 the future and what we think we are going to do about those challenges. I came to the missile defense mission just a few years after President Reagan challenged the nation to look at ways that we might solve the problem of defending our nation against the ballistic missiles as opposed to avenging our nation. And so I came back as a young rocket propulsion engineer from the Air Force with about 130 of my compatriots, I see several of them here in the audience today, with the goal of sponsoring research and really capitalizing on the creativity and the innovation in our industry, in our academia, in our national laboratories to go after that challenge. So we made a bet in those days, I think it was on the order of about $2 billion or so a year in research, research in a broad spectrum of technologies and areas that would hopefully pay off down the road and get us that sort of capability. And so there was a great focus broadly, that is an interesting term, great focus broadly on those technologies which might pay off in the future for us. Some of those didn't pan out, some of those did much better than others. We were looking at a lot of things. As you might recall, we were looking at nuclear-pumped lasers, we were looking at high-powered microwaves, we were looking at rockets, we were looking at, of course, in my own case, we were looking at electromagnetic rail guns, giant 100-ton satellites that would launch small projectiles at 20 kilometers per second at a rain of 10,000 or so reentry vehicles coming in. So as I mentioned, the $2 billion, so we spent now, I think those first six or seven years eventually paid off in some areas and we got more focused after Desert Storm at looking at how we might apply these technologies to defend our, against missiles in the theater as well as against our nation. And I want to take one of those examples, one that I worked on in particular, to walk you through how we built that foundation and where we are going to head to, I think, here in the next few years. In the early to mid-age, in the 80s rather, the Army's Ballistic Missile Defense Command now I think is a strategic missile defense command, was looking at ways to apply hit-to-kill technology to destroy an incoming RV. And so they built an experimental set called the Homing Overlay Experiment in which they launched using essentially ICBM rocket motors a very large, about the size of a refrigerator, vehicle and an incoming RV and they had success. But we recognized that that would be a challenge for us in the future and so for things like the electromagnetic railgun, we were talking about launching projectiles of about a kilogram that were the size of a bread box. So we needed to significantly miniaturize that capability if we were going to get to realize that sort of capability in the future. And over time, I didn't get to a kilogram or the size of a bread box, but we did reduce the size of those projectiles down to about six kilograms or so and a little bit larger than a bread box. The electromagnetic railgun technology didn't come along very well in that same time frame, but we recognized that by applying these projectile technologies to some of our existing systems like, for example, the standard missile system in the Navy, we could change anti-aircraft missiles into ballistic missile defenders. And so this standard missile III that we have in the field today is essentially the grandson of that technology that we invented in the 80s and the early 90s. And the foundation for the systems that we have today are primarily based on that investment that we made in that time frame. So as we look at the system that General Todorov described here earlier today and look at what do we need to do in the future to make our ballistic missile defense systems more capable, I think there are two key areas that we want to focus our attention on. One is to reduce the number of shots that we take at each credible object. I'm not going to discuss in any depth here the sort of shot doctrine that our warfighter employs today in order to assure ourselves that we're going to reliably defend our nation. But needless to say that if he's going to have to shoot interceptors since we use hit-to-kill technology against credible objects, then it would be important for us to reduce the number of credible objects as well as the shots that we take against each credible object. And so that's where we're focusing our technology now in those particular areas. We want to find a way to reduce the number of shots that we take at each credible object. And we do that by several ways. One is we look at ways that we can improve the reliability of the interceptors we have today. And that's one of the bets we're making in this year's budget is looking at ways that we can do that for our ground base and mid-course defense system. We also look at the possibility of bringing more capability to each interceptor by adding more kill vehicles to each one of those interceptors. In other words, instead of taking several shots, being able to take one shot with several kill vehicles against that particular object, and then if you think about the probabilities of reliability, our effectiveness goes up in that way. Our system today, as you probably know, is beyond the missile warning message that we get from our overhead sensor systems in space, is primarily a terrestrial radar-based system. So all of the sensing that we do, the tracking of the missiles that come, are based on the ship-based sensors, the sea-based X-band radar, and our other terrestrial radars, including early warning radar, and what we call our TIPI-2, or our X-band radar that does discrimination. So all of that is what we base our decisions on in terms of how we launch our interceptors and on what path we launch our interceptors. For very long-range systems like the homeland defense system, where we expect an