How to optimize joint theater ballistic missile defense
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Authors
Diehl, Douglas D.
Subjects
Optimization
Mathematical programming
Joint theater ballistic missile defense
Mathematical programming
Joint theater ballistic missile defense
Advisors
Brown, Gerald
Date of Issue
2004-03
Date
March 2004
Publisher
Monterey, CA; Naval Postgraduate School
Language
Abstract
Many potential adversaries seek, or already have theater ballistic missiles capable of threatening targets of interest to the United States. The U.S. Missile Defense Agency and armed forces are developing and fielding missile interceptors carried by many different platforms, including ships, aircraft, and ground units. Given some exigent threat, the U.S. must decide where to position defensive platforms and how they should engage potential belligerent missile attacks. To plan such defenses, the Navy uses its Area Air Defense Commander (AADC) system afloat and ashore, the Air Force has its Theater Battle Management Core Systems (TBMCS) used in air operations centers, and the Missile Defense Agency uses the Commander's Analysis and Planning Simulation (CAPS). AADC uses a server farm to exhaustively enumerate potential enemy launch points, missiles, threatened targets, and interceptor platform positions. TBMCS automates a heuristic cookie-cutter overlay of potential launch fans by defensive interceptor envelopes. Given a complete missile attack plan and a responding defense, CAPS assesses the engagement geometry and resulting coverage against manually prepared attack scenarios and defense designs. We express the enemy courses of action as a mathematical optimization to maximize expected damage, and then show how to optimize our defensive interceptor pre-positioning to minimize the maximum achievable expected damage. We can evaluate exchanges where each of our defending platform locations and interceptor commitments are hidden from, or known in advance by the attacker. Using a laptop computer we can produce a provably optimal defensive plan in minutes.
Type
Thesis
Description
Series/Report No
Department
Department of Operations Research
Organization
Naval Postgraduate School (U.S.)
Identifiers
NPS Report Number
Sponsors
Funder
Format
xxii, 42 p. : col. ill., col. maps
Citation
Distribution Statement
Approved for public release; distribution is unlimited.
Rights
This publication is a work of the U.S. Government as defined in Title 17, United States Code, Section 101. Copyright protection is not available for this work in the United States.