Purpose: The purpose of the Air and
Missile Defense Working Group is to gather knowledgeable, responsible
individuals from the military operations research community and provide a forum
for presenting and discussing significant technical, operational and analytical
issues pertaining to any or all aspects of air and missile defense.
Discussion: The areas of interest for this
working group include Theater Missile Defense (TMD), National Missile Defense (NMD),
the space assets which support both, as well as traditional Air Defense. The
mission of TMD is to protect US forces deployed in various theaters of
operations, selected military and geopolitical assets in allied or friendly
nations, and other potential targets that are critical to US national interests.
TMD includes protection against theater ballistic missiles, air-to-surface
missiles, land attack cruise missiles launched from land, air or sea, and
anti-ship missiles. As defined by the Joint Staff, TMD encompasses four mission
areas: Active Defense, Passive Defense, Attack Operations, and Battle
Management/ Command, Control, Communications, Computers and Intelligence
(BM/C4I). Inherent in these mission areas is the likelihood of conducting joint
(multi-Service) and/or combined (multi-national) TMD operations.
National Missile Defense will protect the fifty
United States against a limited or unauthorized attack with intercontinental
ballistic missiles (ICBMs) or sea-launched ballistic missiles (SLBMs) from any
national source. The NMD system ultimately fielded will include sensor elements
to acquire, track and discriminate reentry vehicles from non-threatening
objects, provide cueing information to the interceptor, and to provide data to
verify destruction of RVs; an interceptor element capable of receiving and
processing in-flight target updates, performing on board target selection and
providing reliable target destruction; and a BM/C4I element for system
integration, informed decision making by humans-in-control, and engagement
planning and execution. NMD and TMD will both rely heavily on space-based
sensors and communications.
The Air Defense mission includes defense by
surface-based and airborne weapons systems of high value targets against attack
by aircraft and cruise missiles. This working group is therefore concerned with
Army, Navy, Marine Corps and Air Force, and Joint/Combined, air defense problems
and solutions. Though these problems may be of any size, the emphasis is
normally on theater level and joint operations air defense.
In all these areas, results of recent and ongoing
studies, analyses, experiments and model development efforts will be presented
and discussed, and critiqued as a "peer review." Working Group 4 acts
as a focal point for constructive discussions among representatives of the
Ballistic Missile Defense Organization, the Office of the Secretary of Defense,
Joint Staff, the Services, combat commands, combat developers, hardware
developers, test and evaluation commands and agencies, research houses and
national laboratories.
Other
Working Groups:
Joint sessions are normally held with the other working groups in Composite
Group A: Strategic & Defense, and possibly with working groups in CG B:
Space/C4ISR.
