The United States should consider fielding more space-based sensors to improve its ability to track ballistic missiles that threaten the homeland, a U.S. Northern Command (USNORTHCOM) official said Feb. 7.
U.S. missile defenses currently depend mostly on a network of land- and sea-based sensors, but more space-based sensors may be needed to track Iranian and North Korean missiles, which are growing in number and sophistication, said Air Force Brig. Gen. Ronald Buckley, deputy director of operations for USNORTHCOM headquarters in Colorado Springs, Colo. USNORTHCOM oversees homeland defense operations.
“As long as we continue to solely focus and rely on terrestrial-based … sensors, there will be gaps and seams in our coverage,” Buckley said at an Association of the United States Army (AUSA) air and missile defense forum in Arlington, Va. “Our adversaries are actively working to exploit any of these gaps and seams. I’m not saying that space isn’t without its flaws, but I believe it’s time that we take a hard look at space as an option.”
Space-based sensors offer several advantages, including near-global coverage, less vulnerability to attack and the ability to be deployed without needing permission from a host nation, Buckley said. But the high cost of space-based sensors could be a major obstacle.
In August, Navy Vice Adm. Jim Syring, director of the U.S. Missile Defense Agency (MDA), said his agency will eventually need to field new space-based sensors to track increasingly advanced threats, including hypersonics and intercontinental ballistic missiles. For now, MDA is pursuing a relatively modest effort, the Space-based Kill Assessment (SKA), which aims to deploy a network of small sensors on commercial satellites in fiscal year 2018 to help evaluate the results of missile defense tests.
“If SKA is successful, we will work closely with the combatant commanders to determine what the next potential steps should be,” MDA spokesman Christopher Johnson told Defense Daily. “But we believe a future operational space layer, focused on robust sensing, is essential for missile defense.”
Buckley suggested that sensor improvements are a higher priority for missile defense than a proposal to build a third Ground-based Midcourse Defense (GMD) long-range interceptor site, which is intended to better defend against Iranian missiles. MDA is conducting an environmental impact study on three potential GMD locations, all in the eastern U.S., and USNORTHCOM will provide an operational assessment of those locations.
“I think if you asked” Air Force Gen. Lori Robinson, USNORTHCOM’s commander, “she would say that the threat is something that we watch each and every day out of Iran,” Buckley said. “But right now, if she had any more money to spend, she would put it into better sensors. Obviously, if that threat continues to grow, an East Coast site would become even more important.”
Other speakers at the AUSA event highlighted other shortfalls in the collection and sharing of threat information.
Maj. Gen. Glenn Bramhall, commanding general of the 263rd Army Air and Missile Defense Command, said the Army continues to need persistent, wide-area surveillance to detect cruise missiles fired at the homeland. The Army’s Joint Land Attack Cruise Missile Defense Elevated Netted Sensor System (JLENS) was designed to provide such monitoring, but its fate became uncertain after one of the program’s unmanned, tethered, balloon-like aerostats broke free at Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland and drifted into Pennsylvania in 2015.
“I believe in this capability,” Bramhall said. With JLENS, “I was counting aircraft coming out of Logan [International Airport in Boston]. If I can count aircraft coming out of Logan, guess what, I can pick up a cruise missile.”
Army Gen. Vincent Brooks, commander of United Nations Command/Combined Forces and U.S. Forces Korea, said U.S. missile defense systems should talk to each other more. He also wants to make it easier for allies to integrate their sensors and shooters with American systems. Speaking by video teleconference, Brooks also said that Japan and South Korea have increased their sharing of early-warning information but that rocky relations between the countries remain a barrier to greater collaboration.