Defense Special Missile and Astronautics Center

The Defense Special Missile and Astronautics Center is a department in OPS 1 of the National Security Agency (NSA) which has always been headed by a civilian from the NSA as director and a colonel from the DIA as vice.

It was founded on April 27, 1964 by then Defense Minister Robert McNamara as a result of the Cuba crisis . They wanted to be able to better assess the probability of a danger from foreign missiles. Furthermore, they did not want " NORAD to dilute technologies that the people there did not understand, or to attempt to evaluate a bunch of raw data" to use General Daniel O. Graham , a former director of the DIA, to put it.

With DEFSMAC any rocket launches or launches are continuously registered. It should even be possible to find out the type of missile. Since the end of the Cold War , the workforce has grown to 230. DEFSMAC forwards intercepted data to the National Telemetry Processing Center , which processes the results of the telemetry.