US Missile Defense Agency

@GarryB

Actually I believe there is currently a moratorium on putting weapons in space.

Equally even if their wasn't the Earth is round. US air and space defences are oriented to its north, but Russian missiles could operate in the FOBS mode or fractional orbital bombardment system mode where instead of firing missiles over the north pole to attack targets in the US directly that one is fired in the opposite direction over the south pole into partial earth orbit... when it is directly over the US it can be deorbited into the upper atmosphere and detonated to generate an enormous electro magnetic pulse.
Lots of hardened electronics will survive, but most high tech modern stuff is very vulnerable... the more high tech the more vulnerable it is... it is one of those cases where 95nm chips are better than 45nm chips.
Another effect is that the air over the US will be ionised so radar will be useless for about 30 minutes, which is going to make tracking incoming threats impossible.

The U.S. Defense Support Program early warning satellites, first launched in 1970, enabled the US to detect a FOBS launch.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FOBS

So US is able to detect incoming threat afterall!!

an ICBM has 3 phases

1. Boosting
   
2. Mid
   
3. Terminal
   

Now tell me if an ICBM is launched how can US predict the trajectory of incoming ICBM ??
My understanding is (you can prove me wrong ) that once the ICBM is in terminal phase i.e its warheads reenter the atmosphere at a speed <<10Mach no one can predict its trajectory owing to the presence of maneuverable reentry vehicle.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maneuverable_reentry_vehicle

& also one can't predict while its in boosting phase; I think while in mid-phase being in orbit makes its movement somewht known however do the US have means to pinpoint this threat even in orbital coarse!!
Early warning Satellites as the name implies only can warn you but can't giv adequate info to intercept the coming threats (warheads). I think EWS depends on IR detection which by no means are capable to giv exact coordinates they can only ascetain whether the threat  is close or far nothing else!! because unlike radars these detectors only can receive the heat signature; oneway communication not two way like in radar...  

What you think??

So US is able to detect incoming threat afterall!!

A single launch of one rocket from Baikonur that heads south over the south pole and comes up over the continent of north america... what is the US going to do about it?

Shoot it down with the ABM system in Alaska?

They wont know it is a FOBs till it detonates and it doesn't have to detonate the first time around... or the 5th.

Just put the warhead in a stable orbit and every 90 minutes you can send a signal and it will fire a retro rocket and deorbit over the US to an optimum height to create an EMP pulse that covers the entire US (except maybe Hawaii).

My understanding is (you can prove me wrong Very Happy ) that once the ICBM is in terminal phase i.e its warheads reenter the atmosphere at a speed <<10Mach no one can predict its trajectory owing to the presence of maneuverable reentry vehicle.

Most MARVs are designed to initiate course corrections as the warhead falls to earth to improve accuracy. The manouvers are nothing like the manouvers needed to evade an interceptor and the targets are fixed items.
Western MARVS are designed for maximum accuracy to get as close to the target as possible and has no way of detecting incoming interceptors or being able to manouver off target to evade those interceptors and then manouver again back on target.
The exception is of course the MARV of the TOPOL-M which has been specifically designed to perform manouvers to evade interceptors directed at intercepting it.

& also one can't predict while its in boosting phase; I think while in mid-phase being in orbit makes its movement somewht known however do the US have means to pinpoint this threat even in orbital coarse!!

Ballistic missiles are actually ballistic... in other words for 5-10 minutes the rockets burn, usually three stages of burn, with the first the largest, and the last normally to get the missile to the correct speed and correct trajectory to hit the target area. The third stage carries the warhead bus that releases MIRVs on targets as it flys past them.
Because of the distance between targets after the boost phase the targets can be estimated but until the warheads are released from the bus you really don't know what the actual targets are.

EW satellites use all sorts of methods for detection, and include IR. TOPOL-M has a high energy shorter burn rocket motor designed to minimise the amount of time during the boost phase it can be intercepted.
During the boost phase an ICBM or SLBM is extremely vulnerable because they are emitting enormous amounts of heat and to target them you just fire a missile or projectile at the dark spot on top of the enormous plume of fire.
In the mid course phase the warhead bus might perform some manouvers to correct its flight path, but likely it will use low power cold gas thrusters and its temperature will purely be determined by whether the sun is shining on it or if it is in shadow.

