Northrop to Aid MDA in Early Missile Intercept Initiative

Northrop Grumman is to help the US Missile Defence Agency (MDA) integrate and demonstrate an early-intercept capability.

Early Intercept will demonstrate an integrated architecture of early warning sensors, regional fire control and battle manager systems and secure communications.

The integrated architecture will enable current systems to engage threats earlier in the battle space to improve protection against large raids and facilitate shoot-look-shoot opportunities.

Northrop will conduct initial tasks to design and develop an experimental, plug-and-play battle management, command and control architecture.

With the architecture, MDA will be able to assess the capability of candidate sensors to aid in early intercept against medium and intermediate-range ballistic missiles by two of the MDA's missile defence interceptors – the Standard missile-3 and the ground-based interceptor.