Ballistic Missile Defense Technology

Abstract

The FY 2011 program is balanced, reflecting the goals of the current Missile Defense Program: Continue a defense of the territory of the United States against rogue nation ballistic missile threats, Enhance missile defense to defend our deployed forces, allies, and friends against regional threats, Prove our Ballistic Missile Defense System works before making production decisions, Deliver reliable, high quality, and fiscally sustainable missile defense products, and develop future missile defense capabilities that are adaptable and responsive to intelligence based judgments including defeating large missile raid sizes of all ranges early in their flight. Our submission reflects a greater emphasis on defense of U.S. forces, allies, and friends from regional threats posed by thousands of short- and medium-range ballistic missiles. The most cost-effective missile defense architecture is one that emphasizes intercepts early in a threat missile`s flight. Early Intercepts can be observed by the BMDS sensors to determine if a second or third intercept attempt is necessary to achieve a robust degree of protection. Additionally, Early Intercepts forces the threat to deploy countermeasures early, making them more difficult to be effective. A robust advanced missile defense technology development program is part of the MDA strategy to hedge against future threat uncertainties. The advanced technology effort is focused on the development and demonstration of an integrated set of technologies that allows us to intercept early in the battle space and optimize our ability to execute a shoot-look-shoot tactic, minimize the potential impact of debris, and reduce the number of interceptors required to defeat a large raid of threat missiles in next and future generations. The technology development effort will demonstrate the maturity of missile defense for threat segments emerging in next and future generations. This technology development is based on the BMDS integrated Build D foundation, including increased BMDS sensor resource management, the capability of BMDS weapons to engage ballistic missiles utilizing BMD System track data, and limited system level hit assessment to be used by the new forward based BMDS sensors (e.g. Airborne Infrared) and interceptors (e.g. SM-3 Block IIB) in the capability improvement phases of Phased Adaptive Architecture to allow earlier intercepts of longer range threats. We do this by conducting a series of ground and flight tests to enable thorough assessment of each BMDS sensor to understand its potential to provide the position, velocity and discrimination data for lethal objects with sufficient accuracy and low enough latency (i.e., Quality of Service (QoS)) to enable Command and Control, Battle Management and Communications (C2BMC) and BMDS interceptors to complete ballistic missile engagements. These ground and flight tests demonstrate key functions: Overhead Persistent Infrared for initial tracking in flight, unmanned aerial vehicle or Space Tracking and Surveillance System demonstration satellites for post-boost tracking, the battle management command and control, and Standard Missile-3 engagements. The Advanced Technology program also seeks out and invests in the next generation and game changing technology by executing research and development to address the threats we expect to face in the far term. The bottom line is that we are working to achieve a balance of missile defense capabilities that will provide the best protection today and tomorrow. The three major goals for Advanced Technology are: Pursue cost and operationally effective capabilities to hedge against future threat uncertainties. Develop and demonstrate the maturity of the components of future BMDS architectures, in next and future generations, by conducting a series of experiments to enable thorough assessment of this capability. Leverage technology investments of other DoD organizations, industry, other government agencies and international partners.

Document Details

• Document Type: R2 Budgetary Justification
• Publication Date: Oct 01, 2011
• Source ID: 0603175C_3_0400_PB_2011
• Change Summary Explanation: FY 2009 decrease is a result of MDA programmatic changes. FY 2010 increase is a result of Congressional actions. No FY 2011 data provided in PB10.
• Service Agency Name: Missile Defense Agency

Entities

Organizations

• Missile Defense Agency

Tags

Communities of Interest

• Space
• Weapons Technologies

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

• Acquisition
• Attitude Control Systems
• Ballistic Missiles
• Battle Management
• Command And Control
• Commerce
• Contracts
• Control Systems
• Engineering
• Kill Vehicles
• Procurement
• Sea Based
• Small Business
• Space Systems
• Systems Engineering
• Technology Transfer
• Test And Evaluation

Readers

• Military Science and Technology Research and Modernization.
• Missile Defense Systems.
• Strategic Security Studies

Technology Areas

• Autonomy
• Autonomy - UAVs
• Fully Networked C3
• Fully Networked C3 - Command and Control
• Space