OPINION — The U.S. Army Space and Missile Defense Command (USASMDC) Technical Center has its primary offices at Redstone Arsenal, Alabama, although it has other sites including one on Kwajalein Atoll in the Republic of the Marshall Islands.
Among the USASMDC Technical Center’s tasks is to develop, demonstrate, and integrate beyond-line-of-sight small satellites’ resolution imagery with ground command and control systems, and direct downlink tactical data feeds for deployed ground forces.
Last Tuesday, at a hearing of the Senate Armed Services Strategic Subcommittee on the fiscal 2024 budget for missile defense, Lt. Gen. Daniel L. Karbler, Commander of USASMDC, in his prepared statement listed as a past accomplishment that the “Technical Center leveraged commercial synthetic aperture radar imaging of current interest locations and, using artificial intelligence and machine learning algorithms, provided key operational data to tactical warfighting organizations.”
Although Karbler did not say who the “tactical warfighting organizations” were, a Pentagon press release from last December indicated they were Ukrainian. The release said that since February 2022, USASMDC had been providing “support to U.S. European Command’s response to operations in Ukraine through its Force Tracking Mission Management Center and by providing space operations support to combatant commanders through its 1st Space Brigade.”
The press release quoted Karbler saying, “We have Army space experts over there who are helping enable those space capabilities for the maneuver commanders on the ground … Our space experts are doing everything from looking at what the bad guy’s satellites are doing to what our satellites are capable of doing, in terms of providing communications, GPS, as well as precision-guided weapons.” Karbler added, “We ensure soldiers can shoot, move and communicate.”
The Army’s Advanced Warfare Environment / Tactical Geospatial Environment system developed to provide preparation of the battlespace for Army units has become a primary analysis system to document Russia-Ukraine missile operations for intelligence community assessments, Karbler said.
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Last Tuesday’s hearing had other news.
General Glen VanHerck, Commander of the North American Aerospace Defense Command
(NORAD), told the Senators, “We are re-looking at the policy for homeland defense” and that “the successful defense of North America requires the Department of Defense to move beyond outdated assumptions and plans that do not fully reflect competitor capability, capacity, and intent to threaten the homeland.”
VanHerck said. “I have provided my commander’s estimate which is a plan for that,” and went on saying, “I’m also in the middle of what I call Homeland Defense 2035 which gets at a new way of defending the homeland which is vastly different from the way we do it today.”
“For decades,” He said, “NORAD has relied heavily on the North Warning System
arrayed along the Arctic coasts of Canada and Alaska to detect potential airborne threats to North
America. It is clear that our competitors possess long-range strike capabilities that could be used
to attack the United States and Canada from outside the detection range of legacy sensors.
In order to maintain domain awareness and ensure integrated threat warning and attack
assessment to national leadership, the United States and Canada must continue to move swiftly
to field Over the Horizon Radar…a proven, affordable technology that will ensure our ability to detect threats from surface to space in the approaches to North America.”
VanHerck added, “There has to be domain awareness between the over-the-horizon radars that link the data from there to an end-game effector [meaning an interceptor system] … We need to look more broadly at the rest of the infrastructures, the radar as well, and ensure the data from those systems is incorporated in an integrated air and missile defense system that can lead to effectors.”
Those effectors may take the form of kinetic weapons, such as missiles or non-kinetic effects, such as electronic warfare, VanHerck said.
I must point out here that while VanHerck talks about interceptors, the U.S. and all countries remain vulnerable to large scale ICBM attacks since no country has yet been able to produce a nationwide anti-ballistic missile system, although there are successful regional anti-missile systems deployed that can handle limited numbers of incoming missiles. I will discuss them below.
The U.S., along with most countries, does have early warning systems and they are primarily what are being upgraded.
“These future systems,” VanHerck’s statement said, “will detect, track, and identify threats, including hypersonic threats, enable better warning and assessment, and develop actionable targeting solutions, at a much faster pace than we currently experience, while also delivering an inherent operational resilience.”
He added that Canada has plans to fund “a layered surveillance system that will improve shared domain awareness in the northern air and maritime approaches to North America that include “Arctic and Polar radars and spaced-based surveillance systems, along with advanced munitions, communications, and infrastructure.”
VanHeck also talked about the benefits of data sharing that include linking existing private commercial platforms such as Pathfinder, that ingests air domain sensor data from multiple sources, including commercial and military radars; leverages software automation; and uses machine learning models to produce a fused air domain awareness.
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With Pathfinder used as a battle management tool, VanHeck said, “NORAD has proven that it is possible to rapidly improve domain awareness and streamline global information sharing without the costs associated with fielding exquisite new capabilities.”
