Intelligence Support for Missile Defense

Intelligence Support for Missile Defense

Alex B. Duque

Successful development of the Ballistic Missile Defense System depends on critical intelligence. The Aerospace Corporation is intimately involved in developing tools to help defense system planners manage information from the intelligence community.

The Missile Defense Agency (MDA) will invest approximately $50 billion during the next five years in development of the advanced, highly complex Ballistic Missile Defense System (BMDS). Many will agree that the United States faces serious, credible, and growing threats from an accidental or intentional ballistic missile strike from rogue or nonstate actors. Since the advent of the German V-2 rocket in 1944, the world has witnessed an exponential rise in the advancement and proliferation of missile technology. The intelligence community estimates that more than 20 nations now possess ballistic missile capabilities-and this number continues to rise.

For more than three decades, the Cold War maintained a stable, though tense, environment through the policy of mutually assured destruction. The doctrine's success derived from the fact that both the United States and Soviet Union were rational superpowers, and that neither was interested in self-annihilation or global destruction. The end of the Cold War has produced a less predictable enemy and an unstable world environment.

Although weapons of mass destruction are a primary concern, it is not necessary for nonstate actors to use nuclear, chemical, or biological warheads to coerce or terrorize other nations. Instead, conventional weapons on ballistic missiles can be used effectively to weaken coalitions, influence military options or strategy, and sway public opinion. Ballistic missiles are glamorous weapons for developing nations, perceived as status symbols and prized possessions that can be used to project power against much stronger opponents (see sidebar, Troubling Events).

Even terribly inaccurate munitions like rockets may be used as instruments of alarming destructive power when equipped with unconventional warheads. Careless control over fissionable material, particularly in the former Soviet Union, is troubling because unauthorized sales to rogue states become increasingly possible. Of course, it is more likely for bad actors to obtain the wherewithal to produce chemical or biological weapons and to engineer them for purposes of terror than to obtain fissionable material and package it for that same purpose. Nevertheless, it is not altogether far-fetched for rogue states to find the means to package and deliver weapons-grade nuclear arms when characters like A. Q. Khan, former nuclear advisor to Pakistani President Musharraf, are transferring knowledge and nuclear technology to parts of the Middle East.

MDA and Intelligence

The MDA and its constituents (many of which are covered in separate articles in this issue) are empowered to design, build, test, and integrate sections of the BMDS. MDA is also charged with training the eventual operators of this highly complex system. Successful design and development of the BMDS depends on so-called "essential elements of information.' Examples of these include missile phenomenology and flight characteristics (signatures, object shapes and spacing, and flight dynamics); ballistic performance parameters; composition and depth of missile platforms and the placement of critical missile subsystems; ancillary data on launching platforms; inventory; payloads; countermeasures; deployment mechanisms; and country of origin. Current intelligence on these and other critical parameters is crucial to the design and optimization of sensors, interceptors, and shooters as well as command and control, battle management, and communications (C2BMC) constructs. Reliable information is also critical to the development of discrimination algorithms and engagement sequencing needed to destroy inbound warheads.

The Intelligence Requirements Division and Aerospace

The MDA Intelligence Requirements Division (formerly the Intelligence Directorate) is entrusted with satisfying MDA's demand for critical missile information. Through collaboration with many intelligence community members, it pursues all of MDA's intelligence needs and serves information to the whole agency through classified Web pages and assorted intelligence tools. Agencies MDA collaborates with include the Defense Intelligence Agency/Missile and Space Intelligence Center (DIA/MSIC), Air Force Intelligence/National Air and Space Intelligence Center (NASIC), Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), National Security Agency (NSA), National Reconnaissance Office (NRO), National Geospatial Intelligence Agency (NGA), National Ground Intelligence Center (NGIC), the Department of Energy (DOE), and Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI). The Intelligence Requirements Division is organized into four teams: the Current Intelligence Team, the Sensors Intelligence Team, the BMDS and Asymmetric Threat Team, and the Intelligence Applications Team. Each team has different responsibilities.

The Current Intelligence Team is responsible for producing, maintaining, and disseminating numerous daily intelligence reports and briefings to the MDA director, senior staff, and program elements. This team is also responsible for supplying the director and his senior staff with insight into global daily events, ensuring a high level of global situational awareness.

The Sensors Intelligence Team is responsible for coordinating the allocations for national sensor collections and for introducing MDA's requirements for scheduling consideration. This group is responsible for exploiting multiphenomenology products as well as analyzing and identifying potential MDA use of evolving intelligence community capabilities.

