FAITH-​​BASED MISSILE DEFENSE

Early in his admin­is­tra­tion, President Bush put a whole lot of stock in “faith-​​based” ini­tia­tives to solve domes­tic prob­lems. Now, the President seems to be tak­ing the same approach to mil­i­tary mat­ters.
Yesterday, President Bush cam­paigned at a Boeing plant, pro­mot­ing his mis­sile defense sys­tem, due to come on line shortly. “We say to those tyrants who believe they can black­mail America and the free world, ‘You fire, we’re going to shoot it down,’” he said.
But there’s a teeny-​​tiny prob­lem with this bold dec­la­ra­tion: no one knows whether it’s true or not. The anti-​​missile system’s effec­tive­ness is a mat­ter of faith, not evi­dence. Because, in a rush to ready the sys­tem before the elec­tion, the Defense Department scrapped some of the $10 bil­lion per year program’s most impor­tant tests. And the results the Pentagon does have are murky, at best.
“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,” the Washington Post noted ear­lier 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.“
Slate’s Fred Kaplan trans­lates:

In the past six years of flight tests, here is what the Pentagon’s missile-​​defense agency has demon­strated: A mis­sile can hit another mis­sile in mid-​​air as long as a) the oper­a­tors know exactly where the tar­get mis­sile has come from and where it’s going; b) the tar­get mis­sile is fly­ing at a slower-​​than-​​normal speed; c) it’s trans­mit­ting a spe­cial beam that exag­ger­ates its radar sig­na­ture, thus mak­ing it eas­ier to track; d) only one tar­get mis­sile has been launched; and e) the “attack” hap­pens in daylight.

Phillip Coyle, Christie’s pre­de­ces­sor, put it more suc­cinctly: the sys­tem is “sim­ply not up to the job,” he said.
Now, some might argue that merely hav­ing some deter­rent to, say, North Korean mis­siles — no mat­ter how half-​​assed — is bet­ter than noth­ing. Which would be true. If Pyongyang was wor­ried at all that the thing might work. But if the Pentagon’s own test­ing chiefs aren’t con­vinced, what are the chances that the North Koreans are?
The sit­u­a­tion isn’t likely to change any time soon. The next stages of the Pentagon’s mis­sile defense plan call for build­ing defenses that can catch enemy rock­ets before they take off. But in a study last year, the American Physical Society said that couldn’t be done with cur­rent or near-​​term American anti-​​missile tech­nol­ogy.
So it’s no sur­prise that when the Defense Department tried to show off its anti-​​missile train­ing pro­gram to reporters ear­lier this year, the wargame had to be rigged in order for the good guys to win.

August 18th, 2004 | Missiles | Comments Off Both comments and pings are currently closed.