ICBM to travel a very long distance, you can imagine how challenging it would be to get a terrestrial radar all along the path of that ICBM, especially if you might envision a rate of ICBMs that would take different paths. And so the challenge of the Earth's curvature and these radar systems then brings us to the issue of how do we find a way to more reliably track from birth to death these incoming ballistic missiles. So our vision is to do a couple of things. One is to bring new phenomenology, in other words, gain more knowledge about what this system looks like, what the ballistic missile raid looks like by bringing additional sensors into this architecture. Not only radar systems, but systems that use electro-optical phenomenology in order to determine more about that system. So you can imagine the power of having much greater knowledge, especially knowledge that is relevant to the same sort of sensors that are on our interceptor-kill vehicles. We want to get more knowledge about that system, and we want to understand it from birth to death so that we can discriminate and determine which are the two objects that we ought to be shooting at. And so getting a more capable discrimination system here now would be a way to improve the number of shots that we have to take or reduce the number of shots that we have to take by reducing the number of things that we might consider to be a credible object. So our vision here in the technology exploration now is to look at ways to bring electro-optical sensors into this architecture beyond that OPIR sensor, that missile warning sensor that kicks these things off. And we are going to do that by capitalizing on the work that is being done in industry today, both on sensors as well as on building unmanned aerial vehicles that fly at very high altitudes. A high altitude platform is also key to one of the other investments we want to make. And so if we go back just a few years here, we made a big bet on airborne lasers in the late 90s and early 2000s. And that system that we built, although it was very effective in doing that one particular job we had for it, which is proving that you could shoot down a rocket at the speed of light using light, a tremendous accomplishment, although it proved impractical from an operational standpoint. You can imagine having a fleet of 747s flying about 33,000 feet with a laser system in them. There is a lot of challenges to that. But what we know now from that is the next time we do this work, we are going to be looking at getting above the known atmosphere, where the aerosols won't affect the lasers, and at altitudes where the turbulence is significantly lower. So we want to find a regime that is high above the 33,000 feet. For all of us who fly on 747s on a regular basis here, we know that it can get pretty shaky at 33,000 feet almost any time of the year depending on where you are flying. So we want to make that more like 60,000 feet. Get to the stratosphere, where it will be a much calmer place for us to work. We are making investments in laser technology today that is both in our national laboratories and in our industry that goes beyond those chemical lasers that we looked at earlier to new solid-state electric lasers, which will be much more effective, efficient, effective as well, I believe, and ones that we can scale up and reduce the size of the laser necessary to get that job done. If we can find a way to make that happen, and we believe these technologies will lead us there, that we will be able to get those lasers on an unmanned aero platform at very high altitudes and make that case for the entire logistics and infrastructure which goes along with that much, much more simpler and make the technical challenges less daunting than they have been in the past. Mentioned earlier, it might have been during our discussion at lunch that there are other areas which we want to go back to, and so I am sort of going back to my past in this one. We left the rail gun in 1989 because there were challenges with getting a rail gun and the idea that we would build a new launch infrastructure that would get these 2,000 or 100-ton satellites in orbit with rail guns on them was not achievable. However, the services have been making investments in bringing that technology along primarily for close-end engagements and primarily for long-range fires, and so as they continue to develop that technology, we are looking at that as a possible way to get at some of our missile defense challenges, again having a magazine which is very, very cheap projectiles with the capability of electrically generating the power makes it possible for us to get away from this challenge that we find in terms of expensive interceptors against other rocket systems. Our goal ultimately is then to find a way to get more capable sensors into the architecture to improve the knowledge that we have from birth to death of this launch and to reduce the number of credible objects by understanding what objects are there. With the ultimate goal of reducing the objects dramatically by destroying the bucket booster in the boost phase, that will revolutionize the capability for missile defense and dramatically change the calculus of any of our adversaries. We are working today with industry, we are working with academia, and we are working in our national laboratories to make that vision come true. We are shifting our overall balance in our investments this year which had been primarily focused on increasing capacity over the last few years for our regional missile defense systems, and looking now at shifting the balance somewhat, ramping over the next couple of years to get at the advanced technology challenges that we are going to need to build that foundation for the missile defense architecture I just spoke of. We hope to have that here in the next decade based on those investments. We recognize