MDA Chief Vice Adm. Jon Hill on Moving THAAD Missile Defense System to Army

Vice Adm. Jon Hill, director of the Missile Defense Agency, said he’s not in favor of a plan to transition the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense system to the U.S. Army, Defense News reported Wednesday.

“Why would we hand that off to the Army or Air Force, that sort of transfer to a service where it won’t be prioritized? They have many other priorities,” he told the publication in an interview at the Space and Missile Defense Symposium in Huntsville, Ala. “I don’t like organizational experiments on programs that are delivering more fighting capability.”

Hill noted that THAAD is part of wider integrated missile defense platform and that the “transfer of services” should be clearly defined.

“It gets suspicious when we don’t have a fully defined term because all it really results in is fracturing of a program during a time where it’s most critical to have those programs stable and taking care of the war fighter,” he said. “There’s been a lot of discussion about the THAAD and the SM-3 [missile] transfer to the services. What does that mean?”