Mark Udall

What is the level of support from our NATO allies, particularly Romania, Poland, Turkey, and Spain, for our planned EPAA deployments?

The European Phased Adaptive Approach (EPAA) to missile defense is designed to provide increasing levels of missile defense capability for the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) Europe against Iran's growing regional ballistic…

I believe the MDA needs to fly a GMD intercept test with the CE-1 kill vehicle as I recommended in my 2013 Annual Report.

Last July, the flight test of the GMD system with the Capability Enhancement (CE)-I kill vehicle failed because the kill vehicle failed to separate from the booster.

We have one chance to get this right.

We'd do well to emulate Dr. Schlesinger's role.

I think he said the Iranians are moving to develop an ICBM. He said adding a weapon to that ICBM is a whole other problem.

Would it be good to be able to do three or four or more tests per year for the ground-based missile defense system? Yes, it would.

There will be additional time to discuss that as we move forward, and we'd welcome clarifications, additional information.

Does the budget request put us on a path to improving our ability to defend against both Homeland and regional missile threats?

The three of you took us on quite a tour. It's impressive what we're doing. I know we want to do more.

As the Secretary of Defense and various combatant commanders have previously testified, the warfighter remains confident in our ability to protect the Nation against a limited ballistic missile attack, even in the face of a changing fiscal…

We must get out of the old Chemistry and Metallurgy Research (CMR) building by 2019.

This is a huge amount of taxpayers' money, either lost or about to be lost.

I think we'd spent up to about $500 million on that design.

The priority for this budget is in improving the EKV on the interceptors that we have.

There is, of course, no limit to what you could do. There's always a limit to resources.

You've each indicated that, in addition to improving interceptor reliability, our investment priority for Homeland defense is to improve our sensor discrimination capability, rather than deploying an additional interceptor site on the east…

The fly-before-you-buy was a policy enunciated in the ballistic missile defense review of 2010 and it continues to be our policy.

In order to avoid repeating the kill vehicle problems we had with the previous rush to failure approach, we need to follow a very rigorous acquisition approach.

I want to ask if each of our witnesses agrees that it is our essential near-term priority to fix the problems we have encountered with our current kill vehicles.

We've not had a successful intercept test with the GMD system since 2008, as has been acknowledged.

We on the committee look forward to working with you on that important mission.

The Murray-Ryan budget possibilities and opportunities are there as long as we do not fall back into sequestration.

I have been asking many of the panelists about disaggregation of existing satellite systems, which after 10 years I think have stabilized costs and requirements.