that just like in the past, it will be a challenging endeavor and that we may not rush forward with continual success towards that goal, but we are excited about having you as partners and making that a true reality over the next 10 years. Thank you. Good afternoon, everybody. I'm Arch Macy and I'm now a private consultant. As many of you know, I had a background in some of this for a few years. If you don't like the ballistic missile defense review, you can blame me. I've heard it before, but go ahead. I was one of the co-authors. I'd like to talk about missile defense and thinking about next steps in missile defense from a somewhat different, perhaps, look at Rubik's Cube. This panel is about future directions. It sort of was titled. And so the question I'm thinking about is what are the future elements of missile defense that need to be developed, melded with each other, and demonstrated and may known to potential antagonists? Let me develop that for a moment. We've talked today a lot about intercept activities. There's been some comment on left of launch. So I'll phrase the question this way. What is the right of launch activities and plans other than that of intercept? My basic premise is that the missile defense system that is generated by MDA and the services does not and cannot provide the overall defense of the nation against ballistic missile threats. We acknowledge for the moment that a massive attack from China or Russia, the only response is in kind, and that has long been our explicit policy and will not change unless there is some breakthrough in physics, which no one expects. But let's see everything else. We've talked earlier about defending against ballistic missiles cannot be an inventory challenge. You're always going to lose. There's always going to be more interceptors, excuse me, more threats than are interceptors. So at some point, in addition, the laws of physics, the laws of probability and statistics say that even as you are taking on incoming threats, some are going to get through. No system is 100 percent. I'm an aerospace engineer by trade and by experience, and you hate to admit that, but you know you can't build a perfect system. So there's no way I can assure somebody that I can get them all, even if I did have the inventory. So why do we have a BMDS? Well, obviously, destruction of the threat is a part of what you need to do. What the BMDS capability does is to provide the protection of critical assets long enough that the National Command Authority, the President and our leadership, can take steps to end the threat by other means, get them to stop launching. If they don't launch it's not a threat. As Rich pointed out, if we can get them on launch, that's great. At some point there, I would submit that particularly in short and intermediate range scenarios, you're going to run out of boost phase interceptors or whatever your technique may be, and boost phase to me can include directed energy, light, railgun, agnostic as to the technique. So the question is what does this thing need to do? The ballistic missile defense system, that capability produced by MDA and the services, has to buy time and it forwards time to the leadership to take other actions and to make decisions. And they're going to have to happen in pretty short order. It gives the NCA the chance to choose other methods, all of the elements of national power, the classic four that you learn in war college, diplomatic, information, military, and economic, and using all of them in whatever way is appropriate to get the threat to cease to occur. The strategic necessity is to protect the homeland, our own forces, friends, and allies from ballistic missile attack. So the key word there is it's about protection. It's not about just flight destruction. So ballistic missile protection planning must encompass a continuum of capabilities, plans, lines of authority and communications, and training to negate or interrupt the ballistic missile threat sequence from its threat planning to preparation to targeting to launch to subsequent launches. So I submit that perhaps an idea for future discussion is that what we need is a ballistic missile protection plan of which the ballistic missile defense system is an element. This to achieve and maintain a comprehensive all of government approach to negate potential or actual ballistic missile threats. Today we've been talking a lot about systems. We started off with the SDI concept of ways to protect us from the missiles, to protect us from the warheads. That's a kinetic approach to people like me in the Department of Defense. That's where we tend to go to. We grew up that way. They said I'm an aerospace engineer, and so I think like that. So since the advent of even the SDI concept has been focused, we've been focused on developing and fielding the capability to perform threat negation by intercept or destruction in flight. So, but we know that we can't keep doing that because we'll lose the inventory game. It's clear that MDA owns the intercept part of ballistic missile protection. Who owns the rest? Do they know that they do? Do others know who owns what? And then the question is what is the rest? What are the methods, the techniques by which you're going to get an antagonist to stop launching? Now it can range from the absolutely terrifying to perhaps something less. I'll go back to that in a bit, but that range of actions needs to be thought about and understood, developed to prevent launch in the first place or to prevent subsequent launches, and melded with each other to provide an effective and understood comprehensive protection. We have to do this ahead of time. The longest flight time of a ballistic missile is the ICBM range at something around 40 minutes. So assuming that it's a one after the other, the best time you have is 40 minutes. It is probable, depending on what you