Anybody knows what "Road to 44" means?
“It actually replicated — without getting into classified details — an operational scenario that we’re concerned about,” Vice Adm. James Syring, currently at NORTHCOM HQ in Colorado Springs, told reporters gathered here around a speaker phone. While the Missile Defense Agency director didn’t explicitly say the threat yesterday emulated a North Korean missile, he did say tests replicate threats “from North Korea or Iran. In this case it was a Pacific scenario.” (Protip: Iran is not in the Pacific).In fact, MDA tests against the intelligence community’s best estimate of where the North Korean and Iranian missile programs will be “three years” from now. “What we see in 2020…was very well replicated in the tests that we conducted yesterday,” Syring said.That cutting-edge threat includes a high-performance target. “It flew at a higher altitude and a longer range and a higher velocity” than any target in previous tests, said Syring. It’s the first time the US missile defense system has actually been tested against a target with the performance characteristics of an ICBM, which is the threat that inspired its creation in the first place, three decades and at least 123 billion dollars ago.
With a twinge of exasperation, Syring also refuted suggestions that the test was a set-up, with the defenders knowing exactly when to fire and where to aim. “The target absolutely does not have a homing beacon on it, despite what some have written,” he said. The missile defense system “was not notified when the target was launched,” instead having to rely on radars and satellites to detect the missile’s take-off and compute its path, just as they would in a real-war scenario.The missile defense crews did know the test was happening yesterday and the rough time window when it would occur, Syring said, but such things have to be scheduled and made public well in advance for safety reasons: “We’re launching an interceptor hundreds of miles north of LAX (Los Angeles airport, to) Hawaii,” he said. “That requires us to shut down large parts of the ocean (to) ship traffic and air traffic.”
Anyone know if any of these Falcon 9 launches from Vberg are to be expendables?
About four times every year, the Air Force goes through the exercise of pulling an ICBM out of a silo, removing its nuclear warhead and sending it to Vandenberg Air Force Base near Lompoc for a test launch.