\u201cHistorically, if you start from the high end here, missile defense and missile warning were operating on separate and distinct stovepipe networks,\u201d Lt. Gen. Rick Zellman said during a panel at the\u00a0Space and Missile Defense Symposium<\/a>\u00a0(SMD) in Huntsville, Alabama, attended by\u00a0TWZ<\/em>. \u201cMissile warning, of course, was going to detect a launch and let people know something\u2019s coming inbound and see a duck and cover and whatnot, and missile defenders were looking to get a little bit more fidelity in their track and be able to shoot down an incoming missile,\u201d he continued. \u201cBut today we don\u2019t really have any ballistic missiles. Everything is maneuvering. Everything is complex, and so we can\u2019t provide warning without providing a lot more observations on these missiles.\u201d<\/p>\n As a result of the evolution in missile technology, \u201cthe lexicon that we\u2019re starting to see is missile tracking, right?\u201d the general proffered. \u201cAnd so missile warning and missile defense are really coming together in that realm. Missile warning was a space legacy mission area, and of course missile defense is missile defense. And you can see how these things are coming together. So really, the distinction between missile warning is almost obsolete at this point.\u201d<\/p>\n The U.S. military has\u00a0space-based early warning sensors<\/a>\u00a0that are integrated into its existing sensing, and has been for decades. But these warn of launches, they generally don\u2019t track a weapon throughout its flight cycle. For some years now, work has been underway to\u00a0substantially expand on space-based missile defense capabilities<\/a>, to include the start of the fielding of\u00a0new satellite constellations<\/a>\u00a0to help track ballistic missiles, as well as\u00a0hypersonic boost-glide vehicles<\/a>\u00a0and other threats, during the\u00a0mid-course portion of their flights<\/a>. This is on top of a major push to move other kinds of terrestrial sensing to orbital layers, some of which\u00a0could potentially have a secondary missile defense role<\/a>.<\/p>\n To achieve the objective of fusing missile warning and tracking functions together, \u201cwe have to leverage a couple of really good partners,\u201d Zellman stated, pointing to two in particular. One is the\u00a0Space Development Agency<\/a>\u00a0(SDA), tasked with quickly delivering needed space-based capabilities to the U.S. military. The other is the\u00a0Missile Defense Agency<\/a>\u00a0(MDA), charged with developing, deploying, and sustaining layered and integrated missile defense capabilities.<\/p>\n The SDA, noted the general, \u201cis developing a number of\u00a0missile-tracking satellites<\/a>\u00a0as part of their tranches that they\u2019re launching.\u201d The MDA, meanwhile, has \u201ca\u00a0long history of integrating battle management<\/a>,\u201d Zellman discussed.<\/p>\n \u201cSo those two together are really helping Space Command take separate disparate stovepipe information and bring it together,\u201d he stated.<\/p>\n \u201cIt also has to talk about decision speed, and this really is going to require us to look at more than man-in-the-loop [MITL], and maybe a man on the loop [MOTL] situation,\u201d he noted. MITL is when a human is fully engaged in assessing and controlling the operation compared to MOTL, which usually relies on more heavily automated systems where the human approves critical decisions, usually based on distilled data presented by the system. AI is becoming a large part of making that possible in an increasingly successful way.<\/p>\n The reason to make this change, Zellman explained, is that \u201cwe have to make these decisions faster, and that data flow has to be able to enable our layered defenses \u2013 whether that\u2019s coming from a THAAD [Terminal High Altitude Area Defense<\/a>], or\u00a0a Patriot<\/a>, or\u00a0directed energy<\/a>, or\u00a0SM-3<\/a>, or\u00a0space-based interceptors<\/a>\u00a0in the future \u2013 all that is going to be dependent on our decision speed.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cAt the heart of all this for the United States Space Command is one of our unified command plan responsibilities, and that is as a global sensor manager,\u201d the general said.<\/p>\n \u201cWe don\u2019t use sensors dedicated to a single mission,\u201d he explained. \u201cThey may have originally been conceived to do space domain awareness or missile warning, or in some cases, missile defense, but we try to take the goodness of all those sensors and use them for all three of those mission areas.\u201d<\/p>\n Under SPACECOM, \u201cwe take those sensors and we dynamically task them and prioritize accordingly, so we can support multiple commands around the globe. And that really, once again, gets to the theme about defending at home and abroad is being able to support these multiple commands simultaneously.\u201d<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.fie.undef.edu.ar\/ceptm\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/GettyImages-823081098_11c57f.jpg\")
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