@GarryB

I am yet to hear from your side that what be the system that can be exploited against the warheads to giv adequate coordinates to launch an interceptor??

If you look at the suggested ABM system in Europe it consisted of a very large X band radar to detect the incoming target and plot its trajectory and several high speed interceptors launched to reach potential intercept points at specific times.

It requires calculations in 4 dimensions but for most targets it is not a huge problem because most targets try to keep to a strictly ballistic path and are relatively predictible.

For terminal guidance a mix of IIR and radar are your main options and for targets that are merely correcting their path for accuracy purposes that should be fine.
For a target actively trying to evade then it is almost impossible.

The intercept point for a target travelling at a modest 8km per second, if it is out by 1 second you miss the target by 8kms. That is over the targets 10,000km flight, if you are out by 1 degree or one second you miss. Your interceptor rocket is travelling very fast too but it can't get to the intercept point and hover and wait, you are hitting a bullet with a bullet... hard at the best of times, near impossible if the target is manouvering specifically to evade your interceptor... and there is no reason why that incoming target wont have an active jammer or flares too.
Above the atmosphere a decoy acts like a warhead... even when the decoy is mms thick sheet metal hollow cone... your warhead bus could carry hundreds stacked inside each other.

Does Russia have any concern this could be a tactical weapon and part of the missile defense shield or even a tactical weapon:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Webb_Space_Telescope

Could it's massive mirrors take the suns energy from 900,000 miles from Earth and then direct that energy beam at another satellite or even the Hubble Telescope to fire directed energy down at Earth?

I think this has a Defense use rather than "scientific". Maybe why they worked so hard on figuring out an orbit that will keep it in the same orbit as Earth. Constant capability.


Many Americans have been unemployed so money could be freed up to make that weapon. If it was for "science" such a project should have been funded by the UN to make sure it couldn't be used as a weapon.

Does Russia have any concern this could be a tactical weapon and part of the missile defense shield or even a tactical weapon:

It would be a very inefficient weapon.

An easy target.

Early telescopes used shaped glass to bend light to magnify the image and make it appear closer. As the bits of glass got bigger however to make the image appear closer and closer it was found that there is a problem with bending light with glass.

Any glass prism will show that white light is made up of all the colours of the rainbow and when you shine light through glass the light tends to separate into its separate colours so images got colourful halos of bright colours.

The solution was to use a mirror so the light coming from a long way away comes into an open tube with no glass at the front to hit the bottom of the tube which is lined with a large flat mirror which both reflects and focuses the image back up to about half way up the tube to a small mirror that redirects the focused image sideways out of the tube to a small lens that can be used to adjust the focus to get a sharp clear image.

In big powerful telescopes replace the small mirror half way up the tube with an incredibly expensive CCD light sensor with a 100 mega pixel or better performance.
The sensor blocks some of the light so the mirror in the bottom of the telescope might have a bare centre, but to look at things as close as 100km away or as far away as distant galaxies you need to be able to very accurately flex the mirror to the correct focal length to properly focus the image. Because of the huge range of distances the CCD detector might move up and down the tube a bit as well, but the point is that the long tube in front of the mirror will make it very very difficult to catch sunlight and redirect it at something on the Earth... especially as the telescope itself will be zipping along at orbital speeds.

In this system however the mirrors are exposed and shielded from sunlight by a large shield.

The CCD sensor will be mounted somewhere on the craft and the mirrors will be angled to direct a view of the target into the sensor.

The system will be located near a Lagrange point to avoid entering the earths shadow... which is perfectly normal for a solar powered satellite

A Lagrange point is an area of zero real gravity.

In Earth orbit an object like the ISS is subject to Earths gravity... it keeps falling in a curve but because it is going so fast it misses landing on earth, or conversely it is trying to fly away from the earth but keeps falling back towards it enough so that its distance from earth never increases.
On board the ISS everything is "falling" at the same rate and appears to be weightless, but from an energy point of view every once in a while the engines need to be fired to maintain its orbital height.

