WASHINGTON — A decision to place the U.S. Missile Defense Agency under the Pentagon’s new research branch could pay dividends for an agency that has seen its research and development capabilities shrink in recent years.
The Defense Department is in the process of splitting the undersecretary of defense for acquisition, technology and logistics, or AT&L, into two new organizations: the undersecretary of research and engineering, or USDR&E; and the undersecretary for acquisition and sustainment, or USDA&S.
Under a draft plan rolled out Aug. 1, the MDA would report directly to the USDR&E, the organization tasked with developing and fielding next-generation capabilities needed to support the Pentagon’s mission, rather than USDA&S, the organization that will handle more oversight of ongoing programs.
That is a notable and important choice, according to Thomas Karako, a missile defense expert with the Center for Strategic and International Studies and the author of a 2016 study that expressly called for MDA to focus more on research and development and less on procurement and sustainment of existing systems.
MDA was originally designed to do research on new missile defense capabilities, but as time went on and systems such as the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense missile defense system and the Navy’s Standard Missile entered service, the agency found itself focusing on sustaining operative systems over designing new ones.
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“MDA has become more of a combat-support agency and less of a material developer/R&D entity, and that has a risk,” Karako said. “That has some risk because it means MDA is having a harder time, or has been having a harder time, focusing on its core mission, which is research- and development-centric.”
A big problem has been MDA’s ability to transfer procurement to the services on existing missile defense systems, which eats up a lot of its budget. On top of that, Karako said, between 7 and 9 percent of its annual funding goes to supporting missile defense development for Israel.
And when that happens, “everything else gets squeezed,” he said. “And it isn’t procurement and sustainment that is first to go. It’s R&D.”
Notably, the entire AT&L restructure was based on the idea that services would take more of a leadership role in procurement, letting the former AT&L focus on new technology and oversight. If that happens, MDA will be free to focus on R&D, which would explain its placement in the USDR&E group.
Aaron Mehta was deputy editor and senior Pentagon correspondent for Defense News, covering policy, strategy and acquisition at the highest levels of the Defense Department and its international partners.
