Discrimination Performance Requirements for Ballistic Missile Defense

III A missile defense system must be able to deal with an attack containing decoys in addition to warheads. If the defense system does not have enough interceptors to shoot at all the incoming objects, it must be able to discriminate between decoys and warheads. This discrimination process is not perfect and results in two types of errors: leakage (not shooting at warheads) and false alarms (shooting at decoys). This article describes a methodology for analyzing the consequences of these discrimination errors and determining how well discrimination must perform in a variety of defense scenarios. The analysis focuses on game-theoretic solutions in which the defense can achieve its overall objective of surviving the attack regardless of the tactics used by the offense.