The Missile Defense Review sets “the stage for a high-stakes policy debate between those who value missile defense as an enabler of US grand strategy, and those who fear enhanced missile defense may start an arms race with Russia and China,” write Walter Slocombe and Robert Soofer.
Absent any effort to expand or modernize GMD, homeland missile defense will likely fall behind current threats while NGI matures.
On April 24, the U.S. Department of Defense issued a Request For Proposal (RFP) for the Next Generation Interceptor (NGI), a new interceptor for the Ground-based Midcourse Defense System. According to the release, the solicitation period will conclude on July 31, 2020, with additional extensions available given the ongoing COVID-19 crisis. The Pentagon had previously...
The 2021 budget submission represents an inflection point for missile defense programs, the relationship between active defenses and other forms of missile defeat, and the institutional makeup of the missile defense enterprise.
Following its August 2019 decision to cancel the Redesign Kill Vehicle (RKV) program, the Pentagon has issued a “strategic pause” on its Ground-based Midcourse Defense (GMD) flight test program. GMD’s next flight intercept test was scheduled for 2022, where it was expected to test the RKV interceptor. In the last GMD test in March 2019,...
Recent Pentagon actions have produced considerable uncertainty in the future of homeland ballistic missile defense. In August 2019, Undersecretary of Defense for Research and Engineering Dr. Michael Griffin cancelled the Redesigned Kill Vehicle (RKV) program, a long-running effort to replace the kill vehicles on older Ground-Based Interceptors (GBI) designed to defend the nation from a long-range ballistic...
Following the Missile Defense Agency’s stop-work order in May, the Pentagon announced on August 21 its termination of the Redesigned Kill Vehicle (RKV) program. The RKV was intended to replace the Exoatmospheric Kill Vehicles (EKV) fitted on U.S. Ground-Based Interceptors (GBIs) located in Alaska and California. According to Pentagon officials, the Department of Defense plans...
On May 24, Inside Defense reported that the U.S. Defense Department is preparing a stop-work order on the Ground-based Midcourse Defense System’s Redesigned Kill Vehicle (RKV). The report comes after unspecified concerns over recent component tests, which motivated the MDA to delay the program by 2 years in March 2019. As of February 2019, the...
On March 25, the U.S. Missile Defense Agency conducted a successful GMD intercept test against an ICBM class target. The test is notably “the first salvo engagement of a threat-representative ICBM target by two Ground Based Interceptors (GBI),” as reported by MDA. The ICBM target was launched from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California and...
On March 12, the Missile Defense Agency announced that its “Redesigned Kill Vehicle,” or RKV, will not be ready for testing in FY2020, indicating that the interceptor warhead is not on track to meet all of the program’s requirements. The RKV is intended to replace the kill vehicle used on the Ground-based Midcourse Defense (GMD)...
