September 25, 2001: Missile Defense Requires a ‘Single Integrated Picture,’ Study Says

The US military must develop a single integrated picture (SIP) to meet the emerging threat of cruise missile proliferation, says a study directed by Stephen R. Woodall, a defense expert with the National Defense Industrial Association (NDIA), a defense industry lobby group. [Woodall, 9/25/2001 ] A SIP would be a graphic representation of the airspace around a battle zone that would detect and track all airborne objects, discriminating friend from foe. At the moment, the different branches of the military cannot share a common picture of the battlefield in real time. The US is especially vulnerable to low-flying cruise missiles because they are difficult to detect and intercept. The Defense Department created a SIP program three years ago headed by Navy Captain Jeffery W. Wilson to improve the integration between disparate data collection and tracking systems used by the different services, but making them work together is still a distant goal. Says Stephen Woodall: “A SIP would improve homeland defense. ‘You need a SIP around the United States.’ NORAD can see every airplane in the sky and every satellite in space, but that is ‘not good enough for cruise missile defense.’” A cruise missile attack was part of a recent military exercise named Amalgam Virgo ‘01 (see June 1-2, 2001). According to Woodall, “The conclusion of [Amalgam Virgo] was that ‘we are naked. We have no capability to deal with that kind of problem.’” [National Defense, 11/2001; National Defense, 12/2001; National Defense, 9/2002] The deployment of a new mobile radar command center immediately after the 9/11 attacks also underscores the need for further advances in this field (September 12, 2001).