think the inventories of limited number launches may be, that the ballistic missile defense system could provide protection to a certain level for hours to maybe a day or two. That's how long you have in order to accomplish another effect to end the launches. So they said what capabilities need to be developed to prevent the launch, to prevent subsequent launches. Something that will have to be considered at some point is who is responsible for the attribution that can be made public to explain what you're doing in an unchallengeable manner? Who knows where it came from? Well, we know where it came from within the BMDS and the overhead sensor systems. We usually tend to be loathed to put too much accuracy into our reports on that. But in the case where you're going to take action now, at some level you're going to have to convince the world as well as your antagonists that in fact they are the ones doing it. And you know where it's coming from and you can prove it. So we need a comprehensive basis for BMD protection. It can't be intercept alone. The overarching goal, as I said, has to be to deter or prevent launch in the first place and if the launch occurs to inflict sufficient pressure to end further launches and do so in a timely manner. We need to determine what constitutes effective deterrence to dissuade an antagonist from launching based on two principles that a potential antagonist must be led to understand. First, the attack will not succeed in its objective and that the penalty for the attempt will be too high to be borne. This is not a new concept, it's the basic statement of any deterrent strategy. The challenge for our discussion is what are the steps, the factors, the plans and capabilities necessary to accomplish these two principles in defending against ballistic missiles. The first principle is addressed in prime by the ballistic missile defense system, the intercept destruction capability. The second has to be addressed by a variety of means depending on the situation. BMD planning, I believe, will have to account for different categories of attack. I put them into four sectors or judgment, existential, a violent statement, a rogue or an accident. An existential attack, which against the United States would at this time be provided only by China or Russia, we have a declaratory policy on how we will respond. We have been clear on that for many, many years. That is not a function of BMD protection, per se. A violent statement by an antagonistic state, a number of missiles, a limited attack, a rogue and attack of a limited number of missiles are two different conditions. The rogue issue being who do you pressure? If it's a violent state, if it's an act of State X, then you can pressure State X. You can figure out how to do that, one would hope. If it's a rogue attack and I would pick ISIS as a classic, how and where do you pressure? If ISIS gets its hands on MRBMs and uses them against Europe, what is the pressure point? What can we do about that? In some cases, the answer may be no, which will then affect your response. I will get back to that. Then you have the accidental one. Then how is that communicated? If an accidental launch occurs, how does the owner of the missile prior to launch tell you, I am very sorry and it wasn't me and it won't happen again, and he may be right or he may be faking it. If anyone remembers the somewhat terrifying novel Seven Days in May and what the President had to agree to do at the end of it to end the thermonuclear war, that's a very hard decision. Then how do these questions differ between Homeland Defense and Regional? Are you going to, when a launch comes at you, a limited attack, are you going to take a massive violent kinetic attack on that nation? It may be appropriate. It may not be, because then you run into issues of escalatory response. So we need to consider and pre-plan our responses to these other types of attack. As I said, and I think I bring it up again, there is a limited timeline here. When this happens, we can't then summon the First National Security Council meeting about it. Going back to what I mentioned about all of the government, whole of government part, is that the Defense Department tends to be very, very good at planning. They do branches and sequels, they do con plans and O plans and all that kind of thing. The government as a whole does not, but you are going to have to have an interleaved way of economic pressure, political pressure, diplomatic pressure, steps that you are going to take, and they have got to work together to be maximum, maximally effective. As I said, one of the differences between ballistic missiles and other kinetic threats, particularly for the homeland, is the time span from first action to warhead arrival is shorter than other threats. Cruise missiles, bombers, sea and land forces all are viewable in hours to days before arrival. You can take steps to crank things up, but once the first launch has occurred, inbound is in less than 40 minutes. So we have to have a method of response that starts to apply effective pressure in hours to a very few number of days. The capabilities and actions across the spectrum of necessary responses and responders must be prepared, equipped, and trained before the threat situation develops to the point of requiring action. Putting together all the elements, the dime elements, the plan will need to consider particularly in the area of regional defense, the interaction with allies and partners, and how their actions, decisions, capabilities might play in our assistance of their defense, or how it may limit our ability, depending on what choices they have to make. NATO, for instance, has a very detailed BNB plan for the intercept element of missile defense protection of NATO, territory, and Europe. What are other elements that the NATO alliance can bring to bear against an antagonist? They