MD Wednesday brings you the scoop on missile defence every other Wednesday. This week, the Centre Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments’ assessment of the FY10 defense budget request is the hot potato - insofar as it concerns MD.

The Pentagon’s austerity binge in the MD area has led to the cancellation of the Multiple Kill Vehicle (MKV) and the second aircraft carrying the Airborne Laser (ABL). While we approve of the latter for aesthetics’ sake (heavens, that poor 747-400 looked like a sick dolphin!), it seems the course of MD will now be one step forward and a step and a half back. The main winner is the Theater High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD), gaining four times the funding in FY09 and AEGIS (up 57%). The MKV is going down entirely, as will the Kinetic Energy Interceptor (KEI) program (at $50m per device, colour me not overly surprised - six buy a Raptor). There will be no second ABL aircraft, and ground-based midcourse defense loses 35% of its cash.

The CSBA’s analysis:

The net effect of these changes is to shift the focus from national missile defense (NMD) systems, designed to protect the United States from strategic ballistic missile attack, to theater missile defense (TMD) systems, intended to protect forward-deployed US forces against shorter-range ballistic missiles.
Some of the advantages of this approach are that it is more affordable in both the near term and long term, and it invests money in systems that are proven effective. The programs that the budget proposes to cut or terminate, with the exception of GMD, are still in development and have significant technical hurdles that have yet to be overcome. On the other hand, this approach does not put the nation on a path to providing the same level of national missile defense protection in the future. In particular, reducing the number of operational Ground Based Interceptors to thirty with no replacement or replenishment program planned could result in too few missiles to provide a basic level of protection, especially as these missiles are depleted over time from regular test launches.

Read the full report here (MD talk begins on p.27).

And here’s some KEI nostalgia for you. Now, now.