Missile defense

Missile defense

Measures designed to detect, identify, track, and defeat attacking (ballistic) missiles in both strategic and theater tactical roles, during any portion of their flight trajectory (boost, post-boost, midcourse, or terminal) or to nullify or reduce the effectiveness of such attack.

Industry: Military

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Missile defense

pre-commit strategy

Military; Missile defense

A tactic in which defense weapons are fired without being individually committed to specific targets. Target commitment would occur relatively late in the defensive weapon's trajectory.

host nation support

Military; Missile defense

Civil and/or military assistance rendered by a nation to foreign forces within its territory during peacetime, crisis or emergencies, or war based on agreements concluded between nations.

passive air defense

Military; Missile defense

All measures, other than active air defense, taken to minimize the effectiveness of hostile air action. These measures include deception, dispersion, and the use of protective construction.

brilliant eyes (BE)

Military; Missile defense

OBSOLETE. Successor to Space-Based Surveillance and Tracking System (SSTS). BE is also known as the Space and Missile Tracking System (SMTS), and is now the LEO element of the SBIRS. See SBIRS.

purchase order (PO)

Military; Missile defense

A contractual procurement document used primarily to procure supplies and nonpersonal services when the aggregate amount involved in any one transaction is relatively small (e.g., not exceeding ...

stimulated emission

Military; Missile defense

Physical process by which an excited molecule is induced by incident radiation to emit radiation at an identical frequency and in phase with the incident radiation. Lasers operate by stimulated ...

parallel processing

Military; Missile defense

In parallel processing multiple processors (CPUs) divide up a large task into smaller ones and each CPU acts on the subdivided task simultaneously so that much higher effective processing speeds can ...