Hard and Soft Defense Against a Sequence of Aerial Threats

Tactics to Counter Missile and Drone Threats In “Hard and Soft Defense Against a Sequence of Aerial Threats,” Atkinson and Kress develop an analytical model for missile defense in which a Blue defender counters sequential attacks by Red threats using both hard defense (HD) interceptors and soft measures (SM), such as jamming and decoys. Their model focuses on a shoot-look-shoot tactic by which Blue fires salvos of interceptors and then assesses the battle damage to decide on further engagement. Their objective is to minimize two performance metrics: the number of threats that manage to penetrate the defenses (leakers) and the number of costly interceptors expended. By establishing efficient frontiers in a two-dimensional performance space, they identify effective firing sequences for various scenarios. Their primary contribution is the development of a framework that integrates HD with SM, allowing for an examination of how SM affects interceptor allocation and missile defense tactics.