Congress holds the key to outpacing North Korea’s nuclear capabilities

While our nation is understandably focused upon election year politics, members of Congress and defense oversight committee staffers are wrestling with another challenge that will have serious repercussions of its own: production and passage of a National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) and Defense Appropriations Bill. 

As long as our government continues to operate under continuing resolutions, the fate of a number of critical, new Department of Defense programs hangs in the balance. Within the rapidly changing arena of ballistic missile defense, one such new initiative at the top of the Missile Defense Agency’s (MDA) list is the Next Generation Interceptor (NGI), a program MDA believes will finally place U.S. missile defenses out in front of the threats we face.

A credible and capable defense against a rogue nation, such as North Korea or Iran, and their intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) has been, and will continue to be, a national imperative.  

The threat is real and growing, especially with respect to North Korea. Recent open-source assessments conclude that North Korea possesses approximately 30 to 40 warheads within their inventory, the wherewithal to produce more, and has successfully miniaturized those warheads to enable carriage and delivery on their missiles.

In his 2019 posture statement to the Senate Armed Services Committee Strategic Forces Subcommittee, Air Force Gen. Terrence O’Shaughnessy, commander of North American Aerospace Defense Command and U.S. Northern Command, stated that “North Korea’s ICBM program turned the corner in 2017 when North Korea successfully flight-tested multiple ICBMs capable of ranging the continental United States and detonated a thermonuclear device, increasing the destructive yield of its weapons by a factor of ten.”  

While we cannot put too much stock in what North Korea chooses to share with the world, the North Koreans recently paraded out their largest ICBM we have seen to date. All of these developments, taken together, threaten to overwhelm the existing Ground-based Midcourse Defense system, which was not designed or built to defeat this threat.

This is not MDA’s first attempt to counter the evolving threat posed by North Korea’s nuclear-capable ICBM program. In fact, MDA has suffered multiple false starts over the years in attempting to deal with this problem. The multi-object kill vehicle dates to 2004 and was an attempt by MDA to both enhance the firepower of a single interceptor missile and potentially defeat the use of decoys or other countermeasures on a North Korean re-entry vehicle. It was an on-again, off-again effort that currently enjoys no funding support. Last year, Mike Griffin, under secretary of Defense for research and engineering, canceled the redesigned kill vehicle, a program to replace and improve upon the existing exoatmospheric kill vehicle that is currently mated with each of MDA’s ground-based interceptors. 

With no viable modernization way ahead, MDA clearly saw the need for a new approach, one that will “leap ahead” with technology and capability that not only exceeds today’s threat, but also that foreseen in the future. NGI must be designed and built to address the short-term existing threat and that anticipated on the horizon.

In April, MDA released a request for proposal to industry for an NGI and in August, multiple companies or teams of companies responded with bids. MDA is evaluating those submissions with the goal of selecting two competitors to go forward through the preliminary design review milestone.  

Unlike previous attempts to upgrade the Ground-based Midcourse Defense system that protects the U.S. homeland, the NGI program envisions an entirely new missile booster to launch the kill vehicle(s) into space, allowing MDA potentially to take advantage of decades worth of improved technology. MDA Director Vice Adm. Jon Hill says, “We’re leveraging competition … now that we have bids on the table and we’re going through that evaluation. … It is accelerated; we’re going to be able to do this faster. … That’s one of the benefits of competition.” 

However, that competition must be sufficiently funded by Congress.

The simple fact is that the president’s budget request of $664 million for NGI will not be fully funded, because of extreme budget pressure related to pandemic response. All reasonable people involved understand this. Fiscal realities cannot be wished away. 

Congressional committees with oversight jurisdiction have put forth significantly different numbers for NGI in their fiscal year 2021 (FY21) bills. The House Armed Services Committee and the Senate Armed Services Committee submissions are relatively close, at a $250 million cut and a $160 million cut, respectively.

The sweet spot for Congress, and MDA, may be somewhere in between their numbers, assuming they do not include a rescission of 2020 funds as some have proposed. To have any reasonable chance of funding a real competition within industry, the $302 million planned for NGI within the 2020 budget submission must carry over into 2021.

NGI will be stillborn, and added to the ash heap of other MDA false starts, if congressional authorizers and appropriators do not provide sufficient funding to incentivize industry to compete and push the technological envelope and deliver this much-needed capability to the warfighter in the 2028 timeframe.

Congress owes the nation the chance for MDA to show that it now has an executable path forward to finally significantly reduce the possibility of a nuclear weapon, launched by an unpredictable rogue regime, exploding above an American city.

Retired Maj. Gen. Howard “Dallas” Thompson is a former chief of staff for NORAD/NORTHCOM and a former Air Force fighter pilot.