A Missile Defense Agency (MDA) official recently said, after several years of setbacks, it aims to turn over the Poland Aegis Ashore missile defense site to the Navy before the end of the year, and the system should be fully operational by next spring.
“We had some setbacks in the construction, we had some setbacks from COVID. But we’ve made great progress this year, we’ve come through a couple of key milestones, one of those being full installation of the weapon system, testing as much as we can do testing, and then the Navy has come in to complete their board of inspection of the weapon system and the associated components, passing marks through that,” Laura DeSimone, executive director of the Missile Defense Agency, said on Aug. 17 during the Defense News webcast SMD Debrief event.
The event followed the annual Space and Missile Defense Symposium earlier this month in Huntsville, Ala.
She said MDA is now going through cyber testing on the system and has to generate additional reports and documentation before turning the system over to the Navy this fall.
“We’re headed toward a milestone in October, where we’ll turn parts of the system over to the Navy, with a full Navy acceptance expected to be later in the calendar year,” DeSimone said.
At last year’s SMD Debrief event, former MDA Director Vice Adm Jon Hill said the agency had high confidence in the schedule to deliver Poland Aegis Ashore in 2023 (Defense Daily, Aug. 15, 2022).
While DeSimone said the Aegis Ashore system would be turned over to the Navy before the end of this year, she said there are still “a couple of other steps” before the system is operational, pushing that point to next year.
“This site is eventually to be turned over as part of the NATO architecture for European defense. And so after we come through Navy acceptance we’ll start those efforts to integrate into European Command, NATO, there’s a few steps. So the ultimate goal is to be fully operational in the late spring of 2024.”
The Poland site was initially planned to be delivered by the end of 2018, but then delays piled up due to military construction issues, poor weather, worse than expected performance from the construction contractor and then COVID-19 pandemic delays.
In early 2020, Hill said the construction contractor had difficulty finishing the last technical points, including auxiliary controls, heating, power and cooling (Defense Daily, Feb. 2, 2020).
Hill said those types of issues were tied to adding building automation to the site. The automation involves the computer networking of devices that monitor and control mechanical and security systems in the facility (Defense Daily, June 25, 2021).
“I would say one of the big lessons learned that I have…looking at Poland – was that we put a lot of the building automation into the military construction side and that’s tough and that’s really what has slowed us down there,” Hill said in 2021.
During the 2022 SMD Debrief, Hill said MDA, the Army Corps of Engineers and the construction company in Poland that year had installed the Aegis equipment that had previously been containerized and waiting to be erected, conducted end-to-end checks and made some obsolescence upgrades.
Hill said that, by the 2023 symposium, “I think we’ll be in a great place.”
The Poland Aegis Ashore site at Naval Support Facility Redzikowo aims to help defend U.S. assets and allies from a limited number of ballistic missile threats, particularly geared against potential future hostilities with Iran. This site follows its sister Aegis Ashore site as Naval Support Facility Deveselu, Romania, which has been in operation since 2016.