Missile Defense (General thread)

[American Patriot]

Obama doesn't control the shooting range.

Or the buttons.

Or the missiles.

Or the ability of CONTRACTORS to shoot shit out of the sky if the military is told they can't.

Or the trajectories of the bogies or the good guy kinetic warheads...

[Ryan Ruck]

Was hinting at what information on capabilities might have been shared in the name of fairness.

[American Patriot]

I know. I'm just saying that even the President doesn't know it all and probably can't pass it along.

A classified briefing never includes everything, unless you're a commanding office in charge of the whole shootin-match.

Including, at times, capabilities.

That means the President probably can not tell you exactly when, how or why an interception can occur.

Just saying. He could pass on things. Just not ALL things.

[Ryan Ruck]

Army Missile Defense Stretched Thin: Readiness, Crisis Response At Risk

February 12, 2015

There’s no peace dividend in missile defense. While most types of Army units don’t deploy to Iraq or Afghanistan anymore, some scarce specialties are in increasing demand worldwide, such as special operators, division staffs, and missile defense forces like the famous Patriot. As long-range missile threats increase from Iran and North Korea, China and Russia, Hezbollah and Hamas, Army Chief of Staff Ray Odierno himself has said the current pace of missile defense deployments is not sustainable.

“Today, we have air and missile defense forces in nine countries,” said Col. Clement Coward, deputy commander of the 32nd Air and Missile Defense Command. “On any given day, nearly half of the Army’s Patriot batteries are outside the continental United States [and] we’ve begun forward-deploying THAAD batteries” — even though THAAD’s so new there are only three batteries in service. As a result, Coward told the Association of the US Army today, “we are rapidly approaching an inflection point where we face the risk of breaking our AMD force.”

Skilled personnel are thinking of getting out, equipment is wearing out, and upgrades are delayed because the units aren’t at home to get them, Army leaders warned. Even more worrying is that, with so much of the force either deployed or recovering from deployment, little is ready and available to respond to unexpected crises.

“The risk really comes in our contingency forces,” said Maj. Gen. Gary Cheek, assistant deputy chief of Army staff for operations and plans (section G-3/5-7), also speaking at AUSA.

“Where the risk is not apparent, but it’s very real, is if you’ve got a contingency requirement,” Check told me after the panel. “[If] I’ve got to send four Patriot battalions to protect key seaports, airports, tactical units, headquarters, in an active combat theater where I’m moving in forces, moving out non-combatants….I’ve really put that [contingency response capacity] at risk.”

With budgets shrinking and sequester looming, the Army doesn’t expect to buy a lot of new missile defense batteries any time soon. Besides, the asset under stress is not so much the equipment as the skilled personnel to operate it. “The people are the key,” Cheek said, “so we will in fact for this career field over-man it” — that is, assign more personnel to missile defense than filling every position would require — “because we know the stress on it is so high.”

Along with shoring up the supply of missile defenders, though, the Army also needs to reduce demand.

“We’re trying to step back and say it’s time to rethink this, we need to get global priorities and make some hard calls about where we’re going to be and where we’re not gong to be,” Cheek told AUSA.

“Once a combatant commander has his grip on that asset, they will never agree to give it away, never, and I understand that,” Cheek told me. The Army expects the supposedly temporary deployment of a THAAD battery to Guam will become a permanent fixture, for example. Officials at the conference also fended off repeated questions from the South Korean press about stationing THAAD permanently in the divided peninsula.

“I’m not telling you that everything needs to be back in the United States,” Cheek told me, “but I think we could be more measured.”

So late last year, both Gen. Odierno and his Navy counterpart, Chief of Naval Operations Jonathan Greenert, sent an “8-star memo” to then-Secretary Chuck Hagel calling for a reevaluation of missile defense strategy. While the Army worries about Patriot and THAAD deployments, the Navy worries about more and more of its multi-mission Aegis destroyers being relegated to a narrowly defensive role.

That two four-star service chiefs are taking an interest is significant, said Maj. Gen. John Rossi, who heads both air defense and field artillery training at Fort Sill, Oklahoma. “As the demand exceeds the supply [for] air and missile defense,” Rossi told me, “their intent was [to ask], ‘what’s the broad strategy to deal with this threat set?'”

