Military.com
The Pearl Harbor destroyer USS John Paul Jones, among the most capable ballistic missile defense ships in the Navy fleet, shot down a simulated anti-ship cruise missile Saturday but failed to knock down an extended medium-range ballistic missile target during a “layered defense” test.
The miss was covered by a backup — the land-based Terminal High Altitude Area Defense — that intercepted the target. News agency Reuters said the exercise cost $230 million.
The test in the vicinity of Wake Island and surrounding areas “produced the most realistic warfighting environment ever created by the Missile Defense Agency” to gauge U.S. “layered” regional defense systems increasingly being deployed around the world, said the nonprofit Missile Defense Advocacy Alliance, which supports a strong missile defense.
“This was a highly complex operational test of the (ballistic missile defense system) which required all elements to work together in an integrated layered defense design to detect, track, discriminate, engage and negate the ballistic missile threats,” the Missile Defense Agency said.
The Navy’s Aegis ballistic missile defense ships, which are in high demand, are being augmented by similar land-based capabilities known as “Aegis Ashore” and the THAAD terminal-phase defense.
“The live-fire event showed the reality of chaos for the warfighter and tested system reliability, decision-making and execution of multiple systems,” the advocacy alliance said.
The attack included the firing of a short-range ballistic missile from an Air Force C-17 cargo aircraft southeast of Wake Island which was successfully intercepted by THAAD. While that was happening, an extended medium-range ballistic missile was air-launched by another C-17…
