[Peace-discuss] Bush deploys fake missile defense system

[ppatton at uiuc.edu]

Interceptor System Set, But Doubts Remain

Top Stories - washingtonpost.com

By Bradley Graham, Washington Post Staff Writer

At a newly constructed launch site on a tree-shorn plain in 
central Alaska, a large crane crawls from silo to silo, 
gently lowering missiles into their holes. The sleek white 
rockets, each about five stories tall, are designed to soar 
into space and intercept warheads headed toward the United 
States.

With five installed so far and one more due by mid-October, 
Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld is preparing to activate 
the site sometime this autumn. President Bush (news - web 
sites) already has begun to claim fulfillment of a 2000 
presidential campaign pledge -- and longtime Republican Party 
goal -- to build a nationwide missile defense.

But what the administration had hoped would be a triumphant 
achievement is clouded by doubts, even within the Pentagon 
(news - web sites), about whether a system that is on its way 
to costing more than $100 billion will work. Several key 
components have fallen years behind schedule and will not be 
available until later. Flight tests, plagued by delays, have 
yet to advance beyond elementary, highly scripted events.

The paucity of realistic test data has caused the Pentagon's 
chief weapons evaluator to conclude that he cannot offer a 
confident judgment about the system's viability. He estimated 
its likely effectiveness to be as low as 20 percent.

"A system is being deployed that doesn't have any credible 
capability," said retired Gen. Eugene Habiger, who headed the 
U.S. Strategic Command in the mid-1990s. "I cannot recall any 
military system being deployed in such a manner."

Senior officials at the Pentagon and the White House insist 
the system will provide protection, although they use terms 
such as "rudimentary" and "limited" to describe its initial 
capabilities. Some missile defense, they say, is better than 
none, and what is deployed this year will be improved over 
time.

"Did we have perfection with our first airplane, our first 
rifle, our first ship?" Rumsfeld said in an interview last 
month. "I mean, they'd still be testing at Kitty Hawk, for 
God's sake, if you wanted perfection."

This notion of building first and improving later lies at the 
heart of the administration's approach, which defense 
officials have dubbed "evolutionary acquisition" or "spiral 
development." Bush has scaled back President Ronald Reagan 
(news - web sites)'s vision of a vast anti-missile network 
and pursued a less ambitious system. At the outset, the 
system will be aimed only at countering a small number of 
missiles that would be fired by North Korea (news - web 
sites), which is 6,000 miles from the West Coast of the 
United States.

But Bush also has funded an expanded array of missile defense 
projects, including land- and sea-launched interceptors, an 
airborne laser, and space-based weapons. So far, he has spent 
$31 billion on missile defense research and development, and 
his plans call for an additional $9 billion to $10 billion a 
year for the next five years. Beyond that, the administration 
has provided no final price tag. In 2005, the cost of missile 
defense will consume nearly 14 percent of the Pentagon's 
entire research-and-development budget.

While more money has gone into missile defense under Bush 
than into any other military R&D project, the Pentagon has 
exempted the missile defense program from the traditional 
oversight rules meant to ensure that new weapons serve the 
needs of military commanders.

Administration officials say the procedural shortcuts and the 
increased spending have yielded record gains in record time. 
The urgency, they say, is justified by a growing U.S. 
vulnerability to attack from hostile states pursuing long-
range missiles -- most notably North Korea and Iran.

Critics warn that such haste has made waste -- and is 
unnecessary. The urgency, they suspect, has been more a 
reflection of politics than concerns about the missile 
programs of North Korea and Iran, which still face 
significant technical hurdles. The deployment is being timed, 
they contend, to help Bush's reelection campaign.

They also caution that fielding a U.S. anti-missile system 
before it has undergone realistic testing risks inducing a 
false sense of security and locking the United States into 
flawed technology.

"The design gets frozen in order to build something, so 
development is stopped," said Philip E. Coyle III, the 
Pentagon's chief weapons evaluator during the Clinton 
administration. "You can't be building a house and changing 
the floor plan at the same time."
Out With the Old

Normally, when a weapons system is conceived, the Pentagon 
sets specific requirements that must be approved by a 
committee of senior military officers. The project is then 
assessed periodically by the Defense Acquisition Board, a 
group of high-ranking defense officials from various offices.

This accountability apparatus has been shunted aside in the 
case of missile defense. No requirements document was drawn 
up, and the traditional reviews and assessments have been 
bypassed. Instead, the Missile Defense Agency (MDA), which is 
responsible for developing the system, has been allowed to 
devise its own goals, test schedules and program reviews.

When Rumsfeld authorized this extraordinary autonomy in 
January 2002, he said that technological challenges and 
urgent national security concerns justified it. As a former 
executive in the pharmaceutical industry, Rumsfeld by his own 
account was influenced by the vigorous trial-and-error 
competition that often precedes the creation of new drugs.

