The Missile Defense Agency’s (MDA) fiscal year 2025 budget request is for $10.4 billion, $500 million less than the $10.9 billion requested in FY ‘24.
For the first time in decades, MDA did not provide a press briefing laying out the budget request, but did publish a budget overview document. The Pentagon published some MDA justification documents as part of overall defense-wide budget documentation (
Defense Daily, March 7).
MDA requested $2.7 billion for the overall Ground-based Midcourse Defense (GMD) system. The overview said this encompasses continuing design, development, testing, prototyping and integration of the Next Generation Interceptor (NGI) as well as upgrade and replace existing GMD infrastructure and fire control and kill vehicle software to improve reliability, capability and cybersecurity.
That account also will procure long-lead items for Phased Array In-Flight Communication System Data Terminal retrofits.
While MDA did not break down GMD procurement from research and development or NGI from other GMD improvement efforts, this is lower than GMD funds in the FY ‘24 budget, which was $3.3 billion. (Defense Daily, March 14, 2023). Congress has yet to finalize FY ’24 defense appropriations.
Last year’s request included $2.1 billion for NGI, which aims to improve upon the older Ground Based Interceptors in GMD. GBI’s are meant to defend against a small number of nuclear-armed long range ballistic missiles fired from North Korea, while NGI seeks to better defend against more capable missiles that feature more defense countermeasures.
Two teams consisting of Lockheed Martin [LMT] and L3Harris Technologies [LHX], and Northrop Grumman [NOC] and RTX [RTX] are competing on NGI.
MDA also requested $1.2 billion to continue its Defense of Guam work, a steep increase from the $398 million sought last year.
The FY ‘25 funds will cover development and procurement of the Aegis Guam System and Vertical Launch Systems, completing environmental impact studies, start construction of a command center complex to support Guam missile defense command and control components, a Transportable Array Unit complex and launcher field complex.
Another big ticket item is $1.2 billion to procure 12 Standard Missile (SM)-3 Block IIA missiles, SM-3 Block IB spares and continue more software capability development to upgrade IAMD performance in Aegis ships. This includes integrating missile defense capability with the new AN/ SPY-6 radars getting fielded on new Arleigh Burke-class destroyers.
DoD defense-wide MDA budget justification documents noted the agency is terminating SM-3 Block IB new production in favor of SM-3 Block IIA. The 12 new Block IIA missiles will cost $406 million.
According to those documents, MDA also plans to procure 12 more SM-2 IIA interceptors annually through the five-year Future Years Defense Program.
MDA is requesting $732 million to procure 12 more Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) interceptors and continue development of THAAD system builds “to increase Interceptor capability and weapon system performance to address the current and evolving threat, to include significant improvements which will provide the capability to counter more advanced threats.”
This includes starting initial engineering efforts supporting integration of the THAAD weapon system into the Army Integrated Air and Missile Defense Battle Command System (IBCS) infrastructure. According to the DoD defense-wide documents, the 12 THAAD interceptors in FY ’25 will cost about $247 million.
Notably, MDA seeks only $182 million to continue development of the Glide Phase Interceptor(GPI) to defend against hypersonic missiles, a reduction from $209 million requested in FY ‘24. GPI is currently in competition amid a preliminary design phase.
Defense-wide documents said MDA will use this funding on both the GPI effort and “modify the existing Aegis Weapon System to defeat hypersonic threats in the glide phase.”
Last year, former MDA Director Vice Adm. Jon Hill said the Patriot SM-6 missile has some capacity to defeat hypersonic missiles because they already target cruise missiles (Defense Daily, May 10, 2023).
MDA also seeks $587 million to upgrade and sustain 12 AN/TPY-2 radars and continue production of one more to be delivered in FY ‘25 for a total of 13. The funds include continuing upgrades to improve the radars’ discrimination capabilities.
The agency wants $105 million as it seeks to transfer the Lockheed Martin Long Range Discrimination Radar (LRDR) to the Space Force. The funds would continue operations in FY ‘25 and fund software development for “discrimination improvements.”
MDA requests $517 million for the Command and Control, Battle Management and Communications system (C2BMC). The agency said these funds would “develop expanded hypersonic threat tracking and integration with space sensors to warn, track and type advancing threats.” This would also sustain the latest deployed C2BMC capability spiral that covers LRDR support tasking for GMD homeland defense engagements and initial hypersonic threat tracking.
DoD budget documents said MDA is requesting $53.5 million within C2BMC funds for “new command center build-out, and mission node and network communications installation” as part of the Defense of Guam activities.
MDA is requesting another $120 million for the Hypersonic & Ballistic Tracking Space Sensor (HBTSS) and Space-based Kill Assessment (SKA) to demonstrate HBTSS on-orbit tracking and targeting against hypersonic threats as well as hit assessment for missile defense system flight testing.
DoD launched the two HBTSS satellites on February 14. L3Harris and Northrop Grumman each built one of the satellites (Defense Daily, Feb. 15).
The agency also seeks almost $1 billion for various missile defense tests and targets, including Guam defense testing.
This breaks out into $446 million for ground, flight and cyber testing as well as maintaining test infrastructure and $536 million to develop and product threat representative targets to support the Integrated Master Test Plan.
Defense-wide budget documents said MDA specifically requests about $605 million to develop, produce and launch “an economical and reliable inventory of targets based on engineering assessments of threat intelligence data.”
MDA funding includes $68 million in targets for Defense of Guam, which itself include engineering and hardware to develop the hypersonic target vehicle flight test re-entry vehicle.
The agency also revealed its planned FY ‘25 tests include FEM-02, experimental flight test of the Defense of Guam initial deployment architecture with an SM-3 IIA fired against a medium range ballistic missile; FTX-40, testing the Aegis Sea-Based Terminal firing an SM-6 against a hypersonic glide vehicle; FTM-30, intercept flight test, demonstrating an SM-3 Block IIA missile against an MRBM with exo-atmospheric countermeasures; and FTX-26a, an LRDR track exercise required for U.S. Space Force operational acceptance of the radar.