The successful interception of a dummy ICBM this week is more evidence the U.S. will outpace North Korean missile technology through 2020, Vice Adm. Jim Syring, the director of the Missile Defense Agency, said Wednesday.
The test replicated the technology North Korea might be using three years from now based on U.S. intelligence estimates, and it cleared the way the next more complicated test of the Ground-base Midcourse Defense (GMD) system next year, said Syring, who briefed reporters at the Pentagon on the Tuesday intercept over the Pacific Ocean.
“What we see in 2020 … was very well replicated in the test that we conducted yesterday,” Syring said. “I was confident before the test that we have the capability to defeat any threat that they would throw at us and I’m even more confident today after seeing the intercept test yesterday that we continue to be on that course.”
A redesigned GMD kill vehicle scored the first direct hit of a dummy ICBM thousands of miles from the U.S. coast and northeast of Hawaii.
“We have indications it was a direct hit, a complete obliteration, but we will analyze the lethality data over the next 30 days and literally we’ve got to get down to determining within which centimeter on the RV did it hit,” Syring said.
The successful test, long in the planning, was cited as a key milestone in missile defense as North Korea barrels toward development of a nuclear-tipped ICBM capable of hitting U.S. territory, and regime leader Kim Jong Un promised a bigger “gift package” after its latest missile test Monday.
Syring said the next test will likely occur in the fall of 2018 and involve multiple kill vehicles.
“We want to exercise the GMD system with more than one interceptor to gather data for what a first interceptor would do in terms of kill and what this second interceptor would see and this is really a desire of the operational test community to see this scenario, which is the next step in ever increasing operational realism,” he said.
The Missile Defense Agency also plans to flight test a redesigned kill vehicle in 2019 and has just budgeted a multi-object kill vehicle that could start development later this year and is slated for completion in 2025.
“We’re on a very good stepwise progression here of not only increasing reliability, but being ahead of where we believe the threat will go in terms of complexity countermeasures and ultimately consideration for capacity down the road,” Syring said.
The agency has accomplished 10 intercepts in 18 attempts since the missile defense system began development in 1999, and has seen increasing accuracy in the most recent attempts.
Each new launch brings improvements and valuable experience, according to Capt. Jeff Davis, a Pentagon spokesman.
But some critics have still panned the performance of the system, which has cost $28-$41 billion over its nearly two-decade development.
The U.S. can still not rely on it to defend against a long-range North Korean missile, said Philip Coyle, a senior science fellow at the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation.
“That is only a 40 percent success rate since early 2010. In school, 40 percent isn’t a passing grade,” said Coyle, who formerly headed the Pentagon’s office of operational test and evaluation.
