The U. S. military’s Aegis Ashore ballistic missile defense site in Poland is still ready to become operational after years of structural delays and other problems. The facility is meant to help protect Europe from ballistic missile attacks through “rogue actors” such as Iran, but the security landscape in Poland and the rest of Europe has changed dramatically since the task began in 2009.
Navy Rear Adm. Douglas Williams, the acting director of the Missile Defense Agency (MDA), laid out new details about the schedule for Aegis Ashore Poland in written testimony submitted ahead of a hearing before members of the House Armed Services Committee today.
“The Navy will formally accept Aegis Ashore Poland into their inventory on December 15,2023,” Williams wrote. “The Navy will install additional upgrades at Aegis Ashore Poland through May 2024, after which it will transfer to NATO in July 2024 for command and control of Aegis Ashore Poland in the defense of NATO European states against ballistic missile threats originating outside the Euro-Atlantic area.”
“The Aegis Ashore Poland, located in Redzikowo, was added to the operational capability base in September 2023 with improvements over the original design and a built-in electronic security system,” added the acting director of the MDA. “The Aegis Ashore Poland was delivered to the US Navy on October 1, 2023 for operational use and maintenance. “
This is the moment of this kind established by the U. S. military in Europe. Aegis Ashore Romania has been operational since 2016.
The Aegis Ashore venues in Poland and Romania, as well as a committed test edition of the formula in Hawaii, all have the same fundamental setup. These sites are composed of elements taken from the design of Flight IIA’s Arleigh Burke-class destroyer that have been transferred to a ground arrangement. This includes a “deck” construction modeled after the Arleigh Burke’s main superdesign comprising the Aegis critical combat formula and AN/SPY-1 radar, as well as other formulas and workspaces. There is also a separate aerial design containing a Mk 41 vertical launch system (VLS), also discovered at Arleigh Burkes, as well as a number of other U. S. and foreign warships.
You can learn more about the Aegis Combat System, specifically, and the capabilities it offers in this past in-depth War Zone feature.
Standard Missile 3 (SM-3) surface-to-air missile variants are the main interceptors used with Aegis Ashore systems in Poland and Romania, which are designed to interact with ballistic missiles (including intercontinental ballistic missiles or ICBMs) in the open. In the Earth’s environment, the intermediate component of its flights employs a kinetic “vehicle of destruction. “The vehicle of destruction destroys its target with a ramming rather than a classic explosive warhead.
The latest edition of the SM-3 family is the Block IIA edition, which evolved in cooperation with Japan and is particularly larger and more capable than previous models.
There have been rumors in the future about the integration of more interceptors into the Aegis Ashore system, especially in light of growing considerations about new hypersonic weapons. The Mk 41 VLS is a modular launcher that can already accommodate many weapons, adding the SM-6. The SM-6 has a flexible design, and versions have evolved to be more optimized for use against hypersonic threats.
“Today, the SM-6, which uses a fragmentation destruction mechanism, is the only interceptor available for limited defense against hypersonic missile threats,” Williams, MDA’s acting executive director, said in written testimony at today’s hearing. The U. S. military has revealed in the past.
The progressing Glide Phase Interceptor (GPI) may be a long-term interceptor option for Aegis Ashore.
There has been talk in the past about the potential for Aegis Ashore sites to fire missiles beyond surface-to-air interceptors, especially Tomahawk land-attack cruise missiles. The U.S. government has long denied any intention of integrating weapons like Tomahawk into Aegis Ashore and had also been barred from doing so under the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, or INF. That treaty, originally signed between the United and the Soviet Union, remained in force between the United States and Russia until 2018. The collapse of that deal increases the potential for long-range cruise missile threats in Europe.
The launch of Aegis Ashore Poland will be a fundamental milestone for the project, which has something of a saga spanning the last 14 years. The site’s origins date back even further, to the early 2000s, when the plan was to identify a Course Floor Defense Formula (GMD) in Poland connected to a radar site in the Czech Republic (now officially known like Czechia). GMD is a much more complex formula using larger interceptors introduced from silos and has faced technical and other difficulties over the years, as you can read more about here.
In 2009, President Barack Obama’s leadership abandoned GMD allocations, adding the radar installation in Czechia, and instead initiated the creation of the second Aegis Ashore site in Poland. The original hope was that Aegis Ashore Poland would be delivered in 2018 and operational soon. after.
By 2019, this deadline had already been delayed by about 18 months, a delay attributed to structure-related issues. Other structural difficulties, coupled with worse-than-expected seasonal weather conditions, exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic, subsequently led to the schedule being pushed back to 2022 and then to 2023. Rear Admiral Williams now, as reported in the past, Array demonstrated that the official schedule for delivering the formula to the Navy, regardless, was finalized in October.
