ARTICLE

March 2004

Navy Prepares to Put Aegis Ships ‘On Alert’

by Sandra I. Erwin

The Navy is speeding up preparations to deploy a sea-based missile defense system by early 2005. But it has yet to deal with unsolved issues, such as the specific missions the service will be assigned in the overall U.S. missile-defense blueprint.

The Navy’s current plan is to deploy three Aegis surface combatants equipped with interceptor missiles capable of chasing short- and medium-range enemy ballistic missiles—with a range of about 500 kilometers to more than 3,000 kilometers. The ship-based interceptors would chase these missiles as they exit the atmosphere, and ram them before they reenter.

The Aegis BMD system employs the advanced SPY radar to detect and track enemy missiles, and the Standard Missile 3 as the interceptor weapon. The SM-3 is a three-stage missile.

If the Aegis system proves successful, it is expected to become a key component of an overarching system of missile defense “layers” that would protect the United States, deployed forces and allies around the world. The first layer would target missiles in the “boost” phase, the next layer would defend the “midcourse” phase, and the final layer would be set up as the last resort, to hit the incoming missile during the “terminal” phase. The most complex piece of this layered system is a ground-based mid-course defense, consisting of a network of early-warning radars, a sea-based X-band fire-control radar and interceptor missiles, based in Alaska and California.

The Defense Department is requesting $9.2 billion for missile defense programs in fiscal year 2005. Of that amount, $900 million will fund an “initial operational capability,” said a senior defense official. The IOC consists of 10 ground-based interceptor missiles (six in Alaska, four in California) and five sea-based interceptors aboard three Aegis ships.

With Aegis, the Navy can “take the defense forward,” closer to the suspected enemy launch sites, said Capt. Mac Grant, program director for ballistic missile defense engineering and integration. “It allows you more opportunities to shoot down the target,” he told a conference of the Surface Navy Association. “A layered defense allows you to do a much better job to attack enemy ballistic missiles in all phases of flight. ... We are not just talking about defending the United States, but also friends and allies and deployed U.S. forces.”

The Aegis BMD that will be deployed in early 2005 will be an “emergency” system, to be upgraded and improved over the next several years, said Grant. It is similar to what the Navy employed during the invasion of Iraq last year, when the USS Higgins was part of an Army-Navy air-defense network with the Patriot battery, defending U.S. forces in Kuwait. The Navy already has two Aegis cruisers — the USS Lake Erie and USS Port Royal — permanently assigned to missile defense duties.

The U.S. Strategic Command asked MDA to improve the system and “turn it over to the operator, so the operator can decide if they want to put it on alert,” said Grant. The actual deployment date has not been set.

The system will be put in operation, but also will become a test bed, he said. “When we deliver that system, we have to be able to concurrently continue testing.”

Meanwhile, Rear Adm. Kathleen Paige, program director for Aegis BMD, has been overseeing a “design review” of the next upgrade of the Navy Aegis tactical missile defense system, Grant said. The MDA expects “continuous deliveries of capabilities over the years.”

The next step would be to deploy an X-band radar at sea, to replace the Aegis Spy as the forward-based radar for the ground-based midcourse system. In the event of an attack against U.S. forces in South Korea, for example, operators in the United States would initialize and launch the missile from an Aegis system stationed off the coast of the Korean Peninsula.

Under the current plan, Aegis would defend against short and medium-range missiles only, but Navy officials plan to upgrade the system to make it capable of going after intercontinental ballistic missiles.

The expectation is that, “as we improve the integration of the overall BMD system, we will be able to use other systems’ sensors to provide external track information so that we can launch the SM-3 earlier and take out even longer range missiles,” said Grant. “There are a couple of ICBMs we are worried about, and more are coming.”

The MDA and the Navy have not yet settled on a definitive plan for how to defeat ICBMs. The Navy favors the development of a larger and faster interceptor missile.

ICBMs are not simply a longer-range version of Scuds or No-Dong missiles. They bring entirely different flight kinematics and sensor sensitivities, making them more difficult to defeat, said Grant.

The Missile Defense Agency is developing a Kinetic Energy Interceptor, a larger, more powerful variant of the SM-3, as a candidate for the boost-phase defense system that MDA wants to field by 2010, to defeat ICBMs.

Grant hinted that, most likely, the tests would be aboard a cargo ship at sea. “The geometry of firing at a very fast moving missile ... is driving us toward taking that testing to sea.”

