Ground-Based Midcourse Defense

[2][3] As of 2019, a Missile Defense Review has requested 20 additional interceptors to be based in Fort Greely, Alaska, though their delivery has not materialized.

[11] GMD is tied into existing United States missile warning infrastructure, as well as purpose built radar sites.

The key sub-systems of the GMD system are: Interceptor sites are at Fort Greely, Alaska[12][13][14] and Vandenberg Space Force Base, California.

[17] In January 2014 the Pentagon announced they were starting a two-year environmental impact study under the 2013 defense authorization bill, which required two missile-defense sites to be identified on the East Coast.

[17] In June 2019, Fort Drum in New York was chosen as the location for the potential East Coast missile defense site.

[19] In March 2013, the Obama administration announced plans to add 14 interceptors to the current 26 at Fort Greely in response to North Korean threats.

[22] On 30 April 2014, the Government Accountability Office issued a report stating that the system may not be operational any time soon because "its development was flawed".

[23] Issues with the EKV prompted the MDA to work with Raytheon, Boeing, and Lockheed Martin on a new Redesigned Kill Vehicle (RKV), scheduled to debut in 2025.

One of them said the thruster remained inoperable through the final, "homing phase" of the test, when the kill vehicle was supposed to make a close fly-by of the target.

[63] MDA acknowledged that a problem surfaced during 28 January exercise: "There was an observation unrelated to the new thruster hardware that has been investigated and successfully root-caused," the agency said in a written response to questions.

Said James M. Acton, co-director of the Nuclear Policy Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, "It assumes that the failure modes of the interceptors are independent of one another.