Protecting the country through missile defense

The improvement in North Korean missile technology, the development of more powerful nuclear warheads, and the continuing threats of attack by an obviously unstable leader have made the need for an effective U.S. missile defense system more critical.

Research has continued with missile accuracy being a critical need along with the ability for the defensive missile to destroy the attacking one. It is important to be able to "kill" the incoming missiles early in its flight as possible to minimize destruction from missile debris.

The development of missile defenses falls under the U.S. Department of Defense's Missile Defense Agency, and Daniel DeLaurentis, an associate professor in Purdue's School of Aeronautics and Astronautics leads the antimissile research at Purdue University.

DeLaurentis was quoted in the Purdue University News Service on Oct. 12, 2010, "Additionally, the closer they get to our friendly positions, the more you have to worry about additional factors like potentially dangerous debris." The antimissile missile system computers process a huge amount of collected data, analyze it extremely quickly and use it to develop targeting info to launch the defensive missiles.

The development of the missile defensive system has been going on for years in civilian and military facilities. One result of this research has been the development and deployment of the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) system. This land-based system has been installed in South Korea and is a key to stopping missiles fired from North Korea. THAAD can hit missiles in the upper atmosphere and those on reentry from the lower levels of space. U.S. Army THAAD missile crews were dispatched to operate the system while South Korean crews are trained to operate the systems.

The Missile Defense Agency was created in 1993 from the 1983 Strategic Defense Agency. It has the mission of developing and deploying systems to create a layered missile defense system to protect the United States. Future technological developments mean that the missile defense system will need to constantly change to meet the newly developed hostile missile systems.

Jack Dragoni attended Boston College and served in the U.S. Army in Berlin and Vietnam. He lives in Chaffee, Missouri.