Everyone that works in strategic missile defense may now see some changes in how tests are conducted and operators are trained on new systems:
The U.S. Defense Department yesterday announced a new initiative aimed at producing missile defense exercises that are more realistic and test missile shield components more thoroughly (see GSN, March 24).
The Pentagon plans to start the program, dubbed “All Things Missile,” within the next two years, said Patrick McVay, joint exercises and training director for the U.S. Strategic Command.
“I don’t want to call ‘All Things Missile’ a system; it is a system of systems, if you will, or a single training capability that will go across all those capabilities,” McVay said in a press release.
The existing U.S. missile defense training framework cannot integrate data from more than one system, he noted: “If I’m using it, then [U.S. Northern Command] can’t train on it, or the guy on the Aegis (guided-missile) cruiser can’t train on it.”
“No (training) task happens in isolation; it’s always done in some kind of global context,” Gregory Knapp, head of the Joint Forces Command’s Joint Warfighting Center and Joint Training Directorate, said in the release. “The way we build the training environment allows us to bring in scenarios with very complex, multidimensional context, like what happens in the real world.”
The Missile Defense Agency, the various military services and some combatant commands would take part in the initiative, the Pentagon said (U.S. Defense Department release, April 28). [Global Security Newswire]
So what does this mean? Well it simply means these systems need to be tested and operators trained in more realistic conditions:
- A senior U.S. defense policy official said yesterday he wants to see more realistic tests of the emerging missile defense system (see GSN, Feb. 26).
“Generally speaking, the complaint is that most of our tests are not realistic and don’t simulate actual … conditions,” Peter Verga, the acting deputy defense policy head, said at a conference held by the Defense Department’s Missile Defense Agency. “I think anything the test community can do to reassure people that the tests are, in fact, operationally realistic is very important.”
Critics have said that missile defense tests thus far have largely failed to capture the element of a surprise launch under conditions that might particularly stress the system’s capability to intercept an enemy rocket. [Global Security Newswire]
So I take this to mean is that gone will be the days of tests where one missile intercepts a threat target at optional conditions. Making tests as operationally realistic as possible sounds like the right thing to do to me. What does everyone else think?
