The American Legion:
Funding for the Missile Defense Agency (MDA) got a major boost in the recent budget back-and-forth, jumping to $11.5 billion for fiscal 2018 – a 40 percent increase over fiscal year 2017. With a paranoid Pyongyang and a terrorist Tehran testing longer-range missiles, let’s hope the renewed interest in, and resources for, missile defense are not a case of too little too late.
Before digging into the worrisome developments in Iran and North Korea, it’s worth spending a moment on some good news related to missile defense.
In April, the Army’s main missile defense systems — the Patriot system and Terminal High Altitude Air Defense (THAAD) system — “exchanged messages through tactical data links and verified interoperability,” MDA reports. This is a key step toward integrating the two systems; the Army plans to have a seamless Patriot-THAAD architecture by 2020.
