Sunday, June 9, 2019

Missile Defense Fail: New "Super-Accurate Kinetic-Energy Warhead" Just Got Scrapped

"U.S. president Donald Trump in early 2017 promised to reinforce the country’s missile defenses. Trump pledged more money for more and better sensors and missile-interceptors.

Two years later, one of the main programs that Trump boosted as part of his “Missile Defeat and Defense Enhancements” push quietly has collapsed. The military has indefinitely deferred Boeing’s Redesigned Kill Vehicle, a super-accurate kinetic-energy warhead designed physically to strike incoming missiles rather than explode near them.

"We will … develop a state-of-the-art missile defense system to protect against missile-based attacks from states like Iran and North Korea," Trump’s White House stated just hours after the former reality-television host’s inauguration in January 2017.

The Missile Defense Agency in 2019 asked for $400 million to work on the RKV, a replacement for an earlier kinetic warhead. The goal at the time was to deploy the new warhead in 2023 as a replacement for older warheads on the U.S. Army’s Ground-Based Midcourse Defense rockets, which are designed to intercept incoming ICBMs.

But in May 2019 the MDA ordered Boeing to stop work on the RKV. The Government Accountability Office in a June 2019 report detailed the warhead’s woes..."

at https://nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/missile-defense-fail-new-super-accurate-kinetic-energy-warhead-just-got-scrapped-61807

No comments:

Post a Comment