BMD Tests, and More: Maintaining the USA’s Pacific Missile Range

MRBM target launch

The Pacific Missile Range Facility (PMRF) is the world’s largest instrumented testing and training missile range, located on the far Hawaiian islands of Kaua’i and Ni’hau. The Barking Sands shore facility used to belong to Kekaha Sugar Company. It became Mana Airport during World War 2, and was renamed Bonham Air Force Base in 1954. The Navy has owned it since 1964, and is currently using PMRF to launch ballistic missile targets for the naval AEGIS BMD/ SM-3 missile combination, and the Army’s THAAD missile system. It will have an Aegis Ashore complex that will be used for testing purposes, but could also serve operationally, and has also been a deployment site for THAAD in response to threatening North Korean tests that posed a risk to Hawaii.

PMRF’s size and scope make it a valuable resource beyond the US Navy, and that role will grow as global interest in naval ballistic missile defense grows. Contracts include:

Rapid Fire Oct. 4, 2012: Fortune Cookie Strategy

• SASC Ranking Member Senator McCain [R-AZ] wrote to SecDef Panetta that by his calculations (which he did not provide), it could cost DoD $4B to comply with Labor/OMB guidance relative to WARN Act liabilities. On the White House’s position that contractors don’t have to draw the logical conclusion from the Budget Control Act because that law might be repelled in the future, Senator Lindsey Graham [R-SC] said: “It’s crazy legal analysis. We are in danger of being no longer a rule of law nation. It’s a mini-coup.”