The Ground-Based Interceptors’ (GBI) Exo-atmospheric Kill Vehicle (EKV) remains the Missile Defense Agency’s top priority and will hopefully prove itself successful in a flight test later this month, MDA Director Vice Adm. James Syring told the Senate Appropriations defense subcommittee Wednesday morning.
MDA hopes to pour $1.3 billion of its $7.5 billion funding request for fiscal year 2015 into homeland defense, which would center on both increasing the number of GBIs in the ground to 44 by 2017 and boosting the capability and producibility of the GBI’s kill vehicles.
(Photo courtesy Missile Defense Agency Photo)
“My highest priority remains the successful intercept flight test of the CE-II Exo-atmospheric Kill Vehicle,” Syring told the senators in his opening statement, referring to the second-generation Capability Enhancement-II EKV. After a December 2010 failure–which an investigation determined stemmed from vibrations that affected the navigation system–the CE-II GBI flew a successful non-intercept flight test in January 2013 and will now fly its first intercept test later this month.
Syring also said he was confident MDA had addressed the root cause of a first-generation CE-I kill vehicle failure in July 2013, when the EKV and booster failed to separate. He said MDA was working to correct the problem in the whole inventory by the end of the year.
More importantly, he said, “instead of continuing to make year-to-year reliability improvements in our GBIs, in FY ’15, we’re requesting to begin the redesign and improvement of the GBI EKV. The new EKVs will be more producible, testable, reliable and cost-effective, and eventually replace the kill vehicle used in our current GBI inventory.”
MDA requested $99.5 million for the redesign, which would bring a modular and open-architecture approach to the EKV design. Having common interfaces and standards would make upgrades easier and broaden the vendor and supplier base, Syring wrote in his written testimony to the subcommittee.
Syring told Defense Daily after the hearing that he stood by wanting to redesign the kill vehicle regardless of the outcome of this month’s flight test.
“Success or failure doesn’t change our path ahead,” he said. “If we have success, you would hear me no less vigorous about the need to redesign the kill vehicle. And the same if we fail.”
Syring added that a failure would not change the plan–accepting the CE-II GBI kill vehicles already under contract with Raytheon [RTN] and moving forward with the redesign–though it could affect the timeline of the military accepting delivery of the CE-IIs.
Subcommittee Chairman Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) asked about the consequence of a failed test flight during the hearing, and Syring told him that if there were to be a failure, “we would go through a very rigorous, very thorough failure review board process. If it turned out to be something very simple in terms of maybe the wrong weapons task plan was transmitted to the interceptor from the radar, or some issue that we haven’t seen before, we would quickly find out what happened, correct and try to get back to flight as soon as possible. But if it was another kill vehicle problem, which would now make us zero for three on this design, I think you would see us take a step back and assess taking delivery of the EKVs that we’re planning on taking delivery of after a successful flight test.”
Durbin also asked about the military having to pay for additional testing if the contractor was at fault for the failed test. Syring said that under the new GBI contract, MDA could hold the contractor responsible and recoup some of the cost of the flight test in certain circumstances.
Also during the hearing, Syring addressed the GBI’s long-range discrimination radar for which he requested $79.5 million in FY ’15 funding. Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) said she was encouraged by the development and fielding schedule but concerned that the House Appropriations Committee did not support funding the project until more details are available. She asked Syring about the procurement and fielding plan, and he told her that “I’m on a very aggressive timeline to award this radar in FY ’15 to meet the FY ’20 capability, which I view as critical.” He said to expect a contract award in the next few months.
To deal with the threat of a barrage of missiles, “we must have the discrimination capability of a radar to counter that, to keep our shot doctrine manageable and to defeat raid sizes of more than one,” Syring said. “And I view it as, in conjunction with the EKV redesign that I asked for in this budget as well, the two most critical components of the [Ground-based Midcourse Defense] program going forward.”