NATO Seeks To Boost Its Missile Defense

[ErnstBlofeld]

Aviation Week and Space Technology/Robert Wall:

The next two months could be critical in helping to shape NATO’s ambition to make missile defense one of its core missions.

This topic has evolved gradually, having once been an area that several member states wanted to avoid altogether. But then NATO began to pursue efforts to protect deployed forces.Now the question is whether NATO’s role should grow further and encompass ballistic missile defense of all members’ territory.

NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen, as well as a group advising the alliance on its strategic direction, maintains that territorial missile defense should become part of the organization’s mission. For critics, the move is seen as merely a NATO ploy for relevance in the new strategic security environment.

What members finally decide should be known soon, since clearly defining NATO’s role is slated to be a major agenda item at next month’s summit in Lisbon.

Program advocates are hopeful the alliance will approve expanding the mandate to territorial from theater missile defense, although several industry officials doubt that such a commitment will emerge. Given budget constraints at the member-state level and the difficulties the alliance has had in tackling the theater missile defense mandate, the most likely outcome will be a two-year study to buy time, the officials say.

Last month, Rasmussen told reporters in Washington that the cost of upgrading NATO’s task to territorial from theater defense would be modest, amounting to no more than €200 million ($268 million). That bill would not involve purchasing missile defense batteries, but represents the cost of upgrading the alliance’s command-and-control infrastructure to integrate member state-provided equipment in a NATO operational scenario.

The issue of territorial defense has been studied since 2003. As part of that undertaking, the alliance has looked broadly at the threat, with no range constraints but with an eye on how it might evolve, notes David Sparks, head of the Missile Defense Group at the NATO Consultation, Command and Control Agency. The work also has involved examining what capabilities member states could provide as well as the command-and-control fabric required to integrate various systems.

As part of that effort, NATO also has had to deal with the change in U.S. plans for its missile defense footprint in Europe. The third interceptor site in Poland had long been at the center of Washington’s push, but now the Obama administration’s Phased Adaptive Approach (PAA) calls for land-basing of the Standard Missile SM-3 with forward deployed sensors (see p. 60). The PAA also calls on members to participate by providing capabilities