Transitioning To The Post Cold War Era (Excerpts relating to TMD)
Missile Defense Organization

The end of the Cold War during the presidency of George Bush brought a relaxation of tensions between America and the Soviet Union and reduced concerns about nuclear war. However, a major new threat emerged: the spread of ballistic missile technology and weapons of mass destruction throughout the world. In early 1991, this new and dangerous security environment prompted President Bush to replace the SDI Phase Architecture with a system know as GPALS (Global Protection Against Limited Strikes). The principal goal of GPALS was to defend America against limited missile attacks and protect deployed U.S. forces and American allies against shorter-range ballistic missiles. GPALS was an integrated architecture with three components: a global, space-based system of Brilliant Pebbles interceptors;a force of ground- and sea-based theater missile defenses; and a limited, ground-based nationalmissile defense element. All interceptors in GPALS were based on the HTK principle. President Bush™s decision to reorient the U.S. missile defense program was validated by the Gulf War, with its battles between Patriot and Scud missiles.

The emphasis on theater missile defenses that was part of the GPALS system was sustained under the administration of President William Clinton, but not the GPALS architecture that integrated national, theater, and space-based systems into a single architecture. As part of the new direction the Clinton administration took with regard to missile defense, on 13 May 1993, Secretary of Defense Les Aspin changed the name of SDIO to the Ballistic Missile Defense Organization (BMDO). A few months later, a new orientation for the missile defense program emerged from the Bottom-Up Review (BUR), a major study of U.S. defense requirements for the post-Cold War era. Published in the fall of 1993, the BUR laid out a missile defense program with three components that were prioritized by means of funding.

A former anti-missile site in Nekoma, North Dakota.
• The top priority of the BUR program was theater missile defense, which was to receive $12 billion over the course of five years. Three projects constituted the core of this component: improvements to the Army™s Patriot missile system (known as Patriot Advanced Capability-3 or PAC-3), a modification to the Navy™s Aegis air defense system to give it the capability to intercept theater ballistic missiles (later known as Navy Area Defense or NAD), and a new Army missile defense system known as Theater High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD).

In addition to the three core TMD programs already mentioned, the Bottom-Up-Review (BUR) called for a fourth major program that would emerge from a competition between three projects: Corps-SAM (Surface-to-Air Missile), Navy Upper Tier, and a boost phase intercept option (such as the Air Force™s airborne laser program). When Corps-SAM changed into an international program known as the Medium Extended Air Defense System (MEADS), it increased in importance and was designated a major defense acquisition program (MDAP).1

Central to Navy Theater Missile Defense, a Standard missile launches from USS Antietam.
Where Navy Upper Tier was concerned, it evolved into the Navy Theater Wide (NTW) program after it was elevated to MDAP status. The addition of MEADS and NTW to NAD, PAC-3, andTHAAD meant that the BMDO TMD program now included five MDAPS instead of the four originally called for in the BUR. This produced funding strains in the overall BMD program that were aggravated by cost growths within the TMD programs themselves and by the occasional addition of smaller, unfunded requirements.

While pursuing its own TMD programs, BMDO also conducted a number of cooperative TMD programs with America™s allies and friends. The longest running and most significant of these is the U.S.-Israeli Arrow missile program, which has its roots in a 1986 agreement between the United States and Israel. The missile developed through this program is a key element in the national missile defense system the Israelis are fielding as the year 2000 comes to an end. A second international program known as RAMOS (Russian-America Observation Satellite) evolved through several stages from a 1992 project. By the year 2000, RAMOS called for the Russians to build two satellites, each of which were to be fitted with U.S. sensors. These satellites would then be used to gather various phenomenological data that the two countries would share. In addition to providing valuable technical information, the project aims to help the U.S. and Russia move beyond the confrontational spirit of the Cold War. A third program grew out of U.S.-Japanese talks that began in December 1993. In response to a grow in signed an August 1999 memorandum of understanding that defined four joint developmental projects related to the interceptor for the Navy™s NTW program.