BreakingDefense

WASHINGTON: Senior DoD officials and top military leaders currently are pondering how to organize future missile defense acquisition, including the possible break up of the Missile Defense Agency (MDA) by transferring its authorities to the Army, Air Force, Navy and Space Force, insiders say.

MDA’s fate is under the microscope as DoD and military leaders struggle to consolidate space acquisition since the creation of the Space Force. While no final decisions regarding missile defense acquisition have been made, DoD officials and experts say that fundamental questions about the ‘who, what and why’ of missile defense need to be resolved.

“There’s a lot more interest in space. There’s a lot more interest in countering missile threats of various kinds, and in the putting together of our various missile defeat and active missile defenses,” says Tom Karako, missile defense guru at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) told me in a phone interview yesterday. “There’s a lot of questions there in terms of how you then go about organizing what I like to call the missile defense enterprise … so as to contend with those things,” he said.

Indeed, a key question in the internal discussions is whether MDA’s acquisition authorities will move to the Space Force once the new space acquisition secretariat is created in 2022. This could either be done by subsuming MDA en masse into the Space Force, currently headed by Gen. Jay Raymond, sources say. Or it could be done by shifting only MDA’s space-related development/acquisition authorities — such as for missile detection and tracking, but also perhaps for long-range ICBM defense — to Space Force.

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