Software technology issues for a US National Missile Defense System

The United States is currently developing a national missile defense (NMD) system designed to protect its territory from attack by strategic (long-range) ballistic missiles. In September 2000, President Clinton decided to defer the NMD deployment decision to the next president. President George W. Bush reaffirmed his administration´s commitment to deploying a ballistic missile-defense shield by advocating an even larger NMD system in a speech at the National Defense University on May 1, 2001. The terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, brought both the sense of deployment urgency for protection, and the call to transfer resources, from NMD to more likely terrorist threats. We focus exclusively on identifying and examining key technical challenges, primarily software-related, inherent to NMD