Pentagon ICBM-Destroying Next-Gen Interceptor Moves Closer to Flight

By Kris Osborn, President, Center for Military Modernization

(Washington D.C.) Finding, tracking, precisely targeting and exploding an incoming ICBM traveling through space toward a large target has presented challenges to the Missile Defense Agency for many years, as potential adversaries increasingly employ sophisticated decoys and countermeasures.

Next-Generation Interceptor

These factors form the essential conceptual basis upon which the MDA is pursuing its Next-Generation Interceptor program, a technical effort to engineer new missile defense systems capable of replacing and moving beyond the existing Ground Based Interceptor. The program, long underway for several years, calls for a next-generation technology better positioned to track and destroy incoming ICBM threats expected in 2030 and beyond.

Video Above: Colonel Michael Stefanovic, Director of the Strategic Studies Institute for the Air Force sits down for an exclusive interview with Kris Osborn

An attacking ICBM, for example, can travel along with deliberately placed phony missile decoys or travel amid space debris and clutter, factors which can disrupt the targeting sensors built onto a kill vehicle released from a Ground Based Interceptor to intercept and destroy an ICBM.

This is why there has, for many years now, been a large number of MDA and industry efforts to resign seekers, kill vehicles, guidance technology and targeting systems to ensure interceptors can effectively make discernments in space to find and eliminate the correct target.

The MDA has awarded several developmental deals to various industry teams, to include a Lockheed Martin-Aerojet team and a Northrop Grumman-Raytheon team.