To explain a Lagrange point it is a point of balanced or doubled or halved gravity. Think about the Earth and the moon.
Both have their own gravity though the Earths gravity is more powerful than the Moons gravity because the Earth has more mass.
If you were to move in a direct line from the Earth to the Moon for the first three quarters of the trip the Earths gravity would be the dominant force on you so if released or suddenly stopped in relation to both objects you would fall to Earth and not the the Moon.
As you get closer to the moon however the effect of the moons gravity will increase and the effect of the Earths gravity will diminish because gravity is directly related to the square of distance. Eventually you will reach a point where the earths gravity equals the moons gravity and they balance out. If you stopped there you would stay there and not fall towards either the moon or the Earth... the gravity of the Earth would stop you falling toward the Moon but the gravity of the Moon would stop you falling toward the Earth.
That is a Lagrange point.
Lagrange point 1 actually.
Lagrange point 2 for the Earth and the moon would be beyond the moon the distance where the gravity of the moon and the earth are equal again.

In this case L2 for the Sun and the Earth is shown on this diagram:



As anyone knows the closer to the sun the faster an object needs to go to prevent falling into that sun, so an object at the L2 position will be in about an 800,000km larger radius orbit than the Earth is... so if it wasn't an L2 point... if it was ahead or behind the Earth it would rapidly fall behind Earth. In the L2 point however it has the Sun and the Earths combined gravity to nudge it along and keep it in place so only a tiny amount of energy will be needed to keep it in place.

It is a bit like Cyclists using slipstreaming in a bike race to reduce the amount of energy they need to burn to hold position by getting in behind another cyclist. Of course this works because the cyclist in front is doing work pushing through the undisturbed air, which is work the cyclist behind does not have to expend energy doing. In space there is no air.

There is a stable Lagrange point between the Earth and the Sun though the passage of Venus and Mercury will upset an object at that point.

This satellite will orbit the L2 Lagrange point so it will fly in a circle around the L2 point. It is called a Halo orbit because from the ground looking directly up at the L2 point the satellites orbital path looks like a circle around that point.
At the L2 point the Earth would be constantly blocking some of the sunlight, but flying a halo orbit around L2 gives you all the gravity boost advantages of the L2 point plus the constant sunlight to the solar panels.
The sunshield also never needs adjusting because the telescope will always point away from the Sun (and Earth).

Personally I think if they really wanted a space based energy weapon they wouldn't put it on anything so public.

Equally space based energy weapons are overrated. A laser weapon will suffer about a 1mm divergence per metre of travel, so from 100km up the laser when it hits the ground will be 100m across... which is pointless for anything except ranging.

A over 1 million kms past Earths orbit this system (ie the CCD sensor and mirrors) would be damaged by exposure to the solar wind and the intense heat of direct sunlight.
To retain its shape the mirrors need to be kept at a constant temperature... shining sunlight on them would unevenly heat them leading to warped and useless mirrors till they were cooled down again or fully heated to an even max temperature. That even high temperature would probably melt or damage the mirrors which will normally be kept cryogenically cool to observe deep space objects.

It is designed to take light coming from millions of kms or trillions of light years and focus it on a point within the area of the spacecraft itself... it says it has a focal distance of 131m which means focusing on targets on Earth would be impossible anyway. At 800,000km away from the Earth and facing away from the Earth and the Sun there is zero chance this system could be used against anything on Earth or the Satellites in Earth orbit... even geostationary objects are much lower than this.

GarryB wrote:

Does Russia have any concern this could be a tactical weapon and part of the missile defense shield or even a tactical weapon:

It would be a very inefficient weapon.

An easy target.

How many missions has Russia sent to Mars that failed? 30? 40? Deep Space isn't Russia's forte.

Any asset you put out there is pretty safe. The laser on the moon could zap any attempt to get out there.

"an inefficient weapon"?

