[Congressional Record Volume 170, Number 126 (Thursday, August 1, 2024)]
[Senate]
[Pages S5764-S5766]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
REMEMBERING KEITH L. ENGLANDER
Ms. MURKOWSKI. Madam President, on behalf of the men and women who
serve at the U.S. Missile Defense Agency (MDA) and the countless
Americans who have benefited from his distinguished service to our
nation, I rise to pay tribute to the life and career of Mr. Keith L.
Englander, the MDA's former director for engineering, who passed away
on May 2, 2024 at the age of 70.
Mr. Englander gave 45 years of exemplary Federal service to our
country and was the driving engineering force behind the missile
defense system that protects the United States, our deployed forces,
and our allies from missile attacks. He took on and conquered the
toughest engineering problems during his service with the Department of
the Navy, the Strategic Defense Initiative Organization (SDIO), and
later the Ballistic Missile Defense Organization (BMD) and the MDA.
Mr. Englander's passion for aviation was inspired by his life near
the Naval Station at Norfolk, VA; volunteering at the Franklin
Institute in Philadelphia, PA; and the successes of NASA's Gemini and
Apollo programs. In high school, he joined the Junior Engineering and
Technical Society and was a member of the local Boy Scout Explorer Post
focused on space exploration. He graduated from the Virginia
Polytechnic Institute in 1975 with a BS in aerospace and ocean
engineering and soon embarked on a long career of civil service.
Mr. Englander's career began with the Department of the Navy in 1975,
where he was responsible for the design and development of propellant
devices for rocket motors. He later served as chief engineer for the
Navy A-6 attack aircraft. He left the Navy for SDIO in 1992 to tackle
the pure engineering challenge of intercepting ballistic missiles using
space-based weapons. As leader of the Brilliant Pebbles System
Engineering and Integration Directorate, he addressed significant
challenges, such as miniaturization, that pushed the boundaries of
1990s technology.
In 1995, Mr. Englander assumed the role of the National Missile
Defense
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(NMD) System engineer and later served as technical director,
responsible for all aspects of the NMD system that would eventually
become the ground-based midcourse defense (GMD) element that continues
to defend our homeland from missile attack. Always an innovator, he was
the first NMD manager to use Integrated Product Teams, and he led the
engineering and integration that allowed the individually developed
weapon, sensor, and battle management, command, control and
communications components of the NMD system to function as an
integrated network. This integrated approach would later become the
foundation of the BMDS engineering process.
In 1997, Mr. Englander was selected to be NMD deputy for system
integration and entered the Senior Executive Service, where he pursued
a capability-based approach to missile defense requirements,
identifying necessary system engineering changes, and leading the team
to implement those changes. The result was an evolutionary system
engineering process to design, develop, and deliver ever-improving
performance increments to the BMDS, which would later be renamed the
missile defense system (MDS).
In 2001, Mr. Englander was selected to be the MDA director of system
engineering and integration, where he applied the engineering
organizational skills developed during his NMD leadership tenure to
develop and shape the Agency's engineering processes. In this role, he
was a key advisor to the Director and received his first Presidential
Rank Award. A firm believer in the value of engineering collaboration,
he led the integrated MDA systems engineering team (MDSET) comprised of
Government, Industry, Federally Funded Research and Development Centers
and University Affiliated Research Centers (FFRDC/UARC), and systems
engineering and technical advisory engineers and analysts who focused
on developing, integrating, and evolving the BMDS.
As system engineer, he established the technical objectives and goals
for the BMDS, including both technical and operational metrics. He
continued to shape MDA's engineering processes with his vision to
integrate six separate engineering functions within the Agency: system
engineering, test, modeling and simulation, targets and
countermeasures, manufacturing and producibility, and independent
assessment. He created and led the MDA summer study process,
translating policy guidance into overarching objectives for missile
defense. He continued this process for several years, making him a
decisive voice in the development and approval of the Nation's
ballistic missile defense development and fielding roadmaps.
In 2003, Mr. Englander became the MDA technical director, charged
with articulating Agency programs to the services, Congress, public,
and international community. Late in 2004, the Secretary of Defense
directed ``Initial Defensive Operations,'' the first implementation of
a limited homeland missile defense, and Mr. Englander personally led
the significant engineering effort that allowed this to deploy with a
meaningful capability. He was integral to the design, development, and
fielding of the GMD system on alert today in Alaska and California that
defends our Nation against long-range missile threats from North Korea.
In 2006, as a result of the Base Realignment and Closure, Mr.
Englander successfully managed the migration of BMDS engineering
functions from the National Capital Region to Huntsville, AL. Later, as
MDA implemented a consolidated approach to the contractor workforce, he
led the seamless transition of critical engineering niche contractor
support efforts into a few performance-based contracts. He also
developed and implemented a strategy for centrally managing MDA's
FFRDC/UARC efforts to more efficiently apply National Laboratory
subject matter expertise to critical technical challenges across the
agency.