are a military alliance, after all. They are not the EU. What sort of connections and relations with the EU, the economic deciders of Europe, need to be engendered in order to come up with an effective response? In the interleaving of these capabilities, do they fall under the NATO command structure or some other entity? The EU, Council of Governments, unclear. Earlier, we were talking about exchanging information. Frank mentioned that. How do you coordinate this with other allies and partners? Some of this can be very sensitive, but again, some of it needs to be planned and thought of ahead of time. Do we need to extend the concept of the phased adaptive approach to the whole of ballistic missile protection and not just intercept capability? Having asked all those questions and posited a challenge, I have a recommendation. I warned Elaine about this before she had to leave. She smiled. I recommend that we extend the BMDR, the Ballistic Missile Defense Review, not as a revisit but as an extension, to encompass the whole of government approach, to allocate responsibilities and tasks, and to find the deterrent points that need to be made and demonstrated to all who might consider threatening our homeland, forces, allies, and partners. In other words, to provide a ballistic missile protection plan. There have been and are still ongoing studies and plans addressing different elements of providing protection, including non-kinetic, non-military. But I think it is time now to bring those disparate ideas and analysis together. And again, as happened in the 2010 BMDR, to use a cross-government interagency consultative approach, and it really was, and I had the pleasure of taking part in it, much more so than I had experienced in any other time in the government, to interleave the knowledge and capabilities of this requisite approach. I do submit that the original premises and results of the 2010 BMDR remain valid. However, I believe it is time now to extend its scope and direction to the whole of ballistic missile protection. With that, I will close and look forward to your questions. Thanks. Thank you, gentlemen. I think this was very thought-provoking. I think I will start off with a question for Mr. Matlock. You laid out, and in the news, really the past week, there's been a lot of discussion of R&D and that sort of thing for MDA. But you laid out several key technologies. You talked about space for both sensing and other things. You talked about fast interceptors, multiple kill vehicles, things like that, airborne laser. First of all, I was hoping you might address what has been the fruit of these past investments. Number one, speak to that. Has this just been experiments that we yielded nothing from or what kinds of things have they given us now that makes the future possible? And then, frankly, also, given the relative reduction of MDA's budget for R&D, how are we going to be able to do with current budget levels or during the lower budget levels, do these more impressive types of capabilities? I think that what you see in our, as I mentioned a little bit earlier here, what you see in our system today is essentially the results of the technology investments that we made in the 80s and the 90s. And so much of the interceptor systems, the command and control system, the sensor network, all of those things are a result of investments that we made broadly in that timeframe. Elaine likes to use the seed corn analogy here. And so we ate a lot of our seed corn to get that. And in order to respond to the capacity, the requirement for greater capacity across the regions, we've had to transition that technology and make those investments. And so whenever you're faced with the sort of fiscal realities that we face today in terms of that balance of capacity versus capability and the need to look across government for how do we do that in sequestration, then tends to focus the mind a bit more on those things which are having the most promise and perhaps leave those the remainder to future investigations. So that road map that I laid out for you earlier here, Tom, is based on some hard thinking and some hard choices that we made within the agency as well as with our partners in the warfighting community and in the acquisition community and with policy. So we think that we've got a road map now that is going to get us on a path to make those improvements and enhancements in the missile defense capability over the next few years. I take Arch's point in terms of we probably need to go beyond just that right of launch look and so we'll be looking probably with greater consideration this year at how we start to broaden beyond that. Great. Well, let me I think turn to you, Admiral Macy, I really like your extend the VMBR approach. It kind of reminds me, frankly, I think it was the 2002 national strategy for countering WMD, which had those several pillars or what have you and I don't think that was updated. There has been update, although, of course, our national strategy has been been updated since then, which dealt with consequence management response and all that sort of thing. This seems to be really the this is where the rubber meets the road in terms of really maturing how we think about missile defense. How far along, just so we have some clarity about in terms of thinking and acting merely in terms of that missile sponge that Ketcher's made, does it work, how far along are we right now to integrating those missile defense capabilities and plans to everything else? We've heard all day in a way how this is just one piece of our larger national and I think the BMD ballistic missile protection plan that you articulate is a further step, but how far along are we there? I don't think we're very far along, which is why I posited the idea. That stuff's been talked about many times, how you put it's a classic problem of how you put