Five Reasons The Missile Defense Agency Should Be Merged Into The Space Force

It is now 40 years since President Ronald Reagan announced his plan for a Strategic Defense Initiative that would replace the mutual-hostage nuclear relationship between America and Russia.

Reagan’s plan failed, due in part to the nascent state of technologies required for its implementation, in part to collapse of the Soviet Union, and in part to ideological opposition from Democrats like Joe Biden.

As a result, the United States today has no real defense against a large-scale nuclear attack by Russia or China. It can threaten massive retaliation, but it can’t prevent hundreds of warheads from reaching their targets in America.

In fact, it is official U.S. policy not to even try defending against such an attack. Current missile defenses of the homeland are designed exclusively to intercept a modest nuclear attack by North Korea.

This seems like a blind spot in U.S. strategic thinking, given the persistent nuclear threats emanating from Moscow since it invaded Ukraine.

The simple fact is that we lack a reliable ability to predict when and how a nuclear exchange might occur—as the misguided act of a deluded foreign dictator, as an escalation of a regional conflict, as a breakdown in the nuclear command system, or as the result of other easily imaginable events.

The one thing we know for sure is that our present nuclear posture cannot cope with most of those eventualities. If deterrence fails, it might very well be the end of the road for American civilization as we have known it.

So, President Reagan was arguably on the right track when he called for a different approach. At the very least, the nation needs a backup to its offensive nuclear posture as a hedge against the failure of deterrence.

No such hedge will emerge from the Pentagon’s Missile Defense Agency. Although ostensibly the overseer of strategic defense efforts, it exercises little influence in the counsels of government. Its annual budget of $10 billion allocates about one percent of defense spending to what should be a top military priority—and most of that does not go to defense of the homeland.

Missile defense of the American homeland demands a more powerful advocate within the federal bureaucracy. The obvious candidate to fill that role is the Space Force—the world’s only independent space force.

You don’t need to embrace President Reagan’s bold vision of a world in which nuclear weapons are obsolete to see that the Space Force is the logical hub for a revitalized missile-defense effort. Here are five reasons for merging the Missile Defense Agency (MDA) into the Space Force.

MDA is a bureaucratic orphan. The Missile Defense Agency is descended from the Strategic Defense Initiative Organization, the agency set up in 1984 to implement President Reagan’s vision. Its name was changed by President Clinton and again by President Bush as ideas about missile defense shifted, but one thing didn’t change: the agency lacks firm roots in a military service that has a stake in its success.

Because no service has ownership of the mission, it gets short shrift in Pentagon deliberations. The Navy periodically complains about its Aegis warships being tied down by missile-defense missions, and the Army certainly didn’t need MDA to see the requirements for its Patriot air and missile defense system. The mission of defending the nation against nuclear attack needs to be tied to a more powerful bureaucratic player.

Effective missile defense is mainly about space. Detection and tracking of missile threats, both ballistic and maneuvering, is best achieved from space. Terrestrial systems have too limited a field of view to sort out and target large numbers of incoming warheads, especially when they are accompanied by decoys and other penetration aids. MDA’s plans for tracking long-range hypersonic threats depend on proliferating surveillance satellites in low earth orbit.

Engagement of attacking warheads is most likely to be accomplished in or near space, since that is the lengthiest phase of their flight regime. The physics of interception favor attacking incoming weapons from above, in other words from orbit, rather than from below. And battle management of engagements, whether using kinetic interceptors or directed energy, necessarily entails relying on space-based communications links. So much of the relevant infrastructure belongs to the Space Force.

Space Force operates critical ground equipment. The Space Force already operates the ground systems associated with critical missile-defense assets such as the Space Based Infrared System and Strategic Missile Warning system. Earlier this month, Vice Chief of Space Operations Gen. David Thompson disclosed that the Army will transfer its ground-based Theater Missile Warning locations to the Space Force, further bolstering the service’s control of missile-defense functions.

Some surface assets relevant to missile defense such as the Aegis air defense system on naval surface combatants must necessarily remain under the control of their home services because they are integral to other missions. However, as networking of the military proceeds under initiatives such as the Joint All-Domain Command and Control system, it will become feasible to integrate all terrestrial and overhead assets in a single, unified warfighting system.

MDA’s current architecture will not scale. Because the current missile-defense architecture is sized to the relatively modest threat posed by North Korea, it is far from ideal for addressing bigger challenges. The main engagement mechanism for homeland defense is several dozen silo-based missiles designed to intercept incoming warheads in space. Firing doctrine envisions assigning two or more interceptors to each attacking warhead.

This system clearly won’t work against a sizable attack. The cost-exchange ratio heavily favors attackers, and the scale of operations required to intercept, say, a hundred incoming warheads equipped with penetration aids would be too complicated to sustain for long. If the American homeland is to be actively defended against a major attack, the engagements must be performed from space.

An excess of players can slow decisions. It has become customary to set up interagency teams for the implementation of new space systems, because so many players have a stake in the outcome. For instance, the interagency task force guiding development of the next-generation missile-warning satellite constellation contains two Space Force agencies, two intelligence agencies, plus MDA—and that’s before we even get to the various tactical users who might want to have a say.

This system needs to be streamlined, and folding MDA into the Space Force would be a good start. By concentrating missile-defense modernization and operations in the Space Force, a service with a seat at the table in joint deliberations can become the authoritative decider in developing future defensive systems. The time required to resolve issues can be compressed and the Pentagon can move ahead on addressing the greatest military threat the nation faces.

Some contributors to my think tank may have an interest in how missile-defense efforts are organized.