GMD Contest Pivotal Point In Missile Defense
LOS ANGELES — The contest for development and sustainment of the U.S. Missile Defense Agency’s (MDA) ballistic interceptor missiles marks a turning point in the evolution of the Ground-Based Midcourse Defense (GMD) system, says bidder and current prime contractor Boeing.
“It marks an inflexion point in the life of the GMD system,” says Boeing Network and Space Systems President Roger Krone. Boeing is the prime contractor for GMD and its Ground-Based Interceptor, which are fielded at Vandenberg AFB, Calif., and Fort Greely in Alaska to guard against ballistic missile attack.
Boeing, teamed with Northrop Grumman, is pitted against Lockheed Martin and Raytheon for the competition, which is valued at $600 million per year for an initial seven-year period. Speaking to Aviation Week, Krone says: “It moves from a point where we’re filling up silos and building power plants, and moving silos into missile fields, to where we’re conducting operations and doing crew training.”
The original program “started out as an RD project,” Krone adds. “Then the [George W. Bush administration] wanted to drive it to an operational capability, so we worked in partnership with MDA to put it on more of an operational footing. But we did it relatively quickly, and were operational by 2005.”
However, the program hit problems, part of which drove MDA to launch the new contest. Two GMD intercept tests in January and December 2010 failed, and “we are in the process of working through the FTG-06a [the failed Dec. 15 test] root-cause corrective action. Execution of the contract is going on,” Krone says.
Last month, MDA revealed plans to scale back its flight and ground test program for the 2012-16 period by cutting the overall number of tests to 120 from 150. The agency still expects to test the GMD system against intercontinental ballistic missile-class targets in 2014, despite the failed intercepts against shorter-range targets.
Although “it’s not really that all development will come to a halt,” Krone says, the new contract will put a greater emphasis on sustainment. As a result, the winning contractor team can expect “significantly less in revenue,” he says.
MDA is officially expected to announce a winner on May 31, but Krone cautions that delays are possible. “We think the customer is on track and with the discussions we’ve had with them, it doesn’t seem to be much of an issue relative to the continuing resolution and funding,” he says. However, “we’re supposed to hear in May and award in summer — if they hold those dates. The [KC-X] tanker took around 360 days from request for proposals to announcement, and [though] we don’t think this will take that long, if it slips a month or two I won’t be surprised.”
Photo: Boeing
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