Missile Defense Agency head Vice Adm. Jon Hill

WASHINGTON: The US is moving away from a Missile Defense Strategy centered on hit-to-kill anti-ballistic missiles to a hybrid force that includes directed energy weapons and electronic warfare/cyber options, according to Vice Adm. Jon Hill, who heads the Missile Defense Agency.

“The future will be a mix of kinetic and non-kinetic, it will be a mix of hard kill and soft kill, because of where the threat is going to. The threat will drive us to do something different,” he told the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) today.

Hill would not specify exactly what kinds of ‘non-kinetic’ and ‘soft-kill’ technologies MDA might be investing in, citing secrecy restrictions, but confirmed that investments are being made.

“We are making investments in that area — most of it’s in an area where I can’t talk about here — but the future of missile defense will be different because of the threat,” he said.

DoD is about to launch a new Missile Defense Review, Hill said, with the last one released in January 2019 but actually completed in 2017. And that review will be firmly based on defending against emerging threats, he stressed.

“What you’re seeing today is not a simple ballistic missile going in, what you’re seeing are ballistic missiles, cruise missiles, aircraft, unmanned vehicles,” he said. “So, the real challenge today is how do we holistically understand that integrated air/missile defense picture, and now you go outside of just missile defense review that’s focused on the Missile Defense Agency. … You have to, by default, look at the whole threat space, and then what capabilities do we have, and what can we afford to procure over time.”

Indeed, in recent years, DoD has moved from talking about, and organizing its budget around, ballistic missile defense and the MDA budget basket. Instead, it has begun to refer to “missile defense and defeat” — a concept that includes the air defense and cruise missile defense budgets of the various services. DoD asked for a total of $8.9 billion for MDA in its fiscal 2022 budget request, and another $2.7 billion in service air and hypersonic cruise missile defense programs. (CSIS has an excellent breakdown of the 2022 missile defense budget request on its website.)

In particular, MDA has been concerned about gaps in US capabilities to even track hypersonic cruise missiles, which are too difficult for current missile defense satellites based in Geosynchronous Orbit to reliably track. And they often evade ground-based radar due to their low-to-ground trajectory. To that end, it has been pursuing the Hypersonic and Ballistic Tracking Space Sensor (HBTSS). MDA asked for $256 million in research, development, test and evaluation (RTD&E) funds for HBTSS.

“So, the core of what the Missile Defense Agency does still is centered on homeland defense against  ballistic attack. That doesn’t go away,” he said. “But what we have to do is now challenge ourselves to deal with the emerging threats, and I consider those as maneuvering high speed threats or what’s been known as the hypersonic threat. That one’s a real challenge because global maneuver now assumes that you may not be able to see it based on where sensors are placed today.”

But MDA also is “shooting for” first contract awards “before the end of the fiscal year” for its new(ish) hypersonic missile interceptor, called the Glide Phase Intercept (GPI), Hill said. “It’s the first time in a long time where we have a competitive piece going on on a missile. And so we’re pretty excited about that.”

(Indeed, MDA is so excited they’ve released a new video showing how GPI would work.)

In his May 2022 budget overview, Hill said the effort is aimed at developing a “regional” capability to shoot down hypersonic missiles in their “glide phase” — that is, some 40 to 50 kilometers above the Earth where hypersonic missiles spend most of their flight. According to MDA’s 2022 budget justification documents, the agency has slated $136 million (up from $127 million in 2021) in RTD&E for GPI. GPI will be fired, at least initially, from a ship-based Aegis Weapon System. The justification documents say:

“This effort develops an operational defensive capability to engage and defeat regional hypersonic threats during the glide phase of flight using the proven Aegis Weapon System. This will provide an additional layer of hypersonic defense from an Aegis ship which also augments Sea-Based Terminal capability by extending the battlespace of early terminal. The operational defensive capability includes the development of a GPI missile that reduces the operational seam currently used by hypersonic threats to fly between air defense and ballistic missile defense systems. The effort also includes updates to the Aegis Weapon System and C2BMC for planning, tracking and conducting launch on remote engagements against hypersonic threats within the MDS as well as conducting studies and advancing hypersonic capability to legacy Aegis Weapon Systems.”

Hill further confirmed that, while airborne, boost-phase interceptor development is not yet “a program of record,” it remains a possible contender for future deployment as part of this new hybrid force.

DoD has been studying concepts for new interceptors to strike down incoming missiles in their boost phase just after launch, including a missile carried by F-35 stealth fighters as well as controversial space-based interceptors, as an outcome of the January 2019 released Missile Defense Review (MDR).

Hill explained that while the Missile Defense Strategy is shifting, the three main pieces of an overarching architecture for the future still has three main elements: “detect, control, engage.”

“You can apply that to any one of these fights — whether it’s a ballistic or hypersonic or cruise missile fight, … you have to detect the threat, right, that’s your sensor architecture; then you have to have the fire control/command and control networks, that’s the second piece, the control piece; and then when you get to engage, those are your weapons, whether they’re hard kill, soft kill, kinetic, non-kinetic, you have to kind of consider all of those.”