Thomas Kennedy, chairman and CEO of Raytheon, has said several technologies have matured in the last two decades and could support the second iteration of the Strategic Defense Initiative that was canceled in 1993, National Defense reported Monday.
SDI is a program during the Reagan administration that sought to counter the Soviet Union’s intercontinental ballistic missiles, according to the report.
Kennedy said some of the technologies that are now ready for deployment include directed energy weapons and conventional kinetic weapon systems that could be used in missile defense operations.
He noted that those platforms have been driven by improvements in machine learning and artificial intelligence.
Kennedy said space commercialization has resulted in reduced costs for launch services and satellites, according to the report.