Congress has called on the Defense Department secretary to use the ballistic missile defense review to assess ways on how to advance the development of technology platforms designed to increase the capability of the ballistic missile defense system’s ground-based midcourse element, Defense News reported Thursday.
Lawmakers made the call through the fiscal 2018 defense spending bill’s conference report.
DoD is set to release by the end of the year the findings of the review that aims to shed light on the state of the U.S. ballistic missile defense against threats posed by Iran and North Korea.
The congressional conference report for the FY 2018 National Defense Authorization Act also directs the Missile Defense Agency to build a space-based ballistic missile intercept layer and a space-based sensor architecture as well as speed up the development and deployment of defense capabilities as prioritized in the review.
Those capabilities include the multi-object and redesigned kill vehicles, space-based sensor layer, ground-based interceptors, boost phase sensor and the C3 booster.
The BMD review is likely to include plans related to space-based missile defense capability, the report added.
The House on Wednesday passed a conferenced version of the NDAA that would authorize $692 billion in defense spending for fiscal 2018.