Pick up a book:

""An introduction to atmospheric radiation"" By Kuo-Nan Liou. The suns emissions if focused with a mirror could overload your satellites ability to release heat. Hence why Satellites have gone offline the last year. The sun alone took those satellites out. Now imagine you had a mirror setup able to focus that energy onto an ant...I mean satellite....burn baby burn.

Have another satellite able to re-direct that energy to Earth.....and you sir have THE most powerful weapon.

One has already been fired at Earth. It was more powerful than they expected. October .....come on who knows the year?

Some interesting observation on KKV

Ballistic Missile Defense: A Significant Advance in Missile Defense Criticism Evasion Technology

Good Read . Plus take MARV into the equation and Ballistic Missile Defense becomes redundant.

Did Star Wars Help End the Cold War? Soviet Response to the SDI Program

Cruise Missile Defense a Higher US Defense Priority


United States military is shifting its focus from ballistic missile defense to defending the US homeland against cruise missile attacks.

  Homeland cruise missile defense is shifting above regional ballistic defense in my mind, as far as importance goes,” Admiral Winnefeld said in a speech at the Center for Strategic International Studies.On Friday, the US House of Representatives passed a budget with a specific provision directing the Department of Defense to develop a strategy to detect and defeat Russian cruise missiles.

In recent months, the United States has started testing its Joint Land-Attack Cruise Missile Elevated Netted Sensor (JLENS) System to detect incoming cruise missiles and other low-flying objects around the Washington, DC area.

Winnefeld commented that the United States is working to put JLENS in place as well as other systems to enhance its early warning capability.
The US Department of Defense will also be focused on “changing out” some of the older systems currently used to intercept a cruise missile heading toward Washington, DC.

Eventually, advanced cruise missile defense systems will be set up to defend other “important” parts of the United States, but not the entire country, Winnefeld noted, adding that budgetary constraints limit the extent of missile defense.

The Defense Department requested a total of $8.8 billion in appropriations for 2016 to support all aspects of US missile defense, including programs to counter cruise missile threats.




http://sputniknews.com/military/20150519/1022338708.html#ixzz3bSkE0a9g


EXPLAIN WHAT JLENS IS EXACTLY ? I GUESS IT IS A COPY OS RUSSIA'S ABM ? ISN'T IT

Thanx and Garry can you explain what JLENS is and how washington d.c. can defend itself from cruise missile attack as you mentioned no nation can avoid fully an incoming cruise missile attack .

My question is : -

1) What do you mean by saboteur teams ?

2)What are PGSS missiles ?
3)they are sort of cruise missiles or what ?
4)Are these the same missile ussa wants to deploy in Romania ?
5)you can DETECT AND NEUTRALIZE PGSS MISSILES VIA SENSORS USED TO CAMOUFLAGE TANKS ?

What is the point of saboteur teams if you can't find the targets with satellites?

remember the problems the US had finding Scud missiles in Iraq even though Iraq is not a huge country and they had total air control, not to mention it is further south so satellites in geostationary orbits get a better view and there was no one interfering with their satellites...

How on earth are those saboteur teams supposed to track down and attack those trains before they find a siding... pull over and launch their missiles?

Next you will be claiming they can send those very same teams to follow Russian SSBNs around the ocean able to sink them on command too....

Nakidka defeats PGMs because if the munition can't see a target then it can't hit it. Just the same as optical guidance is effected by colour camouflage... if you can't see the man in the trees then you can't effectively shoot him...

GunshipDemocracy wrote: Who says that saboteurs have to be Seals or Green Berets? Why not bunch of pravosekov or Islamic suicide cr@p controlled by Saudis? In ever ycase Russian genrals did nt oshare your optimism guys (both you and Garry) and  already BTR-80  are accompanying Yars launchers.

because they'll promptly get the shit kicked out of them by Russian MVD troops. right now life expectancy of such dregs is measured in a handful of months; get the whole country on high alert and that turns to few days, if not hours.