Mr. Englander also played a significant role in the 2008 satellite
shoot-down known as Operation Burnt Frost. Although analysis showed
several BMDS elements could achieve the intercept, he reasoned the
flexibility and adaptability of the sea-based Aegis ballistic missile
defense system offered the least impact to the program and provided the
best chance of success. Based on his assessment, Aegis BMD engineers
quickly made the required hardware and software modifications, and,
with the support of other BMDS and service assets, the Agency
successfully executed a pinpoint intercept that potentially saved many
lives.
Working with NATO technical committees, Mr. Englander promoted
analyses that led to confirmation of the importance of missile defense
to the Alliance at the 2009 Strasbourg-Kehl Summit, where NATO heads of
state and government supported deployment of U.S. missile defenses in
Europe to counter the ballistic missile threat from Iran. As a result,
the U.S. began development of a phased, adaptive approach to ballistic
missile defense in Europe. Working with the National Security Council
and the Under Secretary of Defense for Policy, Mr. Englander refined
candidate architectures and provided a variety of deployment options
for the placement of missile defense assets, giving State Department
and Department of Defense negotiators the required flexibility to
conduct meaningful nation-to-nation discussions with countries such as
the Czech Republic, Poland, Romania, Bulgaria, Greece, and Turkey. His
insightful, quick-turn engineering analysis was critical in obtaining
administration and international support of the European Phased Adapted
Approach, which included a new weapon system concept known as Aegis
Ashore. His work resulted in a more flexible strategy for regional
missile defenses and saved critical national resources.
Throughout Mr. Englander's engineering career, he maintained a close
and supportive relationship with the ultimate end user of the systems:
the warfighter. In 2012, he saw an opportunity to improve the technical
interface between MDA and the combatant commands and international
partners. He created a warfighter technical interface organization to
serve as the single point of contact to the warfighter for all
engineering and technical issues related to the BMDS. This organization
was responsible for leading the exchange of BMDS technical information
with external stakeholders and assuring BMDS operational performance is
correctly represented in the request for analysis and request for
information process with combatant commands.
Mr. Englander's effective engineering leadership, which resulted in
the unprecedented integration of the BMDS across the three services,
did not go unnoticed at the highest levels of the Department of
Defense. In 2015, the Department gave MDA the role of Technical
Authority for Integrated Air and Missile Defense (IAMD) to lead all the
system engineering for joint IAMD interoperability. Mr. Englander led
development of a unique modeling and simulation representation of
cross-service weapon system kill chains to help identify and implement
multiple fixes to service weapon systems and improve interoperability
for joint track management, combat identification, and integrated fire
control.
Similarly, Mr. Englander established engineering policies and
processes for the BMD system and propagated them to the BMDS elements.
To rapidly deliver incremental defensive capabilities to the
warfighter, he tailored the engineering process to pace the evolving
threat, resulting in the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD)-
Patriot Missile Segment Enhancement integration, which was provided in
response to U.S. Pacific Command's Joint Emergent Operational Need in
the Korean area of operations. To ensure an enterprise-level solution
to a costly and difficult technical effort, he shaped MDA's modeling
and simulation program for ground testing. This program provided
faithful representations of BMDS elements and components to improve
confidence in end-to-end performance assessment.
Mr. Englander received numerous honors over the years, including
three Presidential Rank Awards, the American Institute of Astronautics
and Aeronautics (AIAA) David R. Israel Award for Meritorious
Achievement for International Ballistic Missile Defense, the National
Defense Industry Association Outstanding Leadership Award, and the
Secretary of Defense's Exceptional Civilian Service Award. In 2016, he
was inducted into the Virginia Tech College of Engineering Academy of
Excellence and the Virginia Tech Aerospace
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and Ocean Engineering Department Academy of Excellence.
Mr. Englander's technical acumen was matched by his gift for
leadership. He took care of his people by recognizing their potential,
mentoring many rising engineers, and creating opportunities for them to
grow. Mr. Englander's legacy lives on at MDA through the talented and
capable engineering workforce he trained, the engineering national team
he founded, and the analysis quick response team he established.
Mr. Englander's commitment to excellence and pioneering spirit were
critical to delivering today's proven multilayered and integrated
missile defense system that protects the United States homeland, the
men and women of our services stationed overseas, and our allies and
international partners. He truly is the father of the modern-day
missile defense system.
The achievements of Mr. Englander were on display on April 14, 2024,
when Iran conducted an attack on Israel with over 300 weapons,
including ballistic missiles, land attack cruise missiles, and unmanned
aerial vehicles. The vast majority of the drones and missiles were
intercepted by Israel's own air defenses and warplanes and in
coordination with U.S. forces. The U.S. Standard Missile-3 ballistic
missile interceptor was used for first time in combat, and the Israeli
Arrow 3 and David's Sling weapon systems were both used successfully.
Mr. Englander's lifetime work enabled the defense of Israel and saved
many lives. Although he is no longer with us, he helped realize
President Ronald Reagan's dream of making missile defense a reality.
Mr. Englander is survived by his wife Jana of Alexandria, VA; his son
Alexander and his wife Sarah of Columbia, MD; and his sister Denise
Englander-Kraut and her husband Bill of West Chester, PA. Mr. Englander
was the son of Captain Felix (U.S. Navy) and Elaine Englander. I extend
my heartfelt condolences to the entire Englander family.
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