The BMDS and Asymmetric Threat Team is responsible for increasing the technical content of intelligence community production requests so that it accurately reflects the true intelligence needs of MDA. This team facilitates the resolution of technical differences between intelligence community assessments and the MDA system engineering estimation of the threat. Additionally, this group is responsible for examining unorthodox but credible ways of delivering strikes to U.S. soil.

The Intelligence Applications Team is responsible for developing and managing the capabilities and content of a few intelligence-based application tools. These tools are exceptionally useful in first-order analyses of trajectories and lethal/nonlethal object flight dynamics as well as optimal placement of transportable assets. This team is also responsible for obtaining the latest intelligence threat models and intelligence-validated characteristics, performance, and inventory data that must be made available in the intelligence application tools.

Since the fall of 2003, Aerospace has been an integral part of the MDA Intelligence Requirements Division, providing technical support to each of the four teams. A major portion of this support is concentrated on the Intelligence Applications Team. In particular, Aerospace has been assisting the team with engineering analysis and program management of the Universal Missile Protocol Instantiation Requester Environment (UMPIRE) and the Intelligence Reference Database (IRDB).

UMPIRE

UMPIRE was created to meet the need for a consistent and unified user interface to disparate trajectory-modeling tools. Previously, missile defense analysts had to learn five complicated trajectory applications developed by three different agencies: the DIA's Digital Integrated Combat Evaluator (DICE) and Optimized Missile Engagement General Architecture (OMEGA) for analyzing short- to medium-range ballistic systems; NASIC's Strategic and Theater Attack Modeling Process (STAMP) and Interactive Missile Process for a Universal Launch Simulation Environment (IMPULSE) for studying medium- to long-range threats; and the MDA Threat Modeling Center's Trajectory Generator (TG) tool, a desktop application for war games, tests, and other needs.

To examine the full range of the BMDS threat set, an analyst needed proficiency in applying and running all five tools. As a result, users often misused these utilities and had difficulty in comparing uncommon tool outputs-or, they would focus only on single facets of a threat set to minimize the time and work needed to gain competence with each tool. UMPIRE alleviates these problems by providing a single interface to all five programs and employing common standards to the Earth, gravity, and other physics-based parameters. Aerospace has been involved with the development of UMPIRE since March 2005 as the acting program manager on behalf of the MDA Intelligence Requirements Division.

The basic UMPIRE architecture. UMPIRE provides a single, consistent interface to five trajectory-modeling tools from three different agencies..

The ultimate goal of UMPIRE is to minimize or completely eliminate the misapplication of these tools and to enhance productivity, minimize redesigns, and even lower BMDS production costs. In addition, UMPIRE can be useful to MDA's Systems Engineering Directorate, responsible for identifying and defining the current and potential threat environment that the BMDS must defend against. The directorate developed the Adversary Capability Documents and Adversary Data Packages for this very purpose. Adversary Capability Documents estimate what a potential adversary could realistically do, given the limits of technology, basic physics, and presumed capabilities to date. In a few instances, the Systems Engineering Directorate has designed plainly conceptual missile systems and hypothetical scenarios that span the entire threat space. Sometimes, distinct designs are identified with which to assess the capability and adequacy of existing and future BMDS designs. Analyses of these systems require the use of all five simulation packages, which is streamlined and unified within UMPIRE.

UMPIRE was developed using a structured approach based on modern software development techniques. Initially, requirements were solicited in conjunction with the user community. To develop and review program requirements, an integrated product team was assembled, with membership from DIA/MSIC, NASIC, ONI, MDA's Modeling and Simulation Directorate and Threat Modeling Center, and a select user base. As program manager, Aerospace has chaired the integrated product team. The Intelligence Requirements Division further directed the creation of a System Requirements Specification to guide in the development of UMPIRE. This approach has worked out well. The integrated product team analyzed and considered interfaces to intelligence models, requirements for visualization, requirements for networking, requirements for supporting other platforms such as UNIX and LINUX, memory requirements, responsiveness to user inputs, and efficient methods for adding more simulations in the future.

Sample range contour plot in UMPIRE of a notional threat missile.