Dr. John Plumb, Assistant Secretary of Defense for Space Policy, described to the Senators
the Hypersonic and Ballistic Tracking Space Sensor (HBTSS), which he said, “will fill the final gap in missile defense by providing high-precision target tracks to battle management and fire control systems, supporting intercept of advanced missile threats – including hypersonic glide vehicles.”
HBTSS satellites will have a multi-wavelength optical sensor with high sensitivity for dim target detection which is expected to “provide continuous tracking and enable handoff for targeting of enemy missiles, including hypersonic threats launched from land, sea or air,” according to Northrop Grumman Corp., its manufacturer.
Plumb said an HBTSS prototype will be delivered this year and an on-orbit test will be used to demonstrate its “unique tracking and targeting capabilities needed to defend against hypersonic glide vehicles.”
Plumb also described plans to develop a new “proliferated resilient missile warning/missile tracking architecture” and the Next-Gen Overhead Persistent Infrared (OPIR) space and ground system, for which there is $4.8 billion in the fiscal 2024 budget now before Congress.
This so-called Next-Gen OPIR will consist of three satellites in geosynchronous orbit (GEO) that would cover mid-latitudes and two satellites in highly-elliptical-orbit over the Polar areas for coverage of the upper latitudes. The first GEO satellite is planned for 2025, while the first Polar satellite is scheduled for 2028.
Vice Admiral Jon Hill, Director of the Missile Defense Agency told the committee about the Command and Control, Battle Management, and Communications program called C2BMC, which is the integrating element of the entire Missile Defense System and provides senior policymakers as well as combatant commanders with a global, persistent, and near-real-time missile defense common operating picture.
As Hill explained it in his prepared statement, “C2BMC joins space-based infrared, land-, and sea-based sensor threat observations to provide acquisition, tracking, cueing, discrimination, and targeting data to engagement elements in support of U.S. and coalition-partner missile defense.”
As explained more clearly in the fiscal 2024 Missile Defense Agency budget, “First, missile defense system sensors (radars and satellites) detect the launch of threat missiles and track them in flight, maintaining birth to death custody of the threats. Based on these tracks, C2BMC tasks the sensors to collect threat data with fire control accuracy to support the appropriate weapon systems in engagement of the threats. The weapon systems develop fire control solutions enabling their interceptors to engage and negate the threats.”
Collectively, thanks to C2BMC, users can plan ballistic missile defense operations and see the battle develop, and to dynamically manage designated networked sensors and weapons systems to achieve global and regional mission objectives,” according to the Missile Defense Agency.
That, at least, is the theory.
Guam is a good example of a missile defense buildup underway for a point area, in this case one that faces potential Chinese or North Korean attacks.
Assistant Secretary Plumb told the Senators that “Integrated Air and Missile Defense (IAMD) architecture for the defense of Guam…will simultaneously protect U.S. forces and our ability to project power in the region.” The fiscal 2024 budget requests $1.5 billion for this effort and a senior official will be designated to manage the missile defense effort.
Guam has major Air Force and Navy bases, both of which are important for strategic nuclear deterrence. Strategic bombers use Guam’s Andersen Air Force Base and nuclear-armed SSBNs visit Navy Base Guam.
An Indo-Pacific Command requirement calls for “a persistent 360-degree layered defense capability on Guam against simultaneous raids of cruise, ballistic, maneuvering, and hypersonic threats,” Adm. Hill told the subcommittee. He added that an AN/TPY-6 four-sided, phased array radar for integrated air and missile defense along with the Navy’s disaggregated Aegis Ashore system will provide persistent long-range midcourse discrimination, precision tracking, missile engagements, and hit assessment to protect Guam.
Plumb described other areas where regional missile defense systems are being upgraded.
In Europe, he said, “Initial acceptance testing is ongoing at the Aegis Ashore site in Poland, which will become operational in 2024 after completion of all testing and receiving additional software upgrades.” The Polish site, along with the Aegis Ashore site in Romania, the BMD [ballistic missile defense] capable ships home ported in Spain, and the AN/TPY-2 radar in Turkey, complete the U.S. voluntary contribution to NATO Ballistic Missile Defense.
U.S. tactical missile defense systems like Patriot and THAAD are also, Plumb said, “deployed world-wide, including throughout the Middle East and Indo-Pacific regions, where they defend U.S. forward-deployed forces and other national security interests in concert with our allies and partners.”
There is much more to be said about strategic and tactical missile defense, since like other weapons systems they are changing in nature and capability. But interceptors are costly and no system yet guarantees perfect defense.
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