whole of government approaches together. It's always hard to do. I try to argue that in the case of responding to ballistic missile defense events, the ballistic missile events, the timeline is much shorter than almost any other event occurrence factor when you have more than one launch. So you don't have days or weeks or months, much less to say, okay, this is how I'm going to respond. The other end of it was a of such a thing would be the classic force on force event that occurred in Desert Storm and we took, we had the luxury of months to prepare our response. You're not going to have that here. So therefore you have to build your capability, exercise your capability, train the people in it much further ahead of time and maintain that level of training, that level of capability. My observation is we really don't have that because this will encompass actions that and certainly the Department of Defense will take, which is what General Todorov and others are responding, rich are responsible to do, but and North Com, NORAD, SENT Com, Paycom is appropriate, but it's also going to involve actions that the State Department are going to have to take, Justice Department, Treasury, Commerce, because you're going to need to apply pressure in a number of different ways in order to change the behavior of your antagonist and I don't believe that we are very far along at doing that now. If we had to do it tomorrow it would be a significant pickup game. Excellent. So we go to the audience questions, especially on the technology and the you might say the full spectrum responses, I guess right here. Good afternoon, Charles Newstead State Department speaking just for myself as a physicist and not for the department where Mr. Carey will fire me. I'll be always doing a great job. Two points. In terms of the technology, Mr. Matlock talked about the various systems that we could have either on terrestrially or in space and as he pointed out developing a capability in the satellites to shoot things down would be certainly better if we could do it. Now in particular laser interests me because those are coming along very quickly. One, not quite there yet, we don't have a laser that would we can direct and quickly take out an incoming attack but the point is that you mentioned dialed pumped south state lasers which are coming along very quickly now and maybe what we need now we've got to be concerned that this capability is being developed in a number of countries. The United States is doing it and so is are the French for their stockpiled stewardship programs as you understand but that doesn't have the strength that we need to knock out a missile so the point. What's the question? Sorry, I get to the question. The question is this because China and Russia are both Russia at Sarov and China in their defense establishment are developing what they call Russia the sign is called divine light and what the Russians call I forgot the name but at least they're supposed to be even stronger than what we had with NIF and laser mega-jewel so if the well I'm sorry I'll get to the point it's a long road I'm trying to travel here. The main point is how do we defend against the Chinese and the Russians because they may well have the capability of developing these lasers before we do since they can seem at this point. Other people doing direct energy as well you want to speak to that we're developing the systems but they can other folks are developing direction energy as well any comment on that? Well I hope we're gonna hope we're moving more quickly no I so I don't mean to be flippant but I think what we see here in the in the last last five or six years is we were very successful in the airborne laser in terms of proving the physics and proving that we could generate the power necessary to shoot down shoot down rockets. Our big challenge there was that it was operationally impractical because of the nature of the of the system so we're looking at the technologies that the gentlemen suggested there the diode pumped alkali laser system which is primarily focused at our our national laboratory in in California. We're also looking at another concept the fiber combined laser along with our DARPA and and Air Force teammates and looking at at scaling those up and so we're finding that the technology is moving along fairly quickly. We won't be at at lethal capability here for some years to come but we're hopeful that we'll be able to focus that research here along with bringing our industry into the in the picture very shortly to help us understand how we might transition that technology then to an effective missile defense system that could perform a number of missile defense functions. Do you want to talk about the FY16 UAV proposal the proposal for a laser mount on UAV that was yeah so we have we've asked we've seen in the last couple of years as I've mentioned a great great improvements in these two laser systems. We also know that that our partners at ONR have been demonstrating lasers on on ships for for a particular mission and the army has done some great work down at White Sands missile range for for counter martyrs with lasers and so we want to take the the research that we've got in the laboratory as well as the research that's going on today in our in our industry and look at the possibility of whether or not we can transition more quickly to a to an airborne laser demonstrator here over the next four years and so we've made made some bets in our budget and will be awarding contracts shortly with industry to look at what that inner what that excuse me what that laser demonstrator might look like and how we might be able to put it together and on what timeline. Great other folks Mike. Hi Mike Gruse with Space News I was wondering if you could uh this question is from Mr. Matlock if you could elaborate a little bit more about the sensor network and