On April 17, the U.S. Air Force announced procurement plans for its next generation of missile warning satellites. Canceling further satellites launches for the Space Based Infrared System (SBIRS) constellation, the Air Force is instead transferring to a new program dubbed the Next Generation Overhead Persistent Infrared. Procurement is scheduled in five years, yet analysts...
The Pentagon’s missile defense review is now underway, incorporating mandates from both the White House and Congress. One of its considerations, at presidential direction, is whether there should be a relative “rebalancing” between homeland and regional missile defense. Regional defense has received a relatively greater share of the Missile Defense Agency (MDA) budget over the...
Note: This appears as Chapter 5 in Missile Defense 2020: Next Steps for Defending the Homeland. Sensors and Command and Control No missile defense system is better than the sensors and command and control systems that determine where the threat is and how to kill it. While interceptors tend to capture the imagination, sensors are...
Gaps in coverage leave interceptors less-equipped to defeat the threats of tomorrow. No missile defense is better than the sensors that tell the interceptors where to go and what to kill. The Ground-based Midcourse Defense system, or GMD, draws upon considerably more sensors for homeland defense than when operations began in 2004, but shortfalls remain....
The Air Force is preparing for its January 19 launch of the Space-Based Infrared System (SBIRS) GEO-3 satellite. The satellite will be part of a constellation used to provide missile warning by identifying the infrared heat signatures of missiles during launch. This information is used to alert U.S. missile defense systems. The GEO-3 will be carried...
Space is the place for a variety of missile defense tasks — including launch detection, tracking, discrimination, intercept, and kill assessment. Ballistic missiles travel in space, and the missile defense task is by definition largely a challenge in and through the space domain. For all but very short range missiles, a considerable part of the...
