Missile defensePentagon to fund new “kill vehicle” for missile defense

The Pentagon’s fiscal 2015 budget includes $8.5 billion in funding for missile defense programs, calling, among other things, for building fourteen additional ground-based interceptors by 2017.

The budget request includes $300 million to begin work on a new “kill vehicle” which would destroy incoming enemy missiles on contact, add a new long-range radar to be deployed by 2020, and fund other measures to help the system better identify, track, and destroy potential enemy missiles. The new kill vehicle would replace the current one built by Raytheon, which, according to the Pentagon, has failed several tests.

The Chicago Tribune reports that Frank Kendall, the Pentagon’s acquisition chief told a conference last week that a new kill vehicle was needed because the current system suffered from “bad engineering.”

Missile Defense Agency director Vice Admiral James Syring said the Bush Administration’s decision to deploy the fledgling missile defense system in 2004 was aimed at countering “a very real threat,” but it cut short systems engineering and testing of the system. Spending more time on the system would have avoided some of the problems seen now, he said. “The final step now is to step back … to now look at this from a bottoms-up design standpoint and not just keep making reliability improvements … on the margin,” Syring said.

The Pentagon will decide on how to proceed with the redesign of the kill vehicle rather soon, keeping in consideration, schedule, cost, and price. Since the government provided early funding for a new kill vehicle to Raytheon, Boeing, and Lockheed Martin, the Pentagon could choose from three “viable industry concepts,” Syring said.

According to the Pentagon, a redesigned kill vehicle would be built with a modular, open architecture and designed with common interfaces to make upgrades simpler, and help broaden the vendor and supplier base. “The kill vehicle will improve reliability, be more producible and cost-effective, and will eventually replace the kill vehicle on the current ground-based interceptor fleet,” the Pentagon said in its budget plan.

Riki Ellison, chairman and founder of Missile Defense Advocacy Alliance, welcomed the budget proposal for missile defense programs and said efforts to modernize the current-ground-based system were overdue after the rushed deployment in 2004. “It unequivocally has to be modernized, redesigned and fully integrated to handle the upcoming advancing threats of Iran, North Korea and others,” Ellison said.

The Pentagon’s next intercept test was planned for the third quarter of 2014, with a focus on the reliability and performance of the ground-based missile defense system.