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“Aegis Ashore Poland, located in Redzikowo, was added to the operational capability base in September 2023 with upgrades to the original design and a built-in electronic security system,” added the MDA acting director. “Aegis Ashore Poland was delivered to the U. S. Navy on October 1, 2023 for operational use and maintenance. “
The installation is the second such site the U.S. military has established in Europe. Aegis Ashore Romania has been operational since 2016.
Aegis Ashore’s sites in Poland and Romania, as well as a committed test edition of the formula in Hawaii, 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 inspired by 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 has been talk in the past about the integration of additional interceptors into the Aegis Ashore system, especially in light of growing concerns about new hypersonic weapons. The Mk 41 VLS is a modular launcher that can already accommodate a host of other weapons, including the SM-6. The SM-6 is a multi-purpose design and versions have been developed that are 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.
https://www. youtube. com/watch?v=-q-ieXZgrhY
There has been talk in the past about the option of Aegis Ashore sites firing missiles beyond surface-to-air interceptors, specifically Tomahawk land attack cruise missiles. The US government has long denied any goal of integrating weapons like Tomahawk into Aegis Ashore and has also prohibited it from doing so under the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, or INF. This treaty, originally signed between the United States and the Soviet Union, remained in force between the United States and Russia until 2018. The failure of this agreement increases the possibility that cruise missiles will threaten the long-standing diversity in Europe.
Aegis Ashore Poland becoming operational will be a major milestone for the project, which has become something of a saga over the past 14 years. The site’s origins date back even further, to the early 2000s, when the plan was to establish a Ground-based Midcourse Defense (GMD) system in Poland linked with a radar site in the Czech Republic (now formally known as Czechia). GMD is a much more complex system that utilizes larger silo-launched interceptors and has been beset by 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.
In 2019, this deadline had already been delayed by about 18 months, a delay attributed to structure-related issues. Other structural challenges, in addition to worse-than-expected seasonal weather, exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic, led to a calendar postponement to 2022 and then to 2023. Rear Admiral Williams has now shown, as he has reported in the past, that the official timetable for the delivery of the formula to the Navy, despite everything, has been set in October.
On top of all this, Aegis Ashore Poland will come online in a very different geopolitical and security environment in Poland and the rest of Europe than existed in 2009. As acting MDA director Williams noted in his written testimony today, the site’s ostensible purpose is still to support “the defense of NATO European states against ballistic missile threats originating 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 President Duda: “There is no indication this was an intentional attack on Poland. Most likely it was a Russian-made S-300 missile. We've no proof it was fired by the Russian side. Many indications it was an air defence missile that unfortunately fell on Polish territory.”
— Yannis Koutsomitis (@YanniKouts) November 16, 2022
Poland faces additional security challenges with regard to Russian ally Belarus that predate the all-out invasion of Ukraine. Russia has further complicated the situation by deploying nuclear weapons, including nuclear-capable Iskander short-range ballistic missiles, on Belarusian territory in cooperation with that country’s 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.
All this being said, the potential for smaller actors to launch equally smaller ballistic missile strikes on targets in Europe does remain a threat. Iran, in particular, continues to expand the scale and scope of its ballistic missile arsenal. It has also shown a willingness to use them, including to target U.S. forces in the Middle East.
Some Iranian-mandated groups, the Houthis in Yemen, are also expanding their abilities to launch ballistic missile strikes, as well as movements with cruise missiles and drones, far away from their main operating spaces. The Houthis have also introduced ballistic missiles. as well as other long-range weapons, against 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 intended to protect against smaller-scale measures and are now used regularly.
https://www. youtube. com/watch?v=Depz8_VHbxQ
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, in operation for more than a decade, is now on the verge of becoming operational.
Contact the author: joe@thedrive. com