. Dan, you pointed out correctly, we got to relook at the base issue and some of the roles and responsibilities to get this thing set and moving.
You have momentum, you have energy, you have Congress, you have the President, you have everything here to support the Army air missile defense mission. We’ve got to take advantage of it. We’ve got to leverage it and break through and try the innovation and not sit back on our heels and wait. We can’t do that anymore. We’ve got to be out front. So I’m excited about it. I’m excited for the 20 years that you’ve put in there to get to where we’re at today. But now it’s a jumping point, and we’ve got to take advantage of it. So, great discussion.”
Mr. Riki Ellison, MDAA Founder and Chairman
Speakers:
LTG (Ret.) Jamie Jarrard
Deputy Commanding General for the U.S. Army Pacific (USARPAC)
LTG (Ret.) Daniel L. Karbler
Former Commander U.S. Army’s Space and Missile Defense
Mr. Riki Ellison
MDAA Founder and Chairman
