EARLY MISSILE DEFENSE

The Pentagon says it will start up its mis­sile defense sys­tem early — in the sum­mer, rather than in the fall, as pre­vi­ously sched­uled. But the Defense Department’s test­ing chief thinks the pro­gram may be going too far, too fast.
“The accel­er­ated sched­ule, if real­ized, would enable President Bush to claim ful­fill­ment of a major 2000 cam­paign pledge ear­lier than offi­cials had indi­cated,” the Washington Post notes.

Disclosing the planned sum­mer start, Pentagon offi­cials insisted in inter­views that pol­i­tics played no part in revis­ing the sched­ule. They said the change grew out of the real­iza­tion that the sys­tem could begin pro­vid­ing some anti-​​missile pro­tec­tion before all 10 of the inter­cep­tors slated for field­ing this year had been low­ered into silos in Alaska and California…
Whether the Bush admin­is­tra­tion is mov­ing too fast to deploy the anti-​​missile sys­tem was in dis­pute even before the lat­est shift, with the Pentagon’s own top weapons eval­u­a­tor recently rais­ing a warn­ing flag. In a sta­tus report last month on major new weapons pro­grams, Thomas P. Christie, direc­tor of the Pentagon’s office of Operational Test and Evaluation, said a short­age of test­ing data would likely make it dif­fi­cult for him to assess the system’s effec­tive­ness ahead of any deploy­ment this year.
He expressed con­cern about the small num­ber and rel­a­tively sim­ple nature of flight tests, not­ing they have used the same course each time and have relied on sur­ro­gates and pro­to­types for key ele­ments still under devel­op­ment. Problems with a new booster, designed to carry the inter­cep­tor vehi­cle into space, prompted the Pentagon to sus­pend flight inter­cept attempts after the last test in December 2002.
The next flight tests are sched­uled for May and July; thus, the Pentagon could end up acti­vat­ing the anti-​​missile sys­tem before results of the sum­mer tests have been fully assessed. (empha­sis mine)

THERE’S MORE: The anti-​​missile sys­tem “may not be per­fected, or even in what one might con­sider a pro­duc­tion con­fig­u­ra­tion,” writes Defense Tech reader JA. “But hav­ing *some­thing* in the silos com­pli­cates the prob­lem greatly for North Korea, per­haps to the point of mak­ing it too expen­sive to even attempt to develop hard­ware.“
AND MORE: “I don’t see how it com­pli­cates any­thing for North Korea,” reader MB responds. “They know as well as the rest of us that the chances are near nil of the sys­tem being able to inter­cept even the most rudi­men­tary ICBM.“
AND MORE: “That would be true if the lead­er­ship of the DPRK believes every­thing they read about the fail­ures of the BMD (Ballisitc Missile Defense),” retorts reader Wyatt Earp. “The fact is the lead­er­ship of the DPRK is an extra kind of para­noid, so the accel­er­a­tion of BMD is going to have the pos­si­bil­ity of push­ing the DPRK into two pos­si­ble direc­tions: Give up on their ICBMs because they aren’t going to accom­plish any­thing in light of the American BMD, whose fail­ure is a sin­is­ter cover-​​up by those crafty Imperialists. Or fly the birds either on more test flights or on a strike to knock­out the BMD site in Alaska sooner rather than later, thus not being as effec­tive as they could be since they’ve not fin­ished their mis­siles either.”

February 2nd, 2004 | Missiles | Comments Off Both comments and pings are currently closed.