what you might gain from that and uh what kind of timeline there might be for that. Which sensor network? I'm sorry there was talk earlier about I guess uh space space right space based sensor network that might be a little more elaborate than I guess what currently exists. So what we're what we're doing right now is looking at space for under in the current fiscal environments access to space for for our research has been challenging and so what we've been looking at is uh other uh other modalities that we can use then to demonstrate the technology but ultimately we might want to put on uh put in space and so uh we have right now a program that we're working to uh to modify some of our unmanned aerial vehicles with this uh with this new sensor capability and looking at doing that in the field we had some success just this past uh fall at the Pacific Missile Range Facility in conjunction with some of our Aegis Oblistic Missile Defense tests in which we uh we took a uh a EOIR sensor that's being used in the field today for uh for other purposes mounted on the front of a Reaper unmanned aerial vehicle and move the capability uh forward so that we could track missiles uh up in the atmosphere as opposed to look at targets on the ground and uh with uh with a stereo tracking capability with those uh Reapers we found that we could generate the kind of track quality necessary to launch standard missiles against targets targets that were launched uh there at PMRF we have a uh a tech plan now to look at increasing that capability over the next few years with the primary goal of looking at the sensor capability as opposed to the platform and then making a decision down the road depending on the success of that sensor whether or not this is something we would consider deploying in space uh or whether it's something that makes sense to deploy a terrestrial unmanned aircraft sir hi Scott Masioni from inside the Pentagon I just wanted to go back to the airborne laser on the drones um how do you reconcile that with uh that it will be attacking the missiles in the booster phase and it'll take a while we'll have to be an enemy airspace deal with enemy fire and the lasers probably won't be powerful enough to destroy uh you know the missile instantaneously I'm sorry what was the question I didn't catch the last part of that how can you the the laser won't be able to destroy instantaneously the the missile when it's in the boost phase you know it would at least take a little while until the the missile is destroyed so you know how are you going to protect these drones uh in an enemy environment while they're shooting down a boost phase missile so I'm going to leave that that con up's questioned up to my partners in the air force but but what my my job here and what my goal is is to prove that we can make the the technology work uh at extended ranges uh so uh you know our goal would be rather than tens or hundreds of kilometers to get much longer range of capability out of these lasers so that's uh why I'm driving at these more efficient electric lasers to be able to scale them up to uh to greater power uh and so that we can laze at longer ranges and get more more energy on target which would reduce the time that you've just talked about that we'd have to spend lazing each target so the goal from a technology standpoint is to is to get a more efficient laser that's more powerful at longer range over time and we're of course uh one of the the challenges we're looking at here with this laser demonstrator is then taking it to the field and working with our warfighter compadres on uh on what would be a reasonable con up says we look at missile defense missions that use directed energy well I have another question actually for for Admiral Macy uh did you talk about uh integrating these things and frankly thinking about integrating them uh more heavily ultimately to buy time uh for these what what's the role of we're working with our allies on that to what extent I mean the QDR talks about uh you know one of the the pillars being working with uh our partners and and allies um on the missile defense mission how reliant or is the United States going to be on our own capabilities and how much are are working in in integrating with becoming interoperable with other folks in the Middle East Asia Pacific uh and NATO what I think it's um vision there it's a continual effort it's to uh get more and more reliant and more and more capable of working together I mean NATO has has done this already uh the decision was taken to make ballistic missile defense a mission of NATO and then further that the the ballistic missile defense plans the rules of engagement the defended asset list and everything were agreed upon at 28 and NATO uh which is as complete as you're going to get and that by force means that some areas get more protection than others but they all agreed to it um so you work with your allies and partners for a number of reasons one is particularly in the cases where you have treaties you have a responsibility to them I mean NATO is probably the most classic and the fullest one of article five we're an attack on one is an attack on all so we are fully reliant on our systems one is by definition and then you are reliant on other people's systems to the greatest degree that they can provide them and you can agree to them with it there is certainly a matter of trust you want your allies involved not only because you have a responsibility to them as they do to you for joint defense and for cooperative defense but for whatever assets they can bring to the table whatever capabilities not just military but economic and whatever um a completely off the wall but not necessarily idea is have part of the declared response policy that if a launch comes from a nation that the other nations the other economic power nations which would be the United States