The Missile Defense Agency wants to retain the option to double planned production capacity for a Next Generation Interceptor -- notionally carrying forward both Lockheed Martin and the Northop Grumman-Raytheon teams to manufacture new mega-large, guided missiles in tandem as a strategy to provide policy makers "maximum trade space."
MDA Director Vice Adm. Jon Hill said the NGI acquisition strategy remains flexible, with options to down-select to a single vendor should either fail to achieve a near-term deliverable or pick between the best of two viable proposals.
“But where we stand right now, you have maximum trade space,” Hill said May 23 at an event hosted by the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
MDA’s fiscal year 2023 budget proposal, however, indicates plans to proceed with a single vendor beginning in FY-25.
Nevertheless, Hill said MDA is not ruling out the option to proceed with two different NGI builders if policymakers deem the threat warrants faster production of the new ground-based interceptors being developed to deal with forecasted advances in nuclear-tipped, long-range rockets by North Korea.
MDA launched the NGI program to develop a new long-range, guided missile to protect the United States against anticipated North Korean and Iranian ballistic missile threats beginning in 2028. The project is a follow-on to the Redesigned Kill Vehicle effort, terminated in August 2019, that was a centerpiece of MDA plans to modernize the Ground-based Midcourse Defense system.
The NGI program aims to procure 21 operational NGIs to deploy in new silos in Alaska, recently completed and now empty, that were originally built for interceptors armed with the now-terminated RKV warhead. There are currently 44 GBIs fielded, although MDA estimates it will add a small number to the fleet through a service-life extension program.
In March 2021, MDA selected Lockheed Martin and a Northrop Grumman-Raytheon Technologies team for initial NGI design contracts, setting up a two-way race to build a new guided missile intended to protect the United States before the end of the decade from advanced North Korean ICBMs. The total combined contract value for the two awards was $7.5 billion, DOD said at the time.
After the Pentagon invests an estimated $13.1 billion to develop NGI, the per-missile production cost is expected to be about $111 million a copy, according to the office of cost assessment and program evaluation.
In overseeing NGI development, Hill said he is working to give policy makers a range of options about how to modernize the GBI inventory.
“Do you just replace the older ones, are you going to add to the current inventory?” Hill said, adding that is “another decision that has not been made” and he wants to provide “maximum trade space” to policymakers.
“You could have [a] dual production line and backup production line, you can add to the current inventory or you could replace the older ones,” Hill said. “So that's all open for now.”
The Fiscal Year 2022 National Defense Authorization Act includes a provision that requires MDA to draft notional plans for potentially tripling the NGI program of record by outlining options to replace the current inventory of GBIs with new interceptors.
The law authorizes an NGI program of at least 20 new interceptors and requires MDA to outline “transition plans to replace the current inventory of silo-based boosters with follow-on systems prior to the end of the useful lifecycle of the boosters.
“We'll just continue pressing forward so that we keep those options open for the warfighter, for the department, for the nation,” Hill said.
The Biden administration is actively considering this option to expand the NGI purchase, a senior official told Congress earlier this year.
As North Korean “ballistic missile threats to the U.S. homeland continue to evolve, the department is committed to improving the capability and reliability of the GMD system,” Sasha Baker, deputy under secretary of defense for policy, told the House Armed Services strategic forces subcommittee March 1. “This includes development of the Next Generation Interceptor to augment -- and potentially replace the existing Ground-based Interceptors.”