By Kris Osborn, President, Center for Military Modernization
The threat of enemy ICBMs continues to grow more ominous given the precarious circumstance in Ukraine, Putin’s threats, China’s ongoing effort to double its number of nuclear warheads by the end of the decade and North Korea’s recent ICBM test firing.
Certainly the ability to respond with a massive, catastrophic nuclear weapons attack can serve as a deterrent potentially stopping any would-be nuclear attacker, yet the role of air, sea and land-based missile defense only continues to become more pressing.
The ground-based interceptors are pretty well known and continue to be upgraded with new command and control technology, interceptor guidance with advanced kill vehicles and sensor fidelity, yet there are also a number of critical new avenues of ICBM defense. These include, for example, the potential ability of a fighter jet to incinerate a launching ICBM during its boost phase with laser weapons, innovative and yet to be discovered space-based defenses, a new generation of interceptors and .. perhaps most recently, Navy ships at sea. The Navy has long operated and upgraded its Aegis Combat System ship-based air and cruise missile defense system to intercept short, medium and long-range ballistic missiles, cruise missiles and other threats, yet Aegis-capable Navy ships can now possibly track and destroy enemy ICBMs at sea.
Can Navy Ships Shoot Down ICBMs?
There is a clear, unambiguous national security question of great relevance which naturally continues to receive a massive amount of attention. The question needs little qualification or explanation .. and it is “could the US shoot down, intercept or stop an incoming ICBM?”
In an immediate sense, this might apply to North Korea given the potential volatility of their leadership and continued testing, yet the question is equally relevant to great power threats as well. The pace of Chinese nuclear weapons modernization and production, combined with Russia’s known arsenal of tactical, nuclear-capable hypersonic and larger ICBMs are certainly not lost on the Pentagon. Added to this complexity is multiple recent reports that North Korea has recently test fired an ICBM again, a development reportedly causing alarm, according to an CNN report.
The answer to whether we could shoot them down is both complex and varied, as it might depend upon the positioning and type of available missile defenses. However, there are clearly a number of current and fast-developing technologies which would suggest that yes, indeed, the Pentagon, US military services and Missile Defense Agency would likely be well positioned to intercept an incoming ICBM. The ability to do this, it should be said, will be massively increasing quickly in coming years due to a number of critical promising programs.
Of course Ground Based Interceptors based at Fort Greely Alaska and Vanderburg, California have been maintained and even upgraded with new computing and command and control technology, yet the Pentagon is also making rapid progress with its Next-Generation Interceptor program. Part of this technological maturation also incorporates breakthrough seeker technology designed to better “discriminate” countermeasures, decoys and debris from actual ICBMs. Incoming ICBMs often travel through space with specific decoys and countermeasures designed to confuse missile defense interceptors such that they hit the wrong target, enabling the actual ICBM to continue on to its target. Newer “kill vehicle” sensor technology is better engineered to distinguish decoys from ICBMs and actually destroy the correct threat.
This is a faster, more precise, cutting-edge interceptor and kill vehicle expected to bring paradigm-changing levels of improvement to US missile defense. Naturally many of the details of this are not well known for obvious security reasons, yet several MDA industry partners have been developing, prototyping and testing this critical technology.
Navy Ships Can Stop ICBMs — Aegis Combat System
In addition to this, there continues to be breakthrough success with US Navy missile defense systems, as software upgrades to ship-based Aegis Combat System continue to expand. There are several elements to this, as ship-based missile defense continues to be extremely significant as it can add additional defensive angles of approach with which to track and destroy an attacking ICBM. Part of this pertains to the successful emergence of the SM-3 Block IIA interceptor variant, as the Navy and MDA have shown in testing that this interceptor, combined with cutting edge software upgrades to the Aegis System, has shown an ability to actually intercept ICBMs.
This is extremely significant, as ship-based Aegis radar has historically been limited to long-range ballistic missile defense within the earth’s atmosphere. However, technological breakthroughs are showing an ability for missile defense interceptors such as the SM-3 IIA to track and destroy threats beyond the boundary of the earth’s atmosphere and actually destroy ICBMs. Raytheon’s SM-3 IIA, which has now been in development for several years, is the result of a number of software upgrades, guidance technology enhancements and form-factor alterations to enable breakthrough missile defense capability.
Finally, there are several space-oriented programs intended to not only improve missile defense technology but also generate an ability to develop a “continuous track” of hypersonic weapons as well. This is also extremely significant, as the speed of hypersonic weapons is such that they can travel from one radar aperture or “field of regard” to another so quickly that ground based radar and sensors are unable to maintain an ability to track and target the threat. Industry is now working with MDA on several cutting edge, space-oriented programs to address this challenge.
Hypersonic Missile Defense
Accomplishing this requires non-line-of-sight targeting and connectivity, high-speed data sharing, AI-enabled information processing and transmission and, perhaps most of all, the addition of new constellations of Low and Medium Earth Orbit Satellites to complement traditional Geosynchronous higher altitude satellites. Essentially, hundreds of new satellites need to go up to help “blanket” otherwise unreachable target areas and exchange threat track data quickly enough and accurately enough to ensure a targeting “trajectory” is not lost as a high-speed weapon transits from one field of regard to another.
This is why the Space Development Agency is accelerating its plan to launch 28 new satellites by 2025 through its $1.3 billion Tranche 1 Tracking Layer missile warning program. Space Development Agency Directory Derek Tournear explained last year that the multi-pronged launch initiative, which will break up 28 satellites into four different launches with seven satellites on
each, is grounded upon two key conceptual pillars. These are “proliferation” and “spiral development,” Tournear told reporters at the Pentagon, specifying that there is literally a need for hundreds and hundreds of satellites to operate in space while continuously gaining new capability every “two years” through ongoing spiraled development.
“We want to enable beyond line of sight targeting and get data for targets anywhere in the world. With new hypersonic glide vehicles, we need to detect them, track them and calculate a targeting solution to send down to an interceptor,” Space Development Agency Directory Derek Tournear, told reporters in a media event last year, according to a Pentagon transcript
The point with a massive increase in satellites is to not only build in redundancy and resiliency, but also to use breakthrough “throughput” speeds to cover more of the earth in real time, while networking large numbers of lower-altitude satellites to one another.
Kris Osborn is the Military Affairs Editor of 19FortyFive and President of Warrior Maven – Center for Military Modernization. Osborn previously served at the Pentagon as a Highly Qualified Expert with the Office of the Assistant Secretary of the Army—Acquisition, Logistics & Technology. Osborn has also worked as an anchor and on-air military specialist at national TV networks. He has appeared as a guest military expert on Fox News, MSNBC, The Military Channel, and The History Channel. He also has a Masters Degree in /lComparative Literature from Columbia University. This was originally posted on 19FortyFive.com as part of a syndication agreement to publish their content. You can find more of their content at 19FortyFive.com.
