Dear Members and Friends,

In superseding our advocacy efforts to bring operationally deployed Integrated Air and Missile Defense to EUROPE addressing the capability gap, earlier today, General Curtis Scaparrotti, Commander of the United States European Command and NATO Supreme Allied Commander Europe, gave testimony to the Senate Arms Service Committee for the Defense Authorization Request for Fiscal Year 2019 and the Future Years Defense Program.

“It is essential that our assigned and rotational multi-domain forces are protected by a robust, layered IAMD capability. The FY19 budget calls for the development of an IAMD 18 architecture that begins to address USEUCOM’s requirements for capabilities such as those provide by Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) and Patriot batteries. These capabilities will ensure we can effectively maneuver forces throughout the AOR. Our approach to IAMD must be inclusive with our NATO allies and key partners as we face a growing ballistic missile threat from regional adversaries.”

Senator Dan Sullivan of Alaska: In your opinion, what are our shortfalls in missile defense? And how do we need to address that?

General Scaparrotti: We have capable missile defense systems. When you look at missile defense though, I think that the things we need to focus on is first, we need to focus again on short-range and medium-range missile technology. We have been operating in environments where we were uncontested, but that’s not the case anymore. We need to look at those systems, we need to look at our inter-operability with our allies because we can’t do this in Europe correctly without doing it together, and then we need to look at other parts of this, like passive parts of our integrated air and missile defense as well. I think it’s a wholistic system that we have got to put together and it’s the systems within the mid and short range that I’m most concerned about today.