Disruption forces change. Only those rare few that have the courage, the confidence, the grit, the knowledge, the depth, and the breadth of vast experience can be disruptive agents that force addressing necessary change. Dr. Michael Griffin is one of them, an absolute pioneer of our nation’s missile defense systems from the Delta 180 to the Space Transport Layer today. He is a disrupter that has forced a necessary change in the directions and the processes that were disabling our nation’s future in its ability to lead and be preeminent.

“The National Defense Strategy is today all about recognizing that there are threats to that rules-based order, and that the world is not likely to do better under a different regime than it does today. So it is up to us to defend that, and in order to defend that order we must now go to space.” – Dr. Mike Griffin at MDAA’s Space-Based Missile Defense Congressional Roundtable at Dirksen Senate Office Building in Washington, DC on September 4, 2018.

“In my first hearing after taking this job I was asked to testify in front of the full House Armed Services Committee chaired by Congressman Thornberry, and at one point in our discussion, he asked me why, in my opinion, we were so slow. I told him we were mired down in the process, we can retain either our preeminence or our process but we cannot keep both.” – Dr. Mike Griffin at MDAA’s Huntsville Breakfast of Champions in Huntsville, AL on August 8, 2018.

“But what people actually do is, as soon as they can, they develop missiles to go after those they wish to aggress against. I just note that that is what the world seems to be so we need to respond to what the world is, rather than the way the world could be or should be. Secondly, the number of nations and societies which are capable of doing so seems to be increasing all the time and there is still only one of us. Thirdly, we just can’t do what we need to do in missile defense without space. Now the ground missile defense program which Lt General Sam Greaves currently leads is effective at what it does, which is to handle a medium-sized threat in the midcourse. It cannot affect global persistence on the surveillance side, it cannot differentiate the missile defense side from the sensor side. It detects an incoming threat after it is well inbound, it is not set up to detect hypersonic threats, it is not set up to detect shorter inter-range threats- on the interceptor side it is capable of going after objects in midcourse, but that is all. It is very good at what it does, I have reason to know that our statistics these days are very good, but it only does what it was designed to do.” – Dr. Mike Griffin at MDAA’s Space-Based Missile Defense Congressional Roundtable at Dirksen Senate Office Building in Washington, DC on September 4, 2018.

A few of Dr. Griffin’s solutions to the problem that he identified above that will become legacies for the United States of America:

• Established the Space Development Agency (SDA) and a sound global architecture to track and target hypersonic weapons in flight and a rapid deployment plan to put that space sensor system up in Low Earth Orbit to provide the United States the necessary capabilities to negate the hypersonic threat.
• Modernized the Ground-Based Interceptors (GBIs) by disrupting and canceling the Redesigned Kill Vehicle (RKV) to put forward the Next-Generation Interceptor (NGI).
• Invigorated Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and led the hypersonic offensive development for the United States to compete on hypersonic weapons against the near peers.

We recognize the exceptional talent of Dr. Mike Griffin to bring forth these solutions, it is now the responsibility and leadership of the “team” to implement, develop, and execute these solutions. We greatly thank and appreciate Dr. Mike Griffin for his service to the nation as the first Undersecretary of Defense for Research and Engineering from February 19, 2018 to July 10, 2020.