MDA decided that the initial deployment of KEI will be on a ground-based mobile launcher, before it moves out to sea, in 2012 or so. A land-based system makes sense, according to MDA experts, because it would be faster to develop and less costly than a sea-based system.

The size of the KEI booster — about 36 inches in diameter, compared to 21 inches for the SM-3 — is a cause for concern, given the cost and the logistics implications.

Not only does the KEI have to be fast enough to go after an ICBM shortly after launch, but it also needs extra endurance to make up for possible deviations in the ICBM’s trajectory.

If MDA adopts the KEI for sea-based missile defense, the Aegis ships would have to be modified significantly, to fit the larger missiles. Another option contemplated is to make the launchers in the Navy’s next-generation cruiser, the CGX, compatible with the KEI.

The Navy awarded a nearly $4 billion contract to a Northrop Grumman-Raytheon team to develop the KEI and build five launchers over the next eight years, but there is still some confusion about what exactly KEI will be used for.

Among the options considered in recent years were to replace the Alaska-based midcourse defense boosters with KEI, even though the KEI is smaller than the ground-based interceptor missile.

Another alternative, later dismissed as impractical, was to make KEI a one-size-fits-all replacement for the SM-3.

Concept of Operations
Exactly how the Navy Aegis system will operate and integrate with other pieces of the MDA layered defense remains a work in progress, said Capt. Bill Ault, from the Joint Theater and Air Missile Defense Organization.

JTAMDO and MDA are responsible for the Aegis missile-defense operational concept and are helping the Strategic Command draft a “military utility assessment” of Aegis. That report, to be completed by July, intends to prove the “relevance” of the system, said Ault.

The integration of Aegis with the other missile defense layers and the “battle management, command and control” of the system are the most difficult hurdles ahead, said Rear Adm. C. Mike Moe, deputy surface warfare director for combat systems and weapons.

“BMC4I is the long pole,” he said. Even though he is buoyant by the four successful intercept tests (out of five attempts) of the Aegis BMD system, he cautioned that fixes are needed in the “command-and-control architecture and the C2 nodes.”

The commander of the Naval Surface Warfare Center, Rear Adm. Alan B. Hicks, expressed similar concerns.

Battle management and airspace “deconfliction,” are hard problems in ballistic missile defense, he said at the SNA forum. Another question is whether existing data links can support the multi-layer architecture envisioned by MDA.

As in most multibillion-dollar programs, there is bureaucratic infighting. One of the “turf battles,” said Hicks, revolves around who ultimately is responsible for the “joint architecture” of U.S. missile defense. “We’ll continue to fight those turf battles,” he said. “The outcome will be based on technical merit.”

Other participating agencies include the Joint Forces Command, the Space and Naval Warfare Systems Command, and the Naval Air Systems Command.

“We are asking the other services to contribute engineering talent,” said Hicks. “There is finite technical expertise.”

Another example of interagency wrangling is the replacement program for the Cobra Judy ship-based sensor suite, consisting of an S-band phased array and an X-band dish radar.

The plan is to replace the aging Cobra Judy with two new radars, said Hicks. “If you think working with MDA is hard enough, throw in the intelligence community. We are in a real kabuki dance over Cobra Judy.”

Capt. Al Haggerty, Navy program manager for radars, said that the Cobra Judy follow-on system likely will evolve into a sensor suite for the CGX cruiser.

The Navy Combined Fleet Forces Command, meanwhile, is studying the ramifications that putting the Aegis system on alert will have on the fleet overall. The analysis focuses on the area of coverage, patrol cycle time and the available ships in major theaters of war.

Most likely, those ships assigned to missile defense duties will be on station for years at a time, and the crews would swap in and out, said Vice Adm. Timothy W. LaFleur, commander of naval surface forces, U.S. Pacific Fleet. LaFleur has overseen “sea swapping” experiments in recent months, with successful results, he told reporters.

Missile defense critics, meanwhile, question the need to deploy a system within a year, when there is not an immediate threat on the horizon. Lawrence J. Korb, a former assistant secretary of defense during the Reagan administration, said the Defense Department is “rushing” to field a system that may not work. “The technology is not ready,” he said. The nation would be better off spending less money on missile defense and more on preventing WMD shipments from entering U.S. ports. There is a “theology” of missile defense, said Korb, that is not relevant to what is going on in the world.

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