US Conducts Successful Aegis Ballistic Missile Defense (BMD) Test
Fox News is reporting that the US Missile Defense Agency (MDA) announced today that a ballistic missile was successfully shot down over the Pacific Ocean in a new test of its at-sea missile defense system, installed on USS John Paul Jones, DDG-53.
The test vessel fired an SM-6 interceptor missile to shoot down the target, and comes after a previous test last June, that failed.
“We are working closely with the fleet to develop this important new capability, and this was a key milestone in giving our Aegis BMD ships an enhanced capability to defeat ballistic missiles in their terminal phase,” MDA Director Lt. Gen. Sam Greaves said in a statement. “We will continue developing ballistic missile defense technologies to stay ahead of the threat as it evolves.”
The target missile was launched from Kauai, was detected and tracked with Jones’ AN/SPY-1 Aegis radar, and was successfully engaged with on-board SM-6 missiles.
This test follows North Korea’s Tuesday ballistic missile test. That missile was fired from North Korea’s capital Pyongyang, overflew the northern Japanese island of Hokkaido and terminated in the Pacific Ocean. The missile flew around 1677 miles and reached an altitude of 341 miles. The overflight of a close US ally resulted in President Trump’s written statement repeating that all US options are being considered, and called for a UN Security Council meeting.
“Threatening and destabilizing actions only increase the North Korean regime’s isolation in the region and among all nations of the world,” Trump said.
Perhaps next time NDtBF will be kind enough to provide the test target in a real-world Capabilities Test of the system.
Category: Politics
Considering that the Nork missile, a Hwasong-12, was supposed to fly toward Guam instead of Japan, either the guidance system was set incorrectly or malfunctioned during/after launch.
I don’t understand why the Japanese didn’t shoot that one down, but it was their call.
Well, it was 340 miles up so it was in space when it crossed their northern big island (Hokkaido).
There was a discussion elsewhere about why it wasn’t shot down that I read yesterday. As I recall, the gist is that it would have been a hard shot; THAAD in ROK didn’t have a shot; if they had missed, it would have been a bad thing. See https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/08/n-korea-launches-missile-over-japan-should-us-have-shot-it-down/.
I am going to take a wild guess here. The only time someone is going to attempt a BMD intercept of someone’s missile is if the plotted impact is somewhere interesting.
Of course, the moment someone’s rocketry -does- have an interesting point of impact, things will get exciting indeed.
It would be awesome to have one of that asshole’s test shots taken out of the sky….
Some lessons are best learned from direct experience of the current reality.
And the debris fall in his front yard.
Also Google Translate renders DPRK’s “Supreme Leader” to “Mr. Squidward” due to people gaming the system for giggles: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2017/08/crowdsourced-gaming-of-google-translate-dubs-kim-jung-un-mr-squidward/
Now that’s funny!
When I heard this on radio and read preliminary reports, the talk was that the missile was “unarmed” or ” had no warhead”. Ok, fair enough. But how do they know that?
Which missile are you referring to? The North Korean ballistic missile most likely had an instrumentation package in lieu of an actual warhead, same as the test missile launched from Kauai. The SM-6 can have a 140 pound focused blast-fragmentation warhead installed.
Where’s the kaboom?
There should have been an Earth-shattering Kaboom!
HooYah NAVY.
Oh, dear! I’m going to have to disintegrate you!