EX-​​PENTAGON BIG RIPS ANTI-​​MISSILES

President Bush’s mis­sile defense sys­tem, to put it plainly, “doesn’t work.” And tests of the pro­gram “so far have been more tightly scripted than a mod­ern polit­i­cal con­ven­tion.“
That’s not my opin­ion. It’s the words of for­mer Pentagon test­ing chief Phillip Coyle. In an e-​​mail to Defense Tech, he repeat­edly rips the Bush admin­is­tra­tion over its anti-​​missile push, and breaks down the system’s many, many prob­lems:

On Thursday, July 22, 2004, the first ground-​​based mis­sile inter­cep­tor was installed in a silo at Fort Greely, Alaska. In their press release on GMD [Ground-​​based Midcourse Defense] deploy­ment, the Pentagon’s Missile Defense Agency hailed it as “the end of an era where we have not been able to defend our coun­try against long-​​range bal­lis­tic mis­sile attacks.“
Is this true? Have we not been able to defend our­selves? And can this sys­tem defend us now?
To each of these ques­tions the answer is No.
If North Korea began assem­bling an inter­con­ti­nen­tal bal­lis­tic mis­sile, huge rock­ets that must be launched from fixed launch facil­i­ties, highly vis­i­ble to U.S. spy satel­lites, our mil­i­tary would blow it up on the ground imme­di­ately. Our mil­i­tary would not wait to see if they could inter­cept the mis­sile when it was going thou­sands of miles per hour in space. We would blow up the whole ICBM launch facil­ity with the same weapons that we have seen work so effec­tively in Iraq and Afghanistan, satel­lite and laser guided bombs and mis­siles. With those weapons, we already have a mis­sile defense.
But what if we didn’t see North Korea prepar­ing an ICBM? Suppose the launch sur­prised us? Would our mis­sile defenses pro­tect us then? The answer is still No. This is because if we didn’t see it, our mis­sile defenses wouldn’t work either, since they depend on our see­ing it first with satel­lites too.
Not that our mis­sile defenses have demon­strated real­is­tic oper­a­tional capa­bil­ity with exist­ing satel­lites; they haven’t. And the intended, future satel­lite sys­tems, the Space-​​Based Infra-​​Red System-​​High [SBIRS] and the Space Tracking and Surveillance System, are years behind sched­ule and bil­lions over bud­get. The intended X-​​band radar sys­tems for mis­sile defense also are delayed and miss­ing. With these major ele­ments miss­ing, the sys­tem being deployed has no demon­strated capa­bil­ity to defend against a real attack.
When asked in a NATO press con­fer­ence if he would deploy a mis­sile defense sys­tem that that didn’t work and that had not been ade­quately tested, President Bush replied, “And for those who sug­gest my admin­is­tra­tion will deploy a sys­tem that doesn’t work are dead-​​wrong. Of course, we’re not going to deploy a sys­tem that doesn’t work. What good will that do? We’ll only deploy a sys­tem that does work in order to keep the peace.“
Unfortunately, three years later, that’s exactly what President Bush has done, deployed a sys­tem that doesn’t work and hasn’t been ade­quately tested.
All of the MDA flight inter­cept tests so far have been more tightly scripted than a mod­ern polit­i­cal con­ven­tion.
In these tests, the tar­get launch time, the flight tra­jec­tory, the point of impact, what the tar­get looks like, and the make-​​up of other objects in the tar­get clus­ter have all been known in advance to guide the inter­cep­tor. No enemy would coop­er­ate by pro­vid­ing all that infor­ma­tion in advance.
And if that weren’t enough, the tar­get reen­try vehi­cle has car­ried a radar bea­con, show­ing the inter­cep­tor, “Here I am.” That’s not some­thing a real enemy would do either.
Considering all the arti­fi­cial tar­get­ing aids in these tests, what is sur­pris­ing is not that some of these tests have suc­ceeded. What’s sur­pris­ing is that some have failed, includ­ing the most recent test in December 2002. Just a week later President Bush announced his deci­sion to deploy the ground-​​based mid­course mis­sile defense sys­tem in Alaska!
The Missile Defense Agency says they can’t test the sys­tem real­is­ti­cally until it has been deployed. This also is not true. The Missile Defense Agency was test­ing the sys­tem from Kwajalein and Vandenberg when I was in the Pentagon, well before the con­struc­tion began at Fort Greely. And they could still be doing that with­out Fort Greely. But as soon as President Bush announced his deci­sion to deploy the sys­tem the pri­or­ity went to con­struc­tion and deploy­ment. and the bot­tom fell out of the test sched­ule.
As you know there hasn’t been a flight inter­cept test since December 2002, now 20 months ago, one week before the President made his announce­ment. But not because they couldn’t have con­tin­ued the test pro­gram as planned.
And of course they won’t actu­ally use Fort Greely for mis­sile test launches any­way because of safety con­cerns.
And they do not test what they are actu­ally deploy­ing, namely a sys­tem with no X-​​band radar (and no radar bea­con) using Cobra Dane and Aegis ships instead, no SBIRS satel­lites using DSP instead, and inter­cep­tors that depend on prior infor­ma­tion.
This is like deploy­ing a new mil­i­tary jet fighter with no wings, no tail and no land­ing gear. And with­out test­ing it to see if it could work [first].

THERE’S MORE: “The most dan­ger­ous thing about hav­ing this sys­tem is that some­one on our side might be tempted to behave in a cri­sis as if it were real,” says Defense Tech reader MB. “Wth our cur­rent national lead­er­ship, it’s hard for me to con­ceive of a sce­nario other than acci­den­tal launch where the US hav­ing a vir­tual but not actual mis­sile defense sys­tem does not increase the prob­a­bil­ity and degree of brinks­man­ship that polit­i­cal lead­ers might engage in.”

August 19th, 2004 | Missiles | Comments Off Both comments and pings are currently closed.