MDA to Use USS John Finn Destroyer for Hawaii Missile Shutdown Test

The Missile Defense Agency is approaching its planned Hawaii defense event with an Arleigh Burke destroyer and a Standard Missile-3 Block IIA, to prove that the ship can serve as a support for homeland defense systems with ground base if necessary.

The FTM-44 flight test, which was scheduled for May but was delayed due to COVID-19-related limitations, would prove that the SM-3 IIA could go beyond its originally designed scope and be used for stop an intercontinental ballistic missile, MDA Deputy Director Adm Jon said at an online conference this week. If successful, the SM-3 IIA destroyer and pairing would add another layer to the layered homeland protection model that MDA is developing.

An ICBM target is at the station at Kwajalein Atoll in Marshall Islands and USS based Pearl Harbor. John Fin (DDG-113) is ready to perform the test, Hill said.

He did not specify when the test would take place but said her mandate from the congregation would take place by the end of the year and that MDA and Marina were making final adjustments based on COVID’s ongoing restrictions.

Well ICBM will launch, the ship will maneuver and launch an SM-3 Block IIA outside its design space to take a trail of intercontinental ballistic missiles. It will be a pretty great event and I was looking forward to it, he said, calling it the first empirical data capture event to prove that the SM-3 IIA can be successful against this type of threat.

If successful, he said the Navy will need to determine how its fighters will use this homeland defense capability and which agencies to coordinate with, but he said the first step is to prove it is technologically feasible.

Even as the MDA pushes the boundaries of what is possible for Navy ships and weapons to contribute to ballistic missile defense for the homeland, Hill said he also has high hopes for Navys ability to contribute to defense against hypersonic weapons as well.

Today, a destroyer or cruiser equipped with an SM-6 would be the main defense for an aircraft carrier at sea with the missile going after its target in the terminal stage, as it approaches the aircraft carrier. Hill said relying on engaging in the terminal phase with an incoming threat is dangerous if the defense system is lost, has little time to regenerate and that the MDA is focused on trying to create a new network of sensors and revolvers in so that hypersensives can be hit earlier on sliding paths.

Where we would go in the future is to go back to that trajectory, to that sliding phase, where the hypersonic threat is most vulnerable. Thats where its bleeding from the energy, is not being maneuvered so much, it is quite easy to follow. And we know that based on real world data it collects, he said.

Hill said the MDA had a sliding phase prototype effort that we are working with the industry, but he explained that the MDA was taking a break to review the way forward. Hill said the ability to understand and track a threat was the number one priority for the effort, and while MDA has a vision for a more elegant solution in the long run, MDA needs to deploy a hypersonic defense system much faster than the program was on track. appropriate for.

As a result, MDA will follow two songs.

In the short term, we can take advantage of land-based and mobile sea-based systems today to get tracking data and get them into a system to manage tracking data and pass it to a shooter on land or at sea.

So we can now take a forward-based ship sensor, take what it sees, pass it to a shooting boat, and then get the right weapon up to the sliding stage. And that’s what was working now, now.

For the long term, MDA will continue to invest in science and technology that supports a hypersonic defense system with intermittent coverage and global tracking, and a new interceptor optimized to strike a hypersonic weapon during the sliding phase that will was a primary defense during the slide phase weapons and let the SM-6 capabilities based on the Navys ship as a terminal phase backup plan.

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