GunshipDemocracy wrote:
2-3 monts ago there was info about new counter-saboteur APC with drones and accompanied by armed robots.  With sniper and motion detectors in ranges like 2km.

why not? UGVs are perfect for convoy escort- better sensors, better weaponry and most especially better endurance/persistence. they are remote controlled for now, but there is no issue with switching them to automatic. convoy guards are prolly instructed to immediately open fire on whatever they see that isnt friendly.

GunshipDemocracy wrote:
PGS AFAIK Prompt Global Strike - they do not have to send 1 missile but as many as they like if you can guess with enough accuracy where train CAN be.

congratulations, you just bankrupted your country and restarted a new nuke arms race for real!

GunshipDemocracy wrote:
EW - well what about optical tracking form orbit?

insufficient to say the least.

you got it wrong . PGSS means Persistent Ground Surveillance Systems . NOT PGS Prompt Global Strike . US thinks it is The Best Defense Against Cruise Missiles . It is a giant surveillance Blimp .It is just like JLENS Joint Land Attack Cruise Missile Defense Elevated Netted Sensor . JLENS is basically a way for folks (like NORAD) to watch for low-flying cruise missiles (a.k.a. exploding drones without round trip tickets) and aircraft .

JLENS aerostats are deployed in pairs called "orbits." One blimp carries a giant search radar system while the other has high-powered targeting radar. The search radar looks for interesting stuff — up to 340 miles away — so that the tracking radar can pinpoint the interesting thing and pass that info along to other people in the air defense ecosystem, who can then check it out, shoot at it, or whatever.

At some point in the 1990s — back when people were flapping their gums about the pros and cons of defending against intercontinental ballistic missiles — during a periodic debate over missile defense, some bright spark observed that not all incoming nuclear missiles were necessarily going to be suborbital vehicles screaming in from space on ballistic trajectories. There's an entire universe of nuclear-armed cruise missiles that you need to pay attention to as well. If you're going to be doing "missile defense" you probably ought to defend against all the missiles — including cruise missiles.


Read it here : https://news.vice.com/article/the-best-defense-against-cruise-missiles-might-be-this-giant-surveillance-blimp



Actually i wanted to discuss this stuff here earlier that how come JLENS or PGSS surevillance blimps will pinpoint russian cruise missiles so that their air defenses norad can shoot it down ?

you got it wrong . PGSS means Persistent Ground Surveillance Systems . NOT PGS Prompt Global Strike . US thinks it is The Best Defense Against Cruise Missiles . It is a giant surveillance Blimp .It is just like JLENS Joint Land Attack Cruise Missile Defense Elevated Netted Sensor . JLENS is basically a way for folks (like NORAD) to watch for low-flying cruise missiles (a.k.a. exploding drones without round trip tickets) and aircraft .

So it is a defensive system that flys over your own territory watching for incoming cruise missiles... WTF has that to do with trains carrying ICBMs?

Do you think the Russians will just let the US move a couple of large airships to operate over their airspace and look for missile trains?

A train vs an airship sounds like one of those crap US movies... snakes vs crocodiles or sharktapus.... part shark and part octapus...

The missile armed train would probably have a few S-400s and S-500s on it that could shoot down the air ship...

JLENS aerostats are deployed in pairs called "orbits." One blimp carries a giant search radar system while the other has high-powered targeting radar. The search radar looks for interesting stuff — up to 340 miles away — so that the tracking radar can pinpoint the interesting thing and pass that info along to other people in the air defense ecosystem, who can then check it out, shoot at it, or whatever.

So two airships emitting enormous beams of radar waves that any anti radiation missile could spot from enormous distances.... an ARM version of Iskander would be ideal I suspect... especially with a cluster munition warhead...

Actually i wanted to discuss this stuff here earlier that how come JLENS or PGSS surevillance blimps will pinpoint russian cruise missiles so that their air defenses norad can shoot it down ?

The Russians have already sold airship based monitoring systems to China for use in mountainous areas... I rather suspect they are working on all sorts of variations...

are these  american PGSS JLENS blimps act like russian  manpad igla and verba radars ? 

gunship democracy mentioned about PGSS .

