MDA Kill Vehicle Redesign, Target Radar Gain Traction on Hill

摘要

Two U.S. Missile Defense Agency initiatives designed to bolster the reliability and thus credibility of the primary U.S. territorial shield have won support from congressional appropriators, but lawmakers in both the House and Senate have made clear their intent to closely scrutinize the billion-dollar efforts. The efforts in question are a redesigned kill vehicle for the Ground-based Midcourse Defense system interceptors, variants of which are currently deployed at Vandenberg Air Force Base, California, and Fort Greely, Alaska, and a long-range target-discrimination radar. The redesign initiative is being hatched in the wake of a recent string of intercept test failures involving the GMD system, two of which were attributed, in whole or in part, to problems with the current kill vehicle hardware, built by Raytheon Missile Systems of Tucson, Arizona.