Missile Defense Agency

Supporting Efforts

Targets and Countermeasures

 

Targets and Countermeasures Fact Sheet (PDF*)

The Missile Defense Agency’s Program Manager for Targets and Countermeasures oversees the design, development, manufacture and integration of threat-representative, reliable, and cost-effective ballistic missile targets and countermeasures for the Ballistic Missile Defense System (BMDS) test and assessment program. The program also executes pre and post-test data reduction and identifies target characterization activities necessary to support the Agency’s test objectives.

Highlights

• The design performance and capabilities of the BMDS are assessed in a variety of ways, including flight testing against live targets that must accurately represent key characteristics of real world threats.
• Target systems include launch vehicles, payloads (including surrogate re-entry vehicles and countermeasures), and extensive instrumentation and flight controls. Since 1993, the targets program has successfully launched more than 180 short-range to long-range targets. This record of success includes recent innovations for air-launching targets and targets launched from the Agency’s sea-based mobile launch platform.
• Target quantity, reliability, and affordability have become key concerns as the complexity and pace of missile defense testing increases.  The Missile Defense Agency developed a new acquisition strategy to address these concerns and includes inventory and spare/backup strategies, procurement against performance specifications, and increased Mission Assurance requirements.  The inventory of threat class based targets will be procured in quantities sufficient to support manufacturing efficiencies in quality and reduced costs.

Summary

The role of the Targets and Countermeasures Program is to develop and provide realistic targets for the Ballistic Missile Defense System. Building ballistic missile target vehicles and payloads is rocket science, and industry’s products for Targets and Countermeasures will draw on the available and future technologies to emulate the threat reliably and affordably.

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