WASHINGTON\u00a0\u2014\u00a0Ahead of the release of the new administration’s first budget request, U.S. defense officials are pushing to renew the effort to get missile-tracking sensors into space.
So Defense Department leadership have started up the call again for funding of missile defense threat detection capabilities in space.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Both the Army\u2019s new Space and Missile Defense Commander Lt. Gen. James Dickinson and Brig. Gen. Ronald Buckley, U.S. Northern Command\u2019s deputy director of operations, talked about the importance of space for missile defense in speeches at the Association of the US Army\u2019s missile defense conference in Arlington, Virginia, Feb. 7.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Dickinson said space is “fundamental for every single military operation that occurs on the planet today from satellites to GPS,” and said the domain is a crucial part of connecting the battlefield and the backbone of the missile defense kill chain.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
“As long as we continue to solely focus and rely on terrestrial-based for our BMD sensors, there will be gaps and seams in our coverage,” Buckley said. “Our adversaries are actively working to exploit any of these gaps and seams. I\u2019m not saying that space isn\u2019t without its flaws, but I believe it\u2019s time we take a hard look at space as an option.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Buckley highlighted the BMDS Overhead Persistent Infrared Architecture and the Space-based Kill Assessment experiment as promising and good examples of “what some out-of-the-box thinking can do to capitalize on space.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n
BOA uses sensors already in orbit to provide the BMDS system with “more and possibly better data,” he said. And the SKA program uses the concept of commercially hosted payloads to get a “fairly significant” number of sensors on orbit on time and in a fraction of the cost of traditional Defense Department space programs.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
“This is the kind of thinking we need to continue to pursue,” Buckley said, “as the sticker shock of most space programs is perhaps the biggest impediment to capitalize on this domain within the DoD system.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n
A space-based sensor layer\u2019s persistent vantage point would provide the “holy grail of birth-to-death tracking of hostile missiles, which dramatically improves the lethality of both homeland and regional defense,” Karako wrote in a paper on how the new White House might consider investing in missile defense going forward.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Now space-based missile defense funding is at an all-time low, according to Karako, while improvements to the terrestrial-based missile defense system would still fall short of detecting and defeating missile threats currently in development by adversaries like North Korea and Iran. That shortcoming comes from the detection system\u2019s upward stare and such unfixable issues like the curvature of the Earth, which blocks even the most powerful radar\u2019s full field of view.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
But even understanding the utility of space for missile defense and having technology that could provide capability, the issue has always been having enough money, Karako told Defense News. In the last several years, Pentagon investment in space is now a sliver of what it was in the early 2000s.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Still, space isn\u2019t totally devoid of missile defense efforts.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
There are two Space Tracking and Surveillance System demonstrators in low orbit intended to track a missile\u2019s path from launch to intercept, but Karako said the mission ends for these two demonstrators this year. A follow-on program to STSS was canceled in 2013 that would have included a constellation of nine to 12 satellites with a large telescope and a gimbaled tracking system, he added.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Karako said there are several creative options that could be pursued going forward including using commercial satellites to host payloads like the Missile Defense Agency\u2019s SKA program and relying on international cooperation and joint agency endeavors.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
“We know what needs to be done in terms of capability and the question really just is, do we field the rest of the [STSS] constellation in its current form or do we have a smaller more distributed, potentially cheaper, constellations with similar capabilities,” Karako said. “That is what it really comes down to.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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