and Europe and uh Japan Australia so forth would immediately shut down all banking transactions I mean that that would render any modern country essentially inoperable in something on the order 24 hours because the world is so interconnected on banking so if that becomes part of what you would do that would be part of a cooperative agreement where allies and partners could join in with providing this effect good what the folks world mix it up a little bit let's let's mix actually I you know earlier you asked about the laser technology I'd like to to go back and frankly this is for both of you this was referred to earlier today the the greeners and odierno memo about reassessing our strategy I think you've spoken to that to some extent I'd like to comment on I'm giving you the opportunity to comment on that comment on the memo it said a couple things it talked about budget constraints it talked about really the increasing stress on the services for the missile defense mission and we heard earlier about of course the frustration that affects everything it affects nor the command and homeland defense and it affects others so go at it the reason that I'm personally convinced that that memo is written by the two primary providers of BMD capability among the services was that those two officers were fulfilling their professional and legal obligation when you are a commissioned officer in command you are responsible to keep your superiors advised on your ability or lack thereof to perform an assigned mission it doesn't matter whether you like the mission or not I didn't read that memo was saying that the BMD policy was wrong I read the memo as the chief staff of the army and the chief of naval operations were telling the secretary defense sir I don't think I can do what you want me to do so something's got to change the mission or the resources but they were doing what one has to do in that position in fact they would have been seriously at fault had they not done so very good very good I'm going to keep going I'd like to kick back to the MKV multi-volume kill and now the MOKV multiple object what's the what's the real potential the long-term potential for miniaturization of the kill vehicles whether it's on today's interceptors or whether it's on something else what's the it's the long-term potential for miniaturization there well we've been through through several cycles of miniaturization and and let me kind of give you a feel for where we're at I mentioned earlier that we had taken this refrigerator size the kill vehicle and shrunk it down to the size of a breadbox and that that was primarily what got us the capability to turn the standard missile from the navy parlance into a ballistic missile defender and that that system is probably about the right size for what we need to get done the last time we looked at the MKV program our goal then was to look at a very large number of interceptors on a on a single booster we were talking in the order of 24 25 as we improve our sensing network and improve our capabilities discriminate the need to have 25 25 kill vehicles on a single rocket is certainly less necessary than what we would have perceived before and we weren't striving for that that kind of we don't need to strive for that capability now so my perception is is that that we will probably need some miniaturization this nooks go around I don't think it's the two orders of magnitude that we achieved from from the hoe experiment to the elite projectile but there's some work that we need to do there I think as we look at our RKV and the way we formulated the the new I'm sorry I'm speaking in acronyms but the new kill vehicle improved reliability as we're looking at modular open system architecture there that would allow us to bring new systems in to broaden the vendor space as well for our for our contractors so that in other words if you can design to this particular interface and have this set of meet the set of requirements then you're a you're a new vendor for the missile defense integrator that will allow us to bring more more to bear on that on that challenge and so I think it's a combination of how do we how do we bring a little bit more capability perhaps a little bit more miniaturization but I don't perceive it as going from from one to 26 I perceive this probably going from one to some number much less than 26 in this next go around we're will probably making be making investments this coming year looking at how do we go from an RKV to and to a MOKV a multi object kill vehicle and we'll be looking at at our industry partners to help us help us decide what that what that what's required to make that leap good any other comments from from either you folks or anybody else twitter like for example you're going to Poland hi you're going to Poland right who measures what because I'm looking at it from the host nation standpoint and who sells that or are you guys just RND or the environmental assessment I think I think the general are mainly speaking to future directions more than the political considerations for hosting and that kind of thing yeah any final thoughts things that haven't been been brought out you want to get off no I think it's been a very interesting conference my only encouragement would be again from my obviously demonstrated somewhat parochial viewpoint is is that we continue to look at the fact that we have to do more than provide a kinetic answer to an inbound threat hearing a lot hearing a lot about that and I think there's a lot of nodding heads on that well I think I think we've reached our our conclusion I want to thank both of you gentlemen for this I also absolutely want to thank our sponsor the Boeing company for making this possible for making larger work on missile defense possible and we'll hopefully be have continuing this conversation in the coming month so thank you all for coming out