The U.S. Missile Defence Agency (MDA), and U.S. Navy sailors aboard USS John Finn (DDG-113) successfully conducted an intercept of a medium-range ballistic missile target with a Standard Missile-3 (SM-3) Block IIA missile during a flight test off the west coast of Hawaii.

The SM-3 Block IIA is being developed cooperatively by the U.S. and Japan and operates as part of the AEGIS Ballistic Missile Defence system.

On October 26, 2018, the target missile was launched from the Pacific Missile Range Facility at Kauai, Hawaii.  The USS John Finn (DDG-113) detected and tracked the target missile with its on board AN/SPY-1 radar using the Aegis Baseline 9.C2 weapon system. Upon acquiring and tracking the target, the ship launched an SM-3 Block IIA guided missile which intercepted the target.

Aegis Ballistic Missile Defence is the naval component of the U.S. Ballistic Missile Defence System.

Following a successful intercept in February 2017, a test that same year failed after a sailor error caused a IIA launched from the destroyer John Paul Jones to self-destruct in flight. A second test failed in January 2018 went awry because of an as-yet unnamed component misfired.