NORTHCOM’s head sets record straight on missile defense boundaries with SPACECOM

Gen. Glen VanHerck (center), Commander, North American Aerospace Defense Command and U.S. Northern Command, sits at the morning Operations and Intelligence briefing in the NORAD and USNORTHCOM headquarters on Peterson Space Force Base, Colorado, Oct. 17, 2022. (Department of Defense photo by MSgt Ben Wiseman)

WASHINGTON — Gen. Glen VanHerck wants to make it crystal clear that the military’s most recent plan laying out warfighting responsibilities in no way changes the missile defense-related roles of his two commands, US Northern Command (NORTHCOM) and NORAD — following what he told Breaking Defense was an “incredibly misleading” announcement from US Space Command late last month.

“To be clear, the missile defense mission has not changed,” he said in an interview Thursday. “There’s been no change to any of our missions, including the NORAD mission for missile warning, attack assessment, any of those. And we’re still tracking Santa Claus each year.”

VanHerck pulled no punches in expressing frustration after SPACECOM’s May 31 statement about the 2022 revision of the Unified Command Plan (UCP) signed in April by President Joe Biden that reassigned it some of the missile defense support functions previously owned by US Strategic Command (STRATCOM). Though it has expanded its role, SPACECOM’s vague language appeared to some that it had eaten responsibilities in both missile warning and defense that in reality continue to fall to regional commands like NORTHCOM or NORAD, the North American Aerospace Defense Command. 

“When you have somebody from Space Command saying: ‘So, we’ve owned the missile warning mission since Space Command stood up,’ is totally deceiving and incorrect,” VanHerck said.

He explained that he has a double-hatted role in the US military’s somewhat complicated missile defense ecosystem, that includes various combatant commands, services and the Missile Defense Agency.

“In my NORAD hat, I’m responsible for providing a threat assessment of threats in North America, and am also responsible for an attack assessment of where that potential threat missile would be going, such as Washington, DC or Denver, Colorado,” VanHerck said.

“In my NORTHCOM hat, I’m responsible for defense the United States of America including Hawaii and Alaska, ballistic missile defense. And so the GBIs, the ground-based interceptors we have in Alaska, we have in California at Vandenberg [SFB] allow me to do that against rogue actors, such as North Korea, and that’s where we’re primarily focused,” he added.

Days after its announcement SPACECOM too sought to clarify “confusion” it caused. Those missions transferred from STRATCOM do not include shooting down incoming ballistic missiles, SPACECOM officials told reporters on June 7.

Instead, “each regional combatant commander, to include NORTHCOM, is still responsible for missiles that are coming into their areas of responsibility,” stressed Col. Mark Cobos, deputy commander, of Joint Functional Component Command for Integrated Missile Defense.

As for missile warning, responsibilities under the latest UCP also remain the same for both SPACECOM and NORTHCOM, according to officials from both. While SPACECOM has been and will remain in charge of operating missile warning satellites, NORAD retains the responsibility for actually warning US national security leaders about missile threats to the US homeland.

SPACECOM also keeps the role — assigned to it in the 2021 UCP update, as first reported by Breaking Defense — of Global Sensor Manager, matching the capabilities of the myriad sensors in space and on the ground that contribute to space domain awareness and missile warning to specific missions. SPACECOM operators gather all that data relevant to detecting and tracking missiles, fuse it and send it back out to missile defense operators in the other commands.

So, despite the recent public kerfuffle, VanHerck stressed SPACECOM was a critical partner in the nation’s defense.

“Without Space Command doing that, I don’t have the domain awareness and the ability to execute my missile defense mission or my threat warning mission,” he said. “I am comfortable where the department has landed with Space Command as the sensor manager, and the one that’s going to provide advocacy on behalf of everybody who has equities in missile defense around the globe. I think that’s a good place.”

NORAD’s Santa Tracker And Missile Defense

VanHerck noted that the Santa tracking mission is in many ways a good example of how NORTHCOM, NORAD and SPACECOM work together to ensure US leaders have “global situational awareness.”

“As Santa goes around the globe, Space Command provides domain awareness to me to track Santa and provide warnings all the kids around there of where Santa is and what time he’s going to show up at their house,” VanHerck said.

Another NORTHCOM official elaborated that SPACECOM satellites home in on Rudolph’s red nose with  infrared satellites and “big radar” on the ground, and pass along location information to NORAD for tracking Santa’s reindeer-powered sleigh over North America. (And one would assume, ensuring that no one mistakes Santa for a threat.)

What has changed, officials from both commands explained, is that SPACECOM is now providing other types of supporting capabilities that were previously in STRATCOM’s bailiwick that enable warfighters in charge of missile defense systems to do their jobs.

For example, Cobos’s Joint Functional Component Command for Integrated Missile Defense, which “synchronizes global missile defense planning in support of the coordinating authority, conducts global missile defense operations support, advocates for and recommends acceptance of missile defense capabilities, and executes joint and combined global missile defense training and education,” according to a military fact sheet [PDF] — now reports to SPACECOM, not STRATCOM.

“We’re seeing a convergence between a lot of aspects of the missile defense and space missions,” Cobos said. “A lot of the sensors we use for space are the same as missile defense and missile warning.”

Gordon White, SPACECOM deputy chief of global sensor management, elaborated that therefore the command is looking to provide improved “better integration and fused data for better characterization of threats. This helps all theaters defend their areas.”

Another responsibility that has shifted to SPACECOM under the new UCP is the role of ensuring “trans-regional missile defense,” explained the NORTHCOM official. This is a “support mission,” the official said, and essentially means helping to ensure no one drops the ball in cases where an incoming missile passes through the geographic boundaries on more than one of the US military’s regional combatant commands. (These are Northern, Indo-Pacific, European, Central and Africa commands.)

“What has really changed is who manages the sensors, who does the operational planning, and who does the advocacy — and that used to be STRATCOM and now it’s SPACECOM,” VanHerck said.

It’s self-evidently a complicated relationship between all these entities, though, and VanHerck mused that because of how complex it has become to integrate missile and air defense needs in the face of proliferating missile threats — from ballistic missiles, cruise missiles and hypersonic missiles — it may be time for the Defense Department to create a single office to coordinate acquisition programs to ensure everything is knitted together tightly enough.

“I think the department needs a single entity responsible for oversight that forces efficiencies across services, across the MDA, across the globe that takes a global look to ensure that we don’t end up with regional pictures, regional perspectives. We need a global picture and global perspectives to enable a global layered defense, and globally integrated air and missile defense,” he said.

Santa wouldn’t stand a chance of going rogue then.