FLOPS, NEW THREATS BEHIND STAR WARS CUTS

Sure, the Bush Administration’s mis­sile defense sys­tem has flopped just about every test it’s faced. But that’s not the only rea­son the pro­gram is being cut by more than a bil­lion dol­lars a year, says BusinessWeek.
“The war on ter­ror and Iraq may have taken their toll on mis­sile defense and changed the way Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld assesses poten­tial threats,” the mag­a­zine notes. Worries about incom­ing mis­siles have given way to 9/​11-​​style ter­ror­ism fears, and the war in Iraq.

“The Rumsfeld vision of future war­fare has had a severe col­li­sion with real­ity,” says Loren Thompson, chief oper­at­ing offi­cer of the Lexington Institute, a con­ser­v­a­tive think tank in Arlington, Va. The prob­lems fac­ing mis­sile defense, he says, are “the rel­a­tively weak case for the over­all mis­sion and the need to spend money in other ways.
Consider as well the dif­fer­ence between the 2000 elec­tion and last year’s. Five years ago, mis­sile defense was one of Bush’s key issues… “America must build effec­tive mis­sile defenses based on the best avail­able options at the ear­li­est pos­si­ble date,” he declared dur­ing his first run for the White House.
Since then, despite the roughly $10 bil­lion a year that has poured into the pro­gram, Rumsfeld has con­ceded the sys­tem doesn’t have to be 100% effec­tive. It just has to work well enough to change the cal­cu­la­tion of an enemy think­ing about loft­ing a mis­sile at Los Angeles or New York. Problem is, it doesn’t even seem capa­ble of doing that, as [a botched] December test showed…
And as the American pro­gram strug­gles, other coun­tries are mak­ing head­way in pur­su­ing new tech­nolo­gies. Scott Ritter, the for­mer arms inspec­tor in Iraq who cor­rectly con­cluded Baghdad had no weapons of mass destruc­tion, now says Russia has tested an SS-​​27 Topol-​​M mobile bal­lis­tic mis­sile that would ren­der the cur­rent Star Wars scheme use­less. It is too fast to hit right after take­off unless the inter­cep­tor is lucky enough to be really close to the launch pad.
Also, the SS-​​27 is hard­ened against lasers, so the Airborne Laser — a pro­gram already way behind sched­ule — wouldn’t work. And because it’s maneu­ver­able and capa­ble of releas­ing three war­heads and four decoys, it would be much harder to defeat as it falls in the ter­mi­nal stage of flight.
[Missile Defense Agency] spokesman Lehner says Ritter’s objec­tion misses the point of his agency’s goal, which is to address “the more rudi­men­tary mis­siles North Korea and Iran are devel­op­ing.” But what if Pyongyang or Tehran buys an SS-​​27? “I don’t know about that,” he told BusinessWeek Online. 

THERE’S MORE: Despite a litany of bro­ken bud­gets and shat­tered dead­lines, it looks like the Airborne Laser (ABL) is return­ing to the fore­front of mis­sile defend­ers’ minds.
The laser-​​firing 747 last year achieved “first light” — suc­cess­fully test­ing its ray gun. And now, “agency offi­cials con­sider the pro­gram ‘quite healthy,’ and they are plan­ning to attempt a tar­get shoot-​​down in 2008,” Inside Defense says. Just last month, an MDA offi­cial refused to give a date for when that test might go down.
“It is rev­o­lu­tion­ary, it is dis­rup­tive, mean­ing this required inven­tions and doing things that have never been done before,” a Pentagon offi­cial told the AFP, liken­ing the poten­tial impact on war­fare of the air­borne laser to the advent of nuclear power. “And it has done so well, cer­tainly in the last ten months that we really need to pur­sue this to a con­clu­sion. Were encour­aged by every­thing weve seen.“
The MDA has long been con­cerned about knock­ing a mis­sile down right when it takes off, in its so-​​called “boost phase.” But the task has been deemed all-​​but-​​impossible by a col­lec­tion of lead­ing physi­cists. And, one by one, the tech­nolo­gies the MDA to pur­sue this task have failed to deliver. Now, there’s only a sin­gle “boost phase” option left for the MDA. And that’s the laser jet.

February 8th, 2005 | Missiles | Comments Off Both comments and pings are currently closed.