A version of this story appeared in the daily Threat Status newsletter from The Washington Times. Click here to receive Threat Status delivered directly to your inbox each weekday.
The United States was in a deep hole a decade ago when it came to defending against hypersonic missiles and other high-tech weaponry, and analysts said Tuesday that the hole has significantly deepened.
A former Pentagon director of research and engineering for modernization chaired a panel for the Air Force in 2015 that examined the threat to U.S. security from high-tech weapons such as hypersonic missiles. The panel concluded that the U.S. was in trouble.
“One of the members of the panel wanted to title the study: ‘We’re Screwed.’ That was 10 years ago,” said Mark Lewis, now CEO of Purdue University’s Applied Research Institute. “We sounded the alarm that we were in a race. We’re still in a race, and we’re falling further behind.”
Mr. Lewis participated in a panel discussion about the technology required for President Trump’s missile defense initiative at the Golden Dome for America event hosted by The Washington Times’ Threat Status.
Mr. Lewis said the U.S. must accelerate its offensive and defensive capabilities to combat the missile threat from its adversaries.
“Every time we war-gamed various scenarios when I was at the Pentagon, when we were facing an adversary that had these advanced missile capabilities and we didn’t have an effective system or our own offensive system, we lost — every single time,” he said. “We need these capabilities if we’re going to compete with our potential peer adversaries.”
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Retired Air Force Lt. Gen. Christopher Bogdan said relying on ground-based interceptors won’t be sufficient to counter a barrage of enemy ballistic missiles.
“A space-based constellation of small satellites that covers the Earth will have the ability to intercept those missiles much earlier,” said Mr. Bogdan, now executive vice president of Booz Allen Hamilton. “Each of those small satellites can do a number of things. Every satellite in the constellation can talk to and know what every other satellite knows.”
Ed Zoiss, president of space and airborne systems for L3Harris Technologies, said the U.S. Missile Defense Agency noted in 2020 that the missile defense system needs a new fire control architecture.
“If you can’t see it, you can’t shoot it down,” he said. “What’s challenging with these new threats is that they become unseeable by our ground- and sea-based radar systems because they have the ability to maneuver around.”
The only way for the U.S. to adequately monitor an adversary’s ballistic missiles will be to “move that fire control calculus up into space,” Mr. Zoiss said.
The panel estimated that a constellation of about 500 to 1,000 small satellites would be capable of both tracking and intercepting ballistic missiles during the early part of the flight, known as the boost/ascent stage, and the midcourse phases. Mr. Bogdan said they could be used as a “hit to kill” vehicle to take out the enemy satellites.
“They will have the ability to start a maneuver and then home in on those ballistic missiles and defeat them in their boost ascent phase,” he said.
The Golden Dome has gaps to be filled before it can provide a shield against ballistic missiles. Mr. Bogdan said the Reagan-era Strategic Defense Initiative failed partly because the cost to send thousands of satellites into space was too high.
“But the cost of launching large constellations of small satellites has dropped so much,” he said.
The Golden Dome for America event, organized and hosted by The Washington Times’ Threat Status, brought together retired military officials, key U.S. lawmakers, top academic researchers and defense industry leaders for a day of in-depth discussions about the proposed missile shield, its goals, its hurdles to implementation and the politics around the project.
• Mike Glenn can be reached at mglenn@washingtontimes.com.
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