HASC Grills MDA Chief On ’21 Budget, Space-Based Sensors

WASHINGTON: DoD and military leaders took a bipartisan beating from the House members this morning about not only the budgets for missile defense and “missile defeat” efforts, but also the policy direction of the Missile Defense Agency (MDA).

“While I have always been a strong support of this mission, I have a deep and justified skepticism of the programs direction transparency and accountability of the current enterprise,” growled the ranking Republican on the House Armed Services Strategic Forces Subcommittee, Rep. Mike Turner.

In particular, both Democrats and Republicans grilled MDA chief Vice Adm. Jon Hill on the movement of funds from MDA to the Space Development Agency (SDA) for development of a space-based sensor for tracking ballistic and hypersonic cruise missiles.

MDA’s budget request zeros out funding prototyping the Hypersonic & Ballistic Tracking Space Sensor (HBTSS) Prototyping (under PE 1206895C / Ballistic Missile Defense System Space Programs). And as I reported, Congress deliberately added $108 million for HBTSS back to the MDA budget, and cut funds in the SDA budget, in the 2020 defense appropriation bill.

“The space sensor layer is underfunded and, despite congressional direction, was given to the nascent Space Development Agency,” said Democratic Chairman Jim Cooper in his opening statement.

Turner, in a similar manner, chided that funding for space-based sensor development had “re-allocated somewhere within the Space Development Agency” — reflecting the fact that the SDA budget actually does not have a specific budget line for HBTSS or a space-based sensor layer. Instead, according to MDA’s budget documents, work on HBTSS is being funded under SDA’s $216 million budget for Space Technology Development and Prototyping (PE 1206410SDA).

Clearly frustrated, Rep. Mike Rogers — a Republican who represents Alabama, the home state of SMDC — made a point of stressing, more than once, that Congress in the 2020 National Defense Authorization Act mandated that development of the new space-based sensor layer “take place within MDA.”

He demanded, repeatedly, to know exactly who at DoD had made the decision to transfer funds to SDA — forcing Hill to admit that the decision was made by his boss, head of DoD Research & Engineering Mike Griffin.

“I like Dr. Griffin,” Rogers retorted, “but he should have come back to us and talked to us before he made that decision.”

Hill, for his part, said the decision was aimed at consolidating funding for space within SDA as the “architect” for space development, and that the plan is for SDA to allocate funding for HBTSS back to MDA. “There is no light between us,” he said of the two agencies, saying that it is very clear that MDA will be in charge of developing the new sensor technology.

On the other hand, he recognized the what is important to Congress is “the visibility into how those dollars are leveraged, and making sure that MDA is in charge of building that sensor.” And he  stressed that there “has been no change” in the strategy for MDA to develop an HBTSS prototype.

Democratic and Republican members also expressed misgivings about plans for the Next-Generation Interceptor being developed to replace the failed Redesigned Kill Vehicle (RKV); the problems with the Aegis Ashore in Poland; the cancellation of two radars; and the elimination of funding for high-powered laser research.

“[T]he Next Generation Interceptor, the program which emerged from the ashes of the Redesigned Kill Vehicle, looks like about a $10 billion,10-year effort,” Cooper fretted — and a number of his colleagues pressed for reassurance that MDA will not repeat its past mistakes with RKV. As Breaking D readers know, Griffin killed the $5.8 billion RKV program, being developed by Boeing and Raytheon, in a surprise move in August, after years of trouble.

Hill reassured Congress that the NGI program is working hard to ensure that an operational interceptor can be ready by 2028, including for the first time having the requirements vetted by the Joint Requirements Oversight Council (JROC) — a process that he noted just finished this week.

“Time and schedule is requirement one,” he said, stressing that warfighters would be working with MDA to continually trade off technical requirements if possible to keep on track. He said one of his immediate priorities is to push out to industry an NGI request for proposals (RFP) as soon as possible to “get bids on the table.”

Hill noted that he has discussed the NGI program personally with Vice Chief of Staff Gen. John Hyten who chairs the JROC, and “he wants to help.”

“I’m very happy that even though the JROC is not an MDA process, that Gen. Hyten has stepped in,” he said. “And the help of having the four star service chiefs engaged in how we’re doing through development is unusual, but I think it’s necessary.”

The DoD missile defense/defeat mission has been budgeted at a total of $20.3 billion in 2021: $9.2 billion for MDA; $7.9 billion in regional and missile defense across the services and other parts of DoD;  and $3.2 billion for “left-of-launch” activities.

Left-of-launch refers to offensive actions by US military forces to take out missiles before they are actually fired — what Lt. Gen. Daniel Karbler, head of Army Space and Missile Defense Command (SMDC), characterized in a later briefing with reporters as “instead of shooting the arrow, we’re shooting the archer.”