Russians sold such similar aerostats to Chinese ? so it means russians did use such blimps for cruise missiles detection ?

no gunship you are wrong . militarization of space is against the treaty and even if usa do so x-37b cant be used to carry nuclear missiles . remember russia tested Buran otv to examine that only whay you said .

gunship read back your comment you mentioned pgss . pgss is a sensor tech ussa uses to pinpoint cruise missiles fired at them 
 pgs can be done only via hypersonic glider . that glider cant carry nuke warhead both ussa and china were testing their prototypes .

You guys need to remember that Russias radar and satellite coverage in terms of detecting missile launches of various types, is world renound. In other words, Russia sees the launches. Much like how they detected Israeli missile launches. If they see a launch and already know trajectory, they will retaliate.

They will also see cruise missiles as that is what various low/med altitude radars look for besides choppers.

are these  american PGSS JLENS blimps act like russian  manpad igla and verba radars ?

Don't know much about them to be honest... in comparison the radars that operate with MANPADS teams in Russia are integrated into the IADS and would share and receive information with other assets within the network.

Clearly they are intending to use airships to reduce costs while maximise loiter time and offer excellent low altitude coverage with an airborne platform... the Russian models sold to china could operate unmanned for about 3 months at a time.

so it means russians did use such blimps for cruise missiles detection ?

To cover inaccessible mountainous regions they are ideal and much cheaper than a fixed wing aircraft...

well, my assumption is that US is preparing to strike first. So thye know when PGS missiles are to strike. The whole concept is based on reaching any point of planet with less then hour. So more less 20,000km/s if my math is correct. PGS are supposed to be cheaper then ICBMs otherwise why to change? In such case you to not need really to know which train is missile one. You cut tracks with explosions in area where train can be and bomb every train you spot. Stil lgood tradeoff if you can eliminate 6x10 nuclear warheads.

A million kms of tracks why should it matter if a few hundred kms are cut... that wont stop the trains from launching their missiles... the problem is not just to find the missile trains amongst the hundreds of thousands of other trains on the tracks, but you also have to kill those trains before those trains can launch their missiles... which takes less than an hour BTW...

I got more info on this Blimp thing , it might help you to clear my doubt as : how Russian cruise missiles can evade them?


Pentagon Building Cruise Missile Shield To Defend US Cities From Russia

The military moves to set up an expensive sensor-and-shooter network, but is the threat real ?

The Pentagon is quietly working to set up an elaborate network of defenses to protect American cities from a barrage of Russian cruise missiles.

idea : The plan calls for buying radars that would enable National Guard F-16 fighter jets to spot and shoot down fast and low-flying missiles. Top generals want to network those radars with sensor-laden aerostat balloons hovering over U.S. cities and with coastal warships equipped with sensors and interceptor missiles of their own.

One of those generals is Adm. William Gortney, who leads U.S. Northern Command, or NORTHCOM, and North American Aerospace Defense Command, or NORAD.


Earlier this year, Gortney submitted an “urgent need” request to put AESA radars on the F-16s that patrol the airspace around Washington. Such a request allows a project to circumvent the normal procurement process.

While no one will talk openly about the Pentagon’s overall cruise missile defense plans, much of which remain classified, senior military officials have provided clues in speeches, congressional hearings and other public forums over the past year. The statements reveal the Pentagon’s concern about advanced cruise missiles being developed by Russia.

“We’re devoting a good deal of attention to ensuring we’re properly configured against such an attack in the homeland, and we need to continue to do so,” Adm. Sandy Winnefeld, vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said during a May 19 speech at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, in Washington.

In recent years, the Pentagon has invested heavily, with mixed results, in ballistic missile defense: preparations to shoot down long-range rockets that touch the edge of space and then fall toward targets on Earth. Experts say North Korea and Iran are the countries most likely to strike the U.S. or its allies with such missiles, although neither arsenal has missiles of sufficient range so far.

But the effort to defend the U.S. mainland against smaller, shorter-range cruise missiles has gone largely unnoticed.