“Remember deterrence?” Maj. Gen. Cheek asked the audience at AUSA. “That worked back in the day. It still works.” Of the 116 ballistic missiles shot at US forces since World War II, he said, every one was fired by Iraq before or during an American invasion. In other words, potential adversaries won’t risk US retaliation unless they figure we’re going to hit them with everything we’ve got regardless of whether they fire missiles.

Reassessing the balance between deterrence and forward-deployed missile defense is a major theme of the Greenert-Odierno memo, retired Lt. Gen. Edward Anderson told AUSA.

“The eight-star memo, it’s getting a ton of attention in the building, in OSD [the Office of the Secretary of Defense], from policymakers… and that’s a good thing,” said Air Force Brig. Gen. Kenneth Todorov, deputy director of the joint Missile Defense Agency. That said, Todorov pointed out, “it’s written from a service perspective, not a COCOM perspective.” If the four-star combatant commanders wrote a memo on missile defense, he said, its recommendations might be very different.

“COCOMs don’t pay the bills,” Anderson shot back. “Services do.”

[Ryan Ruck]

Serious Flaws Revealed In U.S. Anti-Missile Nuclear Defense Against North Korea

May 30, 2015

Two serious technical flaws have been identified in the ground-launched anti-missile interceptors that the United States would rely on to defend against a nuclear attack by North Korea.

Pentagon officials were informed of the problems as recently as last summer but decided to postpone corrective action. They told federal auditors that acting immediately to fix the defects would interfere with the production of new interceptors and slow a planned expansion of the nation's homeland missile defense system, according to a new report by the Government Accountability Office.

As a result, all 33 interceptors now deployed at Vandenberg Air Force Base in Santa Barbara County and Ft. Greely, Alaska, have one of the defects. Ten of those interceptors — plus eight being prepared for delivery this year — have both.

Summing up the effect on missile-defense readiness, the GAO report said that "the fielded interceptors are susceptible to experiencing … failure modes," resulting in "an interceptor fleet that may not work as intended."

The flaws could disrupt sensitive on-board systems that are supposed to steer the interceptors into enemy missiles in space.

The GAO report, an annual assessment of missile defense programs prepared for congressional committees, describes the problems in terse, technical terms. Defense specialists interviewed by The Times provided more detail.

The interceptors form the heart of the Ground-based Midcourse Defense system, GMD for short. Four of the massive, three-stage rockets are stationed at Vandenberg and 29 at Ft. Greely.

They would rise out of underground silos in response to an attack. Atop each interceptor is a 5-foot-long "kill vehicle," designed to separate from its boost rocket in space, fly independently at a speed of 4 miles per second and crash into an enemy warhead — a feat that has been likened to hitting one bullet with another.

The GMD system was deployed in 2004 as part of the nation's response to Sept. 11, 2001, and a heightened fear of attack by terrorist groups or rogue states. It has cost taxpayers more than $40 billion so far and has been plagued by technical deficiencies.

One of the newly disclosed shortcomings centers on wiring harnesses embedded within the kill vehicles' dense labyrinth of electronics.

A supplier used an unsuitable soldering material to assemble harnesses in at least 10 interceptors deployed in 2009 and 2010 and still part of the fleet.

The same material was used in the eight interceptors that will be placed in silos this year, according to GAO analyst Cristina Chaplain, lead author of the report.

The soldering material is vulnerable to corrosion in the interceptors' underground silos, some of which have had damp conditions and mold. Corrosion "could have far-reaching effects" because the "defective wiring harnesses" supply power and data to the kill vehicle's on-board guidance system, said the GAO report, which is dated May 6.

When Boeing Co., prime contractor for the GMD system, informed government officials of the problem last summer, they did not insist upon repair or replacement of the defective harnesses, according to the report.

Instead, Missile Defense Agency officials "assessed the likelihood for the component's degradation in the operational environment as low and decided to accept the component as is," the report said.

The decision minimized delays in producing new interceptors, "but increased the risk for future reliability failures," the report said.

Chaplain told The Times that based on her staff's discussions with the Missile Defense Agency, officials there have "no timeline" for repairing the wiring harnesses.

The agency encountered a similar problem with wiring harnesses years earlier, and the supplier was instructed not to use the deficient soldering material. But "the corrective actions were not passed along to other suppliers," according to the GAO report.