The most sensible thing about all this is that Aegis Ashore Poland will operate in a very different geopolitical and security environment in Poland and the rest of Europe than it did in 2009. As MDA Acting Director Williams noted in his written testimony today, the apparent goal remains “the defense of European NATO states that oppose ballistic missile threats coming from outside the Euro-Atlantic area. “
Today, however, Poland has a focal point of Western military aid to neighboring Ukraine and is equally a central topic of discussion amid considerations about the consequences of that conflict. The Russian government has made vague threats in the past, indicating that it could simply divert aid intended for Ukraine to third countries. Last year, two Polish citizens were killed by an errant surface-to-air missile fired in reaction to a barrage of Russian missiles aimed at parts of western Ukraine.
Poland faces situations requiring additional security related to Russia’s ally, Belarus, that predate the full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Russia has created an even more confusing scenario by deploying nuclear weapons and adding nuclear-capable Iskander short-range ballistic missiles on Belarusian territory, in cooperation with the Belarusian armed forces.
In 2010, it was already reported that the Polish government was very interested in hosting U. S. missile defenses to counter possible threats from Russia and that U. S. officials had attempted to solve this challenge by ensuring that the Aegis Ashore formula could be used prospectively as opposed to other “hypothetical” threats.
From the beginning, Russian officials have lambasted the status quo of the Aegis Ashore sites in Poland and Romania, as well as other missile defense advances in the United States and Europe, calling them a risk to their national security interests. On the ground it is not designed to defeat a barrage of large-scale ballistic missiles from a potential close adversary like Russia, and it is not capable of doing so, even in theory.
That said, the option of smaller actors launching similarly small ballistic missile attacks against targets in Europe remains a threat. Iran, in particular, continues to expand the scale and range of its ballistic missile arsenal. He has also shown a willingness to use them, specifically to attack U. S. forces in the Middle East.
Some Iranian-mandated groups, namely the Houthis in Yemen, are also expanding their abilities to launch ballistic missile attacks, as well as moves involving cruise missiles and drones, from their main operating spaces. The Houthis have introduced ballistic missiles, along with other long-range weapons, into Israel in recent weeks in reaction to that country’s ongoing military operations in the Gaza Strip. This, in turn, has highlighted the price tag of Israel’s ballistic missile defenses, which are also aimed at protecting against smaller-scale attacks. It moves and they are now used regularly.
The U.S. military itself is looking to expand its missile defenses, against ballistic and cruise missile threats, at home and abroad, including with an eye toward helping defend critical sites in the Pacific against potential Chinese strikes. The highly strategic U.S. Pacific island territory of Guam, in particular, is set to see a massive expansion of its air and missile defense capacity, which will include a new more distributed variation of the Aegis Ashore concept. You can read more about this here.
Concerns are already growing that the U.S. military’s timeline for establishing its new defenses on Guam may be too ambitious. American officials want at least some portion of the new Enhanced Integrated Air and Missile Defense (EIAMD) system for the island to be operational by 2026.
Whatever role it may now play in the broader geopolitical context that exists today, Aegis Ashore Poland, which has been in the works for more than a decade, is now on the verge of becoming operational.
Update 14/12/2023:
The Naval Forces Europe Public Affairs Office (NAVEUR) and the U. S. Sixth FleetUU. se have contacted The War Zone to reiterate that the formal acceptance of the Aegis Ashore Poland site, which is still scheduled for tomorrow, is part of a procedure that will lead to it being fully operational.
“The Aegis ground-based missile defense system (AAMDS), located in Redzikowo, Poland, will be accepted by the U. S. Navy. “The AAMDS will be launched in the U. S. on December 15, 2023, where the AAMDS will begin a planned maintenance cycle to upgrade the network and computer systems,” NAVEUR/Sixth “Upon completion, the AAMDS Poland will be a fully incorporated and tested component of the U. S. ballistic missile defense system, and will be in a position to operate under NATO command and control,” the Office of Public Affairs said in a statement. The official handover to NATO is expected to take place between spring and summer 2024. “
“The acceptance of the Aegis Ashore site in Poland, as well as its sister site in Romania, is a vital step in our efforts to prepare the AAMDS to protect against the growing risk posed by ballistic missiles introduced from Iran,” he continued. “The addition of this site in Poland will help improve policy and increase the protection of all European NATO populations, territories and forces against potential risks to the Euro-Atlantic area. “
This is all in line with data provided through the Missile Defense Agency at the hearing on Capitol Hill last week.
Contact the author: joe@thedrive. com
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