HUNTSVILLE, Ala. – The Missile Defense Agency (MDA) plans to conduct two key intercept tests of sea-based defenses later this year, the agency’s director said Aug. 17.
In October, the Standard Missile III (SM-3) Block IIA, a new, longer-range version of the SM-3 interceptor that MDA is developing with Japan and Raytheon [RTN], will undergo its first missile shootdown attempt, Vice Adm. James Syring said at the annual Space and Missile Defense Symposium here. The SM-3, deployed mostly on Aegis combat system-equipped ships, is designed to destroy short- to intermediate-range ballistic missiles in their midcourse phase of flight.
And in December, the new Sea Based Terminal system will conduct its second intercept try, Syring said. The Aegis ship-based SBT will fire the Standard Missile-6 (SM-6) interceptor that Raytheon has developed for cruise and ballistic missile defense and anti-surface warfare. The SM-6 shot down its first ballistic missile target in July 2015.
The tests will “send a message around the world of what Aegis is doing and what Standard Missile is doing to defeat the threat,” Syring said.
MDA is also gearing up to conduct two intercept tests in the next 14 or 15 months of the Ground-based Midcourse Defense (GMD) system, which is designed to protect the United States against long-range ballistic missiles. One test will counter an ICBM, while the other will fire a “salvo” of interceptors at a target.
By year’s end, MDA plans to pick a “preferred site” for a potential GMD site in the eastern United States to improve protection against Iranian missiles. The agency has been conducting an environmental impact study of the three military installations under consideration in Michigan, New York and Ohio. Syring reiterated that a decision to build an eastern site has not been made and that no funding has been made available.
The United States has 30 GMD interceptors deployed in Alaska and California. That total is on track to rise to 44 by 2017, Syring said.
While MDA has several efforts underway to make GMD more capable and reliable, including redesigning the GMD interceptor’s kill vehicle and fielding a long-range discrimination radar in Alaska, Syring said the agency will eventually need to field new space-based sensors to track increasingly advanced threats, including hypersonics and ICBMs. The pair of Northrop Grumman-built [NOC] Space Tracking and Surveillance System (STSS) demonstration satellites launched in 2009 “shows it can be done,” he argued.
But he cautioned that a high price, which helped doom the Precision Tracking Space System (PTSS) as an STSS successor in 2013, would turn off policymakers. He noted that MDA plans to spend a relatively modest sum on the Space-based Kill Assessment (SKA), which is placing a network of small sensors on commercial satellites to help evaluate the results of missile defense tests.
“Space does not have to be expensive,” he said. “I don’t know what the answer is, but I know that if we keep getting back to [the view that] this is a $50 billion or $100 billion program, the answer will be no.”
MDA is also looking to cut the cost of targets, and recently issued a request for information on how to achieve that goal. “We need to test more,” Syring said. “In order to test more, I need more affordable targets.”