“While ballistic missile defense has now become established as a key military capability, the corresponding counters to cruise missiles have been prioritized far more slowly,” said Thomas Karako, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, in Washington. “In some ways, this is understandable, in terms of the complexity of the threat, but sophisticated cruise missile technologies now out there are just not going away and we are going to have to find a way to deal with this — for the homeland, for allies and partners abroad, and for regional combatant commanders.”

Intercepting cruise missiles is far different from shooting down a missile of the ballistic variety. Launched by ships, submarines, or even trailer-mounted launchers, cruise missiles are powered throughout their entire flight. This allows them to fly close to the ground and maneuver throughout flight, making them difficult for radar to spot.

“A handful of senior military officials, including several current or past NORTHCOM commanders, have been among those quietly dinging the bell about cruise missile threats, and it’s beginning to be heard,” Karako said.

While many of the combatant commanders — the 4-star generals and admirals who command forces in various geographic regions of the world — believe cruise missiles pose a threat to the United States, they have had trouble convincing their counterparts in the military services who decide what arms to buy.


Fast-track requests like Gortney’s demand for new radars on F-16s have been used over the past decade to quickly get equipment to troops on the battlefield. Other urgent operational needs have included putting a laser seeker on a Maverick missile to strike fast-moving vehicles and to buy tens of thousands of MRAP vehicles that were rushed to Iraq to protect soldiers from roadside bomb attacks.

Last August, at a missile defense conference in Huntsville, Ala., then-NORTHCOM and NORAD commander Gen. Charles Jacoby criticized the Army and other services for failing to fund cruise missile defense projects. NORTHCOM, based in Colorado, is responsible for defending the United States from such attacks.

“I’m trying to get a service to grab hold of it … but so far we’re not having a lot of success with that,” Jacoby said when asked by an attendee about the Pentagon’s cruise missile defense plans. “I’m glad you brought that up and gave me a chance to rail against my service for not doing the cruise missile work that I need them to do.”

But since then, NORTHCOM has been able to muster support in Congress and at the Pentagon for various related projects. “We’ve made a case that growing cruise missile technology in our state adversaries, like Russia and China, present a real problem for our current defenses,” Jacoby said.

One item at the center of these plans is a giant aerostat called JLENS, short for the Joint Land Attack Cruise Missile Defense Elevated Netted Sensor System. The Pentagon is testing the system at Maryland’s Aberdeen Proving Ground, a sprawling military complex north of Baltimore. Reporters have even been invited to see the tethered airship, which hovers 10,000 feet in the air.


WORKING: JLENS carries a powerful radar on its belly that Pentagon officials say can spot small moving objects – including cruise missiles – from Boston to Norfolk, Va., headquarters of the U.S. Navy’s Atlantic Fleet. Since it’s so high in the air, it can see farther than ground radars.

JLENS is in the early stages of a three-year test phase, but comments by senior military officials indicate the Pentagon in considering expanding this use of aerostats far beyond the military’s National Capital Region district.

“This is a big country and we probably couldn’t protect the entire place from cruise missile attack unless we want to break the bank,” Winnefeld said. “But there are important areas in this country we need to make sure are defended from that kind of attack.”

New missile interceptors could also play a role in the network too.

“We’re also looking at the changing-out of the kinds of systems that we would use to knock down any cruise missiles headed towards our nation’s capital,” Winnefeld said.

Ground-launched versions of ship- and air-launched interceptors could be installed around major cities or infrastructure, experts say. Raytheon, which makes shipborne SM-6 interceptors, announced earlier this year that it was working on a ground-launched, long-range version of the AMRAAM air-to-air missile.

The improvements make the missiles “even faster and more maneuverable,” the company said in a statement when the announcement was made at the IDEX international arms show in Abu Dhabi in February.


The Threat

Driving the concern at the Pentagon is Russia’s development of the Kh-101, an air-launched cruise missile with a reported range of more than 1,200 miles.

“The only nation that has an effective cruise missile capability is Russia,” Gortney said at a March 19 House Armed Services strategic forces subcommittee hearing.

Russian cruise missiles can also be fired from ships and submarines. Moscow has also developed containers that could potentially conceal a cruise missile on a cargo ship, meaning it wouldn’t take a large nation’s trained military to strike American shores.

