Defense News:
WASHINGTON — The U.S. Missile Defense Agency’s $9.4 billion budget request for fiscal 2020 — while slightly smaller than last year’s budget of $9.9 billion — maintains many efforts from previous years to defend the homeland and counter regional threats, but it does not reflect some of the major ambitions laid out in the recently released Missile Defense Review.
The two-year delayed Missile Defense Review, released in January, lists space-based missile defense sensors and laser-armed drones as part of a wish list for missile defense capabilities, but these new desires are not highlighted in the agency’s FY20 summary of its budget request released March 12.
The lack of new efforts to get after MDR ambitions could partly be due to the fact that the review called for a significant number of studies over the next six months to gain clarity on the way forward for a variety of potential missile defense efforts, such as the development and fielding of a space-based missile intercept layer capable of boost-phase defense as well as other tracking and discrimination technologies.
