The KE ASAT program is intended to provide the U.S. with the capability to interdict hostile satellites. This capability is crucial to ensuring that hostile satellites are not used against the U.S. or our allied forces to provide an enemy important information derived from space-based surveillance and targeting. The KE ASAT consists of missile and weapon control subsystems. This advanced radar guidance system will allow fast, accurate, and all-weather interdiction of challenging incoming threats, putting missile defense on the front lines to protect the ground maneuver forces. Laser energy does not fly toward the target but is on target with almost no delay.
Kill times are short, and there is a continuing, rather than momentary, kill opportunity.
The effectiveness of high energy lasers as a tactical weapon has been successfully demonstrated by the joint U.S.-Israeli Nautilus program. The Weapons Directorate conducts extensive lethality testing to provide real-time user support to weapon developers and missile defense architecture planners. The Weapons Directorate provides missile defense developers expertise in system survivability. A series of hostile environment models have been developed and are utilized to conduct system analysis and evaluation and to support requirement flowdown for piecepart, subsystem, and system level testing.