Tucked up 30 miles from the Canadian border upon the Great Plains of North Dakota is our nation’s safeguard missile defense system, the first anti-ballistic missile system ever deployed by the United States. Thought of in 1968 to defend against a limited ICBM capability from China with a total 12 sites to include Hawaii and a layered defense of two shot opportunities; one in space and one in high atmosphere. This system brought the Soviet Union to the negotiating table for the first SALT (Strategic Arms Limitation Talks) talks and treaty to reduce nuclear weapons. Safeguard, only one of the 12, was developed, deployed, and operational in 1975 at a cost of 5.9 billion dollars, but was terminated by Congress in 1976 after five months of operation.

This system under the 1972 ABM (Anti-Ballistic Missile) Treaty with the Soviet Union which allowed each country to defend either the capital region or its strategic ICBM (intercontinental-range ballistic missiles) nuclear missile fields. The Soviet Union decided to defend its capital area of Moscow and the United States decided to defend its Strategic ICBM missile silos in North Dakota and Montana. The site and system was called Safeguard and it was made up of the Caviler early-warning radar and fire control radar along with 70 short-range two stage Sprint and 30 long-range three stage Spartan nuclear-tipped interceptors. This system provided a two-layer defense in Space and the Atmosphere through proximity explosion of five megaton nuclear bombs carried on the Spartan interceptors and a lower yield nuclear weapon for the Sprint interceptors, which would of have had fallout over the air space of Canada. The United States terminated the system soon after it was built due to undesired effects from the nuclear electromagnetic pulse (EMP), cost and viable operations of a single site to defend against the massive amounts of ICBMs from the Soviet Union, leaving the United States completely defenseless against Russian and Chinese nuclear ICBMs, but keeping the early warning radar (link), which is still in operation today, while the Soviet Union continued to operate a similar system around Moscow which is still in place today. By 1980, at the apex of the Cold War, President-elect Ronald Reagan addressed the question to the NORAD (North American Aerospace Defense Command) commander of why the United States was not defended against Soviet ICBMs. In 1983, President Reagan declared the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) to develop and deploy a missile defense system to defend against Soviet ICBMs (link). By 1984, the United States conducted a non-nuclear intercept using kinetic energy with the Homing Overlay Experiment and presented the system to the Soviet Union. With technology, funding and support of a national imperative by the United States to build a non-nuclear hit to kill missile defense system to defeat the Soviet Union, the SDI program significantly helped end the Cold War and break up the Soviet Union by making the cost of their technology capability to overcome that system too high to bear and in 1989 the Soviet Union ceased to exist.

Due to North Korean ballistic missile development and the effects of 9/11, in December of 2002, the United States withdrew from the 1972 ABM treaty and began to build a second national missile defense system driven by the threat from rogue nations, particularly North Korea and secondarily Iran. That system is called the Ground-based Missile Defense System (GMD) and was deployed and initially operational in 2004 at Fort Greely, Alaska (link) with the first missile interceptor field of six. Since then, the GMD system has expanded to Vandenberg Air Force Base in California and from 30 to 44 ground-based interceptors (GBI) between Alaska (40) and California (4) by the end of next year. The GMD system has continued to undergo modifications to be made more reliable with an upcoming GBI test early next year for proving out the latest upgrades with the CE-2 kill vehicle. Modernization will continue on the GBI for a new redesigned kill vehicle scheduled for 2020 to a multi object kill vehicle by 2025. In addition, a new Long Range Discriminating Radar (LRDR) will be deployed in Alaska by 2020 along with a down selection of an additional third GBI site to be located in Michigan, Ohio or New York, all directed by President Obama’s Administration and supported by the U.S. Congress.

President-elect Donald Trump and his administration will have the opportunity and leadership to make America safer, similar to President Ronald Reagan, to enhance and expand the U.S. homeland defense with increased reliability and additional sites from the current and growing missile threats facing America. Decisions on increasing current capacity and investing in new technologies in United States ballistic missile defense will have direct consequences to those that challenge status quo globally to include rouge nations and near peers.

MDAA had the opportunity to visit the Safeguard Site in North Dakota and be educated on the lessons learned from this first initiative that had tremendous impact. Attached is a report written in 2004 by current Brigadier General Greg Bowen (link)–Deputy Commanding General for Operations at U.S. Army Space and Missile Defense Command/Army Forces Strategic Command–on the Safeguard system that provides the depth and detail of what took place.