“Cruise missile technology is available and it’s exportable and it’s transferrable,” Jacoby said. “So it won’t be just state actors that present that threat to us.”

During the 2003 U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, American and Kuwaiti Patriot missiles intercepted a number of Iraqi ballistic missiles, Karako said. But they missed all five cruise missiles fired, including one fired at Marine headquarters in Kuwait. In 2006, Hezbollah hit an Israeli corvette ship with an Iranian-supplied, Chinese-designed, anti-ship cruise missile, Karako said.

Shooting down the missiles themselves is a pricy proposition, which has led Pentagon officials to focus on the delivery platform.

“The best way to defeat the cruise missile threat is to shoot down the archer, or sink the archer, that’s out there,” Gortney said at an April news briefing at the Pentagon.

An existing network of radars, including the JLENS, and interceptors make defending Washington easier than the rest of the country.

“[T]he national capital region is the easier part in terms of the entire kill chain,” Maj. Gen. Timothy Ray, director of Global Power Programs in the Air Force acquisition directorate, said in March at a House Armed Services Tactical Air and Land Forces Subcommittee hearing. “We remain concerned about the coverage for the rest of the country and the rest of the F-16 fleet.”

Winnefeld said that the JLENS and “other systems we are putting in place” would “greatly enhance our early warning around the National Capital Region.”

In an exercise last year, the Pentagon used a JLENS, an F-15, and an air-to-air missile to shoot down a simulated cruise missile. In the test, the JLENS locked on to the cruise missile and passed targeting data to the F-15, which fired an AMRAAM missile. The JLENS then steered the AMRAAM into the mock cruise missile.


But there are many wild cards in the plans, experts say. While the JLENS has worked well in testing, it is not tied into the NORTHCOM’s computer network.
It was also tested in Utah where there was far less commercial and civil air traffic than East Coast, some of the most congested airspace in the world. At a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing in March, Gortney acknowledged the project is “not without challenges,” but said that’s to be expected in any test program.

It is also unclear whether the JLENS over Maryland spotted a Florida mailman who flew a small gyrocopter from Gettysburg, Penn., to the U.S. Capitol lawn in Washington, an hour-long flight through some of the most restricted airspace in the country. The JLENS has been long touted by its makers as being ideal for this tracking these types of slow-moving aircraft.

Gortney, in an April 29 House Oversight and Government Reform Committee hearing about the gyrocopter, told lawmakers the JLENS “has more promise” than other aerostat-mounted radars used by the Department of Homeland Security along the border with Mexico and in South Florida. He deferred his explanation to the classified session after the public hearing.

Experts say JLENS can not just spot but track and target objects like cruise missiles, making it better than other radars used for border security.

Raytheon has built two JLENS, the one at Aberdeen and another in storage and ready for deployment.

If a cruise missile were fired toward Washington, leaders would not have much time to react.

“Solving the cruise missile problem even for Washington requires not just interceptors to be put in place, but also redundant and persistent sensors and planning for what to do, given very short response times ", Karako said .


http://www.defenseone.com/threats/2015/06/pentagon-building-cruise-missile-shield-defend-us-cities-russia/115723/

THIS IS HOW THEY ARE EXPECTING JLENS TO WORK AGAINST RUSSIAN CRUISE MISSILES : to counter that threat, the Pentagon is working to install a high-tech radar system that would track incoming, low-flying missiles. Installed in aerostat balloons over major cities, as well as onboard warships off the coast, the radar would transmit warning signals to F-16 fighter jets if an enemy missile were detected.

The Pentagon has remained fairly quiet about the details of the missile defense shield, giving little indication of what the total cost would be to the taxpayer. But the cost of other failed defense shield attempts could provide some idea.


"While ballistic missile defense has now become established as a key military capability, the corresponding counters to cruise missiles have been prioritized far more slowly," Karako said.

  US NOW CAN SHOOT DOWN ALL SRBMS , IRBMS AND MRBMS . NOW THEY ARE GOING FOR
 CRUISE MISSILES .


http://sputniknews.com/us/20150619/1023606597.html