L. David Montague, co-chairman of a National Academy of Sciences panel that reviewed operations of the Missile Defense Agency, said officials should promptly set a schedule for fixing the harnesses.

"The older they are with that kind of a flawed soldering, the more likely they are to fail," Montague, a former president of missile systems for Lockheed Corp., said in an interview.

The second newly disclosed defect involves a component called a divert thruster, a small motor intended to help maneuver the kill vehicles in flight. Each kill vehicle has four of them.

The GAO report refers to "performance issues" with the thrusters. It offers few details, and GAO auditors declined to elaborate, citing a fear of revealing classified information. They did say that the problem is different from an earlier concern that the thruster's heavy vibrations could throw off the kill vehicle's guidance system.

The report and interviews with defense specialists make clear that problems with the divert thruster have bedeviled the interceptor fleet for years. To address deficiencies in the original version, Pentagon contractors created a redesigned "alternate divert thruster."

The government planned to install the new version in many of the currently deployed interceptors over the next few years and to retrofit newly manufactured interceptors, according to the GAO report and interviews with its authors.

That plan was scrapped after the alternate thruster, in November 2013, failed a crucial ground test to determine whether it could withstand the stresses of flight, the report said. To stay on track for expanding the fleet, senior Pentagon officials decided to keep building interceptors with the original, deficient thruster.

The GAO report faulted the Missile Defense Agency, an arm of the Pentagon, for "omitting steps in the design process" of the alternate thruster in the rush to deploy more interceptors. The skipped steps would have involved a lengthier, more rigorous vetting of the new design, defense specialists said. The report said the omission contributed to the 2013 test failure.

All 33 interceptors now deployed have the original, defective thruster. The eight interceptors to be added to the fleet this year will contain the same component, GAO officials told The Times.

The missile agency currently "does not plan to fix" those thrusters, despite their "known performance issues," said the GAO report.

Contractors are continuing to work on the alternate thruster, hoping to correct whatever caused the ground-test failure. The first test flight using the alternate thruster is scheduled for late this year.

The GAO had recommended that the Pentagon postpone integrating the eight new interceptors into the fleet until after that test. Defense Department officials rebuffed the recommendation, the report said.

In a response included in the report, Assistant Secretary of Defense Katharina G. McFarland wrote that delaying deployment of the new interceptors "would unacceptably increase the risk" that the Pentagon would fall short of its goal of expanding the GMD system from 33 interceptors to 44 by the end of 2017.

Asked for comment on the report, a spokesman for the Missile Defense Agency, Richard Lehner, said in a statement that officials "have in place a comprehensive, disciplined program to improve and enhance" the GMD system "regarding the issues noted by the GAO."

"We will continue to work closely with our industry partners to ensure quality standards are not only met, but exceeded," the statement said.

Boeing declined to comment.

The GMD system is designed to repel a "limited" missile attack by a non-superpower adversary, such as North Korea. The nation's defense against a massive nuclear assault by Russia or China still relies on "mutually assured destruction," the Cold War notion that neither country would strike first for fear of a devastating counterattack.

GMD's roots go back to the Clinton administration, when concern began to mount over the international spread of missile technology and nuclear development programs. In 2002, President Bush ordered "an initial set of missile defense capabilities" to be put in place within two years to protect the U.S.

To accelerate deployment, then-Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld exempted the missile agency from the Pentagon's standard procurement rules and testing standards.

Engineers trace the system's difficulties to the breakneck pace at which components were produced and fielded. In precisely scripted flight tests above the Pacific, interceptors have failed to hit mock-enemy warheads about half the time.

As a result, the missile agency projects that four or five interceptors would have to be fired at any single enemy warhead, according to current and former government officials. Under this scenario, a volley of 10 enemy missiles could exhaust the entire U.S. inventory of interceptors.

The Obama administration, after resisting calls for a larger system, pledged two years ago to increase the number of interceptors to 44. Both Republicans and Democrats in Congress have pushed for further expansion. The House this month passed a bill authorizing $30 million to plan and design a site for interceptors on the East Coast. The White House called the move "premature."

[vector7]

Treaty restrictions giving China huge missile advantage over US, admiral warns



The commander of American forces in the Pacific warned Thursday that China has a huge advantage over the United States when it comes to their stockpile of land-based short- and medium-range missiles – some which can carry nuclear warheads.

