DEVESELU, Romania. The US Navy has declared operational the first Aegis Ashore missile defense site expanding the umbrella of missile defense protection for Southern Europe.
The Aegis Ashore facility employs Raytheon’s Standard Missile-3 (SM-3) Block IB guided missiles.
“No other regional missile defense system comes close to SM-3 in terms of its velocity, range and defended area,” said Dr Mitch Stevison, Raytheon’s Air and Missile Defense Vice President. “The SM-3s at the Romania site now offer persistent, land-based defense.”
The same month that is in May, the Aegis Ashore site in Redzikowo, Poland, was inaugurated as United States and Polish officials officially broke ground. The Poland site will be capable of firing the next variant of SM-3, the Block IIA, and is on track to be completed in the 2018 timeframe.
Aegis Ashore and the SM-3 recently successfully intercepted a ballistic missile target during a December 2015 flight mission conducted at the Aegis Ashore Missile Defense Test Complex located at Pacific Missile Range Facility, Hawaii. The guided missile destroyed an intermediate range ballistic missile target in a ‘launch-on-remote’ engagement, using track data from a remotely located Raytheon AN/TPY-2 radar to cue the Aegis BMD Weapon System and launch the SM-3 missile.