The UMPIRE team has demonstrated the flexibility of this architecture. The initial goal to integrate only four intelligence-based simulations was revisited and quickly improved after receiving feedback from numerous audiences. The development group integrated the Adversary Capability Documents systems, which were built with STAMP and TG to support the MDA development community, within UMPIRE. A prototype UMPIRE release incorporated the STAMP and TG databases of the Adversary Capability Documents threats. The alteration was accomplished within a month of receiving an informal change request from MDA. To mitigate the risk of misusing or misconstruing data between real intelligence and conceptual threats in UMPIRE and to address other intelligence community concerns, the team segregated the intelligence community and Adversary Capability Documents databases. Likewise, UMPIRE was designed to produce alerts to clearly differentiate between the intelligence and engineering data output types.

Beyond generating and plotting missile trajectories, other features in UMPIRE include the ability to import trajectory data from other sources and to allow terrestrial RF sensor data to be promptly visualized, plotted, copied, and pasted onto slide presentations. The terrestrial sensor capability places radar assets on the UMPIRE global display, allowing analysts to view simulated foreign missile flight tests and radar asset coverage of the flights. UMPIRE is a very beneficial tool to users who aspire to generate acceptable trajectories rapidly. The Intelligence Requirements Division implemented the ability to display the maximum reach of missile threats as well as contours from specific geographic launch areas.

The next UMPIRE release, now in development, will add terrain images so that users can zoom into areas to view detailed pictures of launch and impact sites. The UMPIRE team will add national sensor models as well so that users can visualize and analyze overhead sensor coverage of ballistic missile launches.

Sample terrestrial RF sensor visualization capability in UMPIRE.

The Missile Threat Portal

In 2003, the MDA Intelligence Requirements Division, the C2BMC Directorate, and DIA/MSIC embarked on an enterprise to serve threat intelligence data from diverse intelligence community data servers to the BMDS C2BMC architecture through an intelligence portal. The goals were to provide "one-stop shopping" for missile intelligence, to promote a mechanism for C2BMC machines to automatically ingest properly formatted information, to accommodate consistent configuration-controlled information, and to develop a machine-to-machine interface for C2BMC suites. The project, known as the Missile and Rocket Knowledge Base (MaRKB), was given one year for completion. Aerospace served as advisor to the Intelligence Requirements Division for the concept, design, development, and initial operations of the MaRKB.

In September 2003, the Intelligence Requirements Division asked DIA to develop an XML schema to tag and deliver missile information through the portal. They coordinated with other intelligence centers to ensure the MaRKB would be capable of accessing the profusion of data that is available but dispersed through various servers. The intelligence community provided information on long-range, medium-range, short-range, and submarine-launched missiles and long-range rockets for more than 80 threat systems. Most of this information, along with a considerable compilation of ancillary details, were staged on the MaRKB. A few more essential parameters, and the accompanying XML translation software, were to be delivered with the Intelligence Reference Database. The IRDB stores radar cross section and family of trajectory information for all threat objects in the MaRKB. It was designed to not only interface with the C2BMC, but to also automatically feed and update its threat database. Aerospace provided technical oversight over IRDB requirements, cost, schedule, and performance to meet the expectations of both the Intelligence Requirements Division and C2BMC Directorate. The MaRKB was declared operational in October 2004. C2BMC developers tested an unclassified beta version and were pleased with the new capability.

Sample terrestrial RF sensor visualization capability in UMPIRE.

Because of funding constraints, significant adjustments to portal data requirements, XML formatting difficulties, and calls for sizable information endorsement by the intelligence community, the MaRKB was discontinued, and the IRDB was delayed. Since then, however, the Current Intelligence Team has deployed the Missile Threat Portal, populated with intelligence community missile threat information. This portal has replaced the MaRKB and is serving a much wider user base. The IRDB is on hold until the intelligence community can audit and endorse its appreciable content.

Conclusion

The environment today has made terrorism vastly easier to coordinate on a worldwide scale than was possible years ago. Because of this, missile defense is seen today as a national priority. The MDA is in charge of deploying a missile defense system that will be effective under realistic conditions, against realistic threats and countermeasures, and without perfect prior knowledge of target cluster composition, trajectory, or direction. To develop and field an effective system that can engage and defeat this threat, MDA requires the best intelligence possible. The Intelligence Requirements Division is the designated interface to the intelligence community and is aligned to fulfill the MDA's myriad intelligence needs. With tools such as UMPIRE, the IRDB, and the Missile Threat Portal, the Intelligence Requirements Division stands primed to assist with the development and deployment of an effective BMDS.