	 

Other historical models also inspired Pentagon authorities. 
One was the National Reconnaissance Office, established in 
great secrecy in the 1960s to develop and operate spy 
satellites. The other was Israel's decision, in 2000, to 
declare its Arrow anti-missile system operational after just 
one successful intercept test.

"Since we have urgent needs, we sometimes cut corners in 
developing systems, meaning we field them before we've 
developed everything," said Arieh Herzog, director of the 
Israeli Missile Defense Organization. He said he held "many 
talks" about Israel's approach with Lt. Gen. Ronald T. 
Kadish, MDA director at the time.

Opponents in Congress and elsewhere say this approach has 
been taken too far in the case of the U.S. system. They warn 
that the lack of established baselines for the missile 
defense program has made it difficult to hold the Pentagon 
accountable for performance and cost.

"We're in this hugely expensive race to build something, but 
we don't know how much it'll cost in the end or what it'll 
do," said Sen. Jack Reed (news, bio, voting record) (D-R.I.), 
a member of the Armed Services Committee.

An audit by the Government Accountability Office, released in 
April, cited an absence of reliable, complete baseline 
estimates of system performance and cost. Without this 
information, the GAO said, policymakers in the Pentagon and 
Congress "do not have a full understanding" of the system's 
overall cost and actual capabilities. The audit concluded 
that the system being fielded this year remains "largely 
unproven."
Supporting Cast

Pentagon officials say the program remains subject to 
extensive internal supervision, even with the departure from 
traditional procedures. Michael W. Wynne, the Pentagon's 
acting head of acquisitions, told a Senate committee in March 
that he meets weekly with the MDA's director. In contrast 
with other programs he oversees from a distance, Wynne 
described his contacts with top MDA officials -- and with 
Rumsfeld -- as "more direct and generally carried out in face-
to-face discussions."

Wynne said other senior Pentagon officials also have had a 
say in shaping and scrutinizing the program. He pointed to 
the Missile Defense Support Group, which consists of mid-
level representatives from Rumseld's office, the Joint Staff 
and each of the military services. The group has met 47 times 
since its creation in March 2002.

"No program in the department receives more scrutiny -- 
either in level or frequency -- than the Missile Defense 
Program," Wynne testified to the Senate Armed Services 
Committee (news - web sites).

But interviews with support group members revealed they have 
played only an advisory role. Several said the group often 
learned of some important decisions after the fact.

"We're not a critical-decision review group," said Glenn F. 
Lamartin, a senior Pentagon acquisition official who chairs 
the group. "We're a support group. We provide advice. Our 
engagement is different than if we were operating under the 
old system of review and oversight."

Lately, some senior military commanders have signaled an 
interest in shifting back toward some sort of formal 
requirement process. The Strategic Command, which will 
oversee operation of the missile defense system, has proposed 
a "warfighter involvement program" to give commanders a 
greater voice in the system's development.

Another important source of internal review is supposed to be 
Thomas P. Christie, the Pentagon's chief weapons evaluator. 
But he is in an awkward position.

By law, his Operational Test and Evaluation office is 
mandated by Congress to judge the readiness of major weapons 
systems before they are deployed, which it does by comparing 
the results of "operational" tests with the requirements for 
the system. In the case of missile defense, however, no 
formal requirements exist, and the test data so far come from 
early "developmental" flights, not more realistic operational 
ones.

Christie's estimate that the system may be only 20 percent 
effective contrasts with a prediction from the MDA of more 
than 80 percent effectiveness. The difference reflects 
disagreement over which test data to include in computing the 
estimates.

Christie wants to count all flight results, including earlier 
test failures. The MDA argues that causes of those failures 
have been fixed, so the data can be discarded. Its estimates 
are based largely on computer simulations and testing of 
individual components.

The MDA's director, Air Force Lt. Gen. Henry A. "Trey" 
Obering III, said in an interview earlier this month that 
both sides were trying to settle on a common set of data. Two 
other senior defense officials said this week that an 
agreement had been reached on "selection criteria" for the 
data and that the gap between the disparate estimates had 
begun to narrow.

The numbers, which are classified, carry considerable 
importance because a future U.S. president would rely on them 
in a crisis.

"He will want to know what his options are and will turn to 
his commanders and ask how sure they are that the system will 
work," said a senior Pentagon official involved in the 
assessment.
Delays Persist

After Bush took office, Pentagon officials outlined a plan of 
stepped-up flight intercept tests. The plan held, more or 
less, through the end of 2002 and several successful 
intercepts. But unexpected difficulty in producing a new 
booster rocket has stalled intercept tests since December 
2002.

The booster's job is to carry a "kill vehicle," a 120-pound 
package of sensors, computers and thrusters. Once in space, 
the kill vehicle separates from the booster and closes in on 
an enemy warhead, destroying it in a high-speed collision.

Earlier flight tests used a surrogate booster that flew at 
only half the speed of the booster that is being produced for 
the system. MDA officials said they have not wanted to try 
more intercepts until that new booster can be incorporated 
into the tests.

By spring of this year, the new booster was ready, but the 
discovery of a faulty circuit board in the kill vehicle