Ballistic Missile Defenses are a part of Call of Duty: Black Ops III and its campaign. It appears in the game's Omnipedia. According to the Allied Drone Defense Act of 2025, Ballistic Missile Defenses would be better funded, and Directed Energy Air Defenses would have their efficiency increased.
Overview[]
Ballistic Missile Defense (BMD) refers to any weapon system or systems that are designed to protect an individual or an area from ballistic threats, including flat-trajectory projectiles like bullets or RPGs, indirect fire weapons like mortar or short, medium and long range missiles and intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs).
The first effective BMDs were deployed in the early 1990s to protect civilian populations in the Middle East from the threat of long range missiles. They employed multiple batteries of interceptor missiles and a distributed network of targeting radars, a design that would be emulated by subsequent systems.
The BMDs radar systems would track and identify incoming threats before launching interceptors in response. Interceptors were either kinetic weapons that destroyed the target by hitting it or by detonating in the path of an incoming missile, creating a shrapnel field to disrupt the target.
Early systems had numerous flaws - they were expensive (upwards of $800,000 per shot), error prone (failure to launch, failure to intercept) and could be susceptible to saturation due to salvos of less expensive attack missiles being launched.
The early 21st century saw a wide variety of BMDs with distributed radar and launch systems capable of defending an entire military theatre. More 'localized' versions existed, such as ship-based systems that protected a ship from sea-skimming missiles by setting up a wall of gunfire from multiple, rapid fire machine guns to anti-sniper systems mounted on vehicles that used radar to determine the origin point of an incoming shot while it was in flight, before returning fire with high-explosives using a rapid-gimbaling .50 caliber rifle.
In the late 2020's, projectile based BMDs started to be phased out in favor of kilowatt class solid-state laser based systems, whose development had been hastened by the Allied Drone Defense Act. Laser systems were cheaper to operate, costing only hundreds of dollars per shot as opposed to hundreds of thousands. They were also more mechanically reliable and don't suffer from the limited ammunition problems that missile based BMDs did.
However, kilowatt class systems required relatively long 'time-on-target' tracking in order to do enough damage to render a threat inoperable. They could also be defeated by smarter navigation systems that would execute rapid, unpredictable 'jinks' in the trajectory of a missile or warhead. Hypersonic missiles were also a problem, as these missiles moved so quickly the laser either couldn't keep on them or couldn't do so long enough to do enough damage.
By the mid-2040's, mega-watt class solid-state lasers became available, along with advanced artificial intelligent target prioritization systems, forming the basis for modern Directed Energy Air Defense systems.