Army revives anti-missile system with novel maintenance approach.

• Author: Tiron, Roxana
• Position: Terminal High Altitude Area Defense system

After seeing more failures than successes in its dozen years of development, a newly redesigned and renamed missile defense program now is racing toward its first flight tests.

The Terminal High Altitude Area Defense system--formerly known as the Theater High Altitude Area Defense--has undergone a complete overhaul to emulate the kind of "pit-stop" maintenance that racecars receive on NASCAR tracks.

The U.S. Army's THAAD is a mobile, land-based weapons program that is intended to destroy short-and medium-range ballistic missiles in their terminal phases, just seconds before they explode. The system is intended as one of the last lines of defense against incoming enemy missiles.

THAAD is the only missile system specifically designed to intercept and destroy incoming ballistic missiles both inside and outside the earth's atmosphere, according to the Missile Defense Agency.

The system has been under development since 1992 at White Sands, N.M., and failed, on six successive tests, to intercept incoming missiles in the late 1990s. Those failures prompted THAAD engineers to completely rework the program in an effort to find a way to fix problems on the go. For that, they requested the help of NASCAR consultants.

Now, the souped-up system is readying for its initial demonstration this year and the first flight test next spring, said Army Col. Chuck Driessnack, THADD project manager.

"If you think of a NASCAR race, the person who wins is the person who can keep the car on the track as long as possible and spend the minimum amount of time working repairs," Driessnack told National Defense.

A missile defense mission has similar requirements, he contended. "There is a lot of synergism between the philosophy of a pit-stop crew and THAAD," he said. Missile defense systems have to stay operational at all times, and therefore need quick and reliable fixes, he added. "If our system goes down, there no longer is any capability to defeat the ballistic missile, and they can attack a region at any time."

Add to that the need to deploy in extremely harsh environments worldwide, he said. Therefore, "the Army can't have a huge crew deployed to keep the system up," he said. "We are trying to reduce the amount of support to keep a fire unit operational."

The basic premise behind the design changes was to reduce the soldier maintenance tasks and the tools for the job, said Tom McGrath, Lockheed Martin's vice president and program manager for THAAD. Lockheed Martin...