Adm. Harry Harris told senators on Capitol Hill that a decades-old arms treaty between the United States and Russia prohibits the U.S. from building its own arsenal of missiles that can fly between 310 and 3,400 miles.

“How many missiles do you have that fall into that range?” Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., asked.

“I have none, sir,” Harris replied.

Harris estimates that 90 percent of China’s land-based missile forces fall into the category prohibited by the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty (INF), signed between then-presidents Mikhail Gorbachev and Ronald Reagan in 1987.

Yet last month, the vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff told Congress that Russia was violating the treaty.

“We believe that the Russians have deployed a land-based cruise missile that violates the spirit and intent of the Intermediate Nuclear Forces Treaty,” Gen. Paul Selva told the House Armed Services Committee.

“The system itself presents a risk to most of our facilities in Europe,” he added. “We believe that the Russians have deliberately deployed it in order to pose a threat to NATO.”

Harris was asked Thursday by Cotton if the United States should withdraw from the treaty because the Russians are violating it, and he kept the door open.

“I do think we should look at renegotiating the treaty,” he said. “We should consider that because, as you say, there are only two countries that signed on to and one of them doesn’t follow it. That becomes a unilateral limitation on us.”

The INF Treaty was signed at the time of a “bi-polar world” occupied by the United States and Russia, according to Harris. Now, other powers are developing their technology and arsenals – Iran and North Korea, in addition to China, are free to build thousands of short- and medium-range missiles not bound by the treaty, he said.

The INF treaty does not include missiles launched by ships or aircraft.

Harris told senators he is “worried” about the Chinese DF-21 missile and DF-26 missile, with a range of over 2,000 miles.

In 1991, the United States removed its land-based nuclear-capable missiles from South Korea.

Jeffery Lewis, a missile proliferation expert at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey, Calif., said the problem these missile systems pose relates to warning time.

“Could you use them to launch a surprise decapitation strike?” he said. “That's why Gorbachev agreed to the treaty in the first place -- the Russians are much worse off in a world with many capable medium- and intermediate-range ballistic and cruise missiles."



Lucas Tomlinson is the Pentagon and State Department producer for Fox News Channel. You can follow him on Twitter: @LucasFoxNews

[Ryan Ruck]

Sailor Error Led To Failed US Navy Ballistic Missile Intercept Test

July 24, 2017

A U.S. Missile Defense Agency review of a failed ballistic missile intercept test showed that a mistaken input into the combat system by a sailor on the destroyer John Paul Jones caused the missile to self-destruct before reaching the target.

A tactical datalink controller, in charge of maintaining encrypted data exchanges between ships and aircraft, accidentally identified the incoming ballistic missile target as a friendly in the system, causing the SM-3 missile to self-destruct in flight, according to a source familiar with the test.

The head of MDA did not comment on the sailor error, but said in a statement that the ongoing review confirmed it wasn’t an issue with the SM-3 Block IIA missile or the Navy’s Aegis combat system.

“Though the review is still in process, the SM-3 IIA interceptor and Aegis Combat System have been eliminated as the potential root cause,” of the failure, said Air Force Lt. Gen. Sam Greaves, the director of MDA.

“We are conducting an extensive review as part of our standard engineering and test processes, and it would be inappropriate to comment further until we complete the investigation.‎”

The test marked the fourth flight test of the SM-3 Block IIA and the second time it was launched from a ship. The missile successfully intercepted a ballistic missile target in a February test launch. The missile is being developed by Raytheon and is a joint project between the U.S. and Japan, designed to counter rising missile threats from North Korea and others.

The revelation that human error likely caused the failed test on June 22 is a relief to the military and contractors racing to advance BMD technology as the threat from ballistic missiles is on the rise.

The silver lining is that there appears to be that there are no issues with the interceptor, said Thomas Karako, a missile defense expert with the Center for Security and International Studies.

“As unfortunate as this might be, it’s a good thing that this wasn’t a technology issue or some deeper failure that needs to be investigated at great length and time,” Karako said. “There is no reason to believe the basic capability that has already been demonstrated has any new problems.”

John Paul Jones is the Navy’s missile defense ship; it replaced the cruiser Lake Erie in 2014. Lake Erie was the test ship since 2000 and is currently on deployment in the Asia-Pacific region.