US air-and-missile-defense (AMD) systems have shown their worth in the Iran conflict, intercepting wave after wave of attacks from missiles and drones.

yeah, sure

But a number of costly TPY-2 radars have been damaged or destroyed, and stockpiles of munitions components such as solid rocket motors (SRMs) are dwindling, exacerbating concerns about the capability of AMD systems to maintain effectiveness. Breaking Defense discussed the performance of AMD systems, munitions stockpile concerns and what needs to happen to ensure future deterrence capability with Tom Karako, director of the Missile Defense Project, Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS).

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Let’s talk about SRMs [Solid Rocket Motors] specifically, which were the subject of a recent report by CSIS. Is it harder to replace SRMs than it is to replace other components of AMD interceptors?

The answer is yes and no, and it just depends on the round. For some things it’s more the dependent variable and in other instances it’s not. It may be the seeker, it may be the avionics, it may be the electronics in some other manner. It just depends, but these relationships are also coupled. Expectations about SRM delivery may shape expectations about seeker delivery and vice versa. The short answer here is that everybody is kind of ramping up and everybody needs to ramp up together.

How has the inconsistency of the demand signals over the last couple decades led to challenges for the industrial base to quickly ramp up SRM production?

The defense industrial base for SRMs is the defense industrial base that we paid for. We also have the defense industrial base that the government has created and curated and shaped and incentivized and disincentivized in 17 different ways. We have the industrial base that was asked for and that was manufactured by the monopsony customer over several decades. When the customer decides on a dime that they want something completely different and now they’re wagging their finger at the defense industrial base that it created, it is not surprising that it creates some difficulty.

You mentioned that everybody needs to ramp manufacturing up together, but don’t SRMs have some additional manufacturing complexities due to considerations such as safety regulations?

Well, they do. From the study interviews and site visits that we did that I don’t think safety regulations are the thing to short. SRMs are dangerous. People do die from time to time and it’s okay to spread buildings around and to have berms between buildings. Safety matters because people matter. We can’t build these things without people. So it’s not the need for regulation or the need for safety by any means. Having said that, there were some things that emerged during this process such as, for instance, the existence of redundant and contradictory regulations. In addition to the Pentagon’s fairly exhaustive and prudent regulations, there’s also the jurisdictional phenomenon that a lot of this is regulated by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms. That’s interesting and this creates dilemmas where you’ve got various objects that are regulated by two different agencies, very different agencies, with different rules, which is not necessarily productive. Perhaps that’s something that a future NDAA or other legislative mechanism takes up. Aren’t the DoD’s regulations good enough? Do we really need a second regulatory organization for solid rocket motor things? The question of redundancy is an interesting object of legislative scrutiny that efficiency and also just good government might be worth revisiting.

In the recent report CSIS released on SRMs for AMD, one interesting note is that the demise of the space shuttle program has created some unused manufacturing capacity for SRMs. Can you expand on that?

The shutdown on the shuttle is a part of why the demand went down. But many of the facilities exist for more capacity than they are producing today. At a number of sites we visited, we would hear from industry and see facilities that are not functioning at their max capacity. The reason for that is not that they can’t. At one facility people pointed to a building with mixing bowls that are only used two days a week. Why are they only used two days a week? Because the government demand only necessitates they’re being used two days a week. Could they be used five days a week? Yes, they could, but the government contracts are not there to use them five days a week. Could they be? If they were, the answer is yes. It really comes down to “physician, heal thyself.” The customer with this collective existence needs to have and to communicate a clear demand signal.

Now that there has been some time to look back at everything that has happened during the Iran conflict, how would you evaluate the current effectiveness of US air and missile defense?

The effectiveness has been quite good, especially in terms of the ballistic missile defense engagements. It’s been so good that we are, unfortunately, beginning to deplete our inventory. As we’ve noted in a number of CSIS reports over the years, including late last year warning of this problem, this was a problem in the 12-day war last summer. I’m in print saying at the time that we couldn’t afford to do it again. Well, we did it again, and that’s kind of a problem. It’s a problem because it is a depletion of our inventories. The good news is that few ballistic missiles have been hitting. Some have, to be sure, been getting through, but we’ve been engaging a lot. It used to be that certain folks would crow that you can’t hit a bullet with a bullet. That cottage industry has gone silent. Now the complaint is that we aren’t hitting bullets with bullets cheaply enough, and that we are running out of anti-bullet bullets. On the air defense side there’ve been hundreds and hundreds of engagements of drones, with lots of them being shot down. Unfortunately, there’s also a decent number of the Shaheds getting through. That’s not necessarily a strike on the capability of the defenses as much as it is a limitation of their capacity and the challenge of being everywhere all the time. Because these things are maneuverable on a certain trajectory, the defense problem is almost by its nature a point defense problem. Ballistic missile defense, by contrast, is an area defense problem, and it’s able to do that because ballistics have a predictable trajectory.

does he... not know about terminal maneuvering? a capability that the Iranians have demonstrated on multiple occasions? fuckin' hell, well at least we can guess that it's even worse for the empire than what even the more pessimistic think thank guys are letting on

But in the same way that it’s hard to know where an airplane is going to go until it gets there, you need to have your point defense defenses co-located with your defended asset. The corollary to that is that some of these things may be getting through because we don’t have drone defenses in the right place at the right time and that’s just the nature of things.

You say that some members of the Shahed family of drones should really be classified more as cruise missiles. What capabilities make you say that?

This is a bit of a pet peeve about what might be called a doctrinal or taxonomy problem. It wasn’t that long ago when the air defense taxonomy was fairly straightforward: it was ballistic missiles, cruise missiles and fixed- and rotary-wing aircraft. But as I’ve written on a number of occasions, the increasing and diversifying threat spectrum has become so proliferated and has so diffused that those easy distinctions are becoming blurred. In short, we need a new taxonomy, or way of describing the threat spectrum. To take one example, there are these aircraft that we call drones or UAVs that may be either fixed-wing or rotary-wing. And some of them have substantial ranges: the Shahed-238 has a range that cannot be described as anything but a long-range cruise missile. The technological maturity, their reliability, and the availability of these things is blurring and challenging the taxonomies of the past. When something can go 2,000 kilometers and it’s got wings, one doesn’t really need to come up with fancy nomenclatures like “one-way attack UAV” or “loitering munition.” That thing deserves to be called a cruise missile.

As you said, drones are relatively easy to kill, but it’s harder to identify targets when there’s a swarm coming at you as opposed to a few missiles.

There is the large salvo problem. It’s the fact that they can hug the terrain or be below the horizon for most of their flight. That’s going to translate to shorter detection time. It’s not just detection, it’s also tracking and identification. You have to not just barely see a blip on the radar screen, but you have to have confidence that it’s not an American aircraft or an American drone.