The Drive:


The Missile Defense Agency, or MDA, has offered a glimpse into how it plans to spot, track, and intercept hypersonic boost-glide vehicles, or HGVs, in a new animated video presentation recently posted online. The animation lays out, step-by-step, its latest “multi-layered solution to defend against the next generation of hypersonic glide vehicles.” Most notably, this animation offers a new look into how it will integrate the Glide Phase Interceptor, or GPI, a still-in-development weapon aimed at defeating HGV threats in the glide phase of their trajectories, into this larger concept of operations.

The new video depicting this system, titled “MDA Concept for Regional Hypersonic Missile Defense: Technology to Defeat the Threat,” describes MDA’s plans “to protect the US, its deployed forces, and allies against regional hypersonic threats using a multi-layered solution to defend against the next generation of hypersonic glide vehicles,” according to the video’s description. The MDA’s current concept for a Regional Hypersonic Missile Defense system combines Aegis Combat System-equipped surface vessels with both space-based and ground-based sensor systems, and ties them together with various integrated fire control and sensor fusion networks. The aforementioned GPI, along with the increasingly capable Standard Missile 6 (SM-6), a multi-purpose weapon that already has the ability to engage certain ballistic missiles in the terminal stage of their flight, would then be used to prosecute the incoming HGVs…



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