Blog

Philip Coyle, a missile defense skeptic and critic, was appointed by the president during a congressional recess to serve as associate director for the National Security and International Affairs in the White House’s Office of Science and Technology Policy.

Among other things, Coyle believes U.S. missile defense is unnecessary and doubts that rogue nations like Iran seek to attack the U.S. and its allies.

“In my view, Iran is not so suicidal as to attack Europe or the United States with missiles,” Coyle said last year.” He doubts Iran or North Korea would launch a missile attack against us.

Rebeccah Heinrichs, an adjunct fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, wrote about Coyle in March at The Politico.

“President Barack Obama has nominated an anti-missile defense adviser who may soon receive congressional approval — and put Americans in danger…Russia and China, two countries with nuclear weapons and effective long range ballistic missiles, have helped Iran develop its missile program. Other countries that range from the hostile to the unreliable — for example, North Korea, Syria and Pakistan — also have ballistic missile programs.”

In his 2008 congressional hearing testimony, Coyle claimed that Ground-based Midcourse Defense (GMD) isn’t effective enough to defend Europe and the U.S., but Heinrichs wrote that “a more complex version of GMD had completed a successful intercept test just months before. It is now the only system capable of defending the United States from long-range missiles.”

Despite threats from rogue states, the Obama administration has scaled back missile defense. In fact, some missile defense experts believe Obama compromised our nation’s security and our ability to defend ourselves in exchange for Russia signing the new START.

As Heinrichs said in her article, the new associate director for the National Security and International Affairs appears confident when it comes to rogues states acting rationally, but lacks confidence in his own country’s military leaders and engineers.

U.S. defense contractor Kratos was awarded a $4.9 million task order to support the AEGIS Ballistic Missile Defense. Specifically, Kratos will evaluate the suitability of combining a surplus Pedro rocket with the Oriole rocket, assess other alternative rocket systems, and support four rocket launches. (Source)

“We are extremely pleased to continue our support of NSWC PHD Detachment White Sands to provide a low cost solution to meet AEGIS BMD test and other technology development requirements,” said President of Kratos’s Defense Engineering Solutions Division David Carter said.

Last year, Kratos was awarded a task order worth $1.25 million to provide services for the AEGIS Ballistic Missile Defense for the Japanese Flight Test Mission.

The Missile Defense Agency (MDA) announced that the MDA and the U.S. Pacific Fleet successfully completed a series of exercises that tested the second-generation Aegis Ballistic Missile Defense (BMD) system, which tracked and simulated engagements of ballistic missile targets. The targets were launched over several months at the Kauai Test Facility. (MDA)

The sea-based, midcourse Aegis is part of the Ballistic Missile Defense System.

In October, MDA successfully completed a Hardware-in-the-Looptheater-level ground test, conducted to integrate new capabilities into the BMDS architecture. From the release:

“Ground tests play a vital role in the development of new technologies for missile defense by providing program officials detailed information about emerging hardware and software system functionality, while reducing the cost and schedule demands that would be required to provide the same information through an extensive flight test program. These efforts enable actual flight test data to be reconstructed and injected into geographically distributed HWIL representations of BMDS sensors and weapon systems. They also support development and validation of BMDS simulations for component weapon and sensor performance, communications, and interoperability, as well as threat and environment simulations. In this test, FCE-C HWIL provided a demonstration of the ability to conduct a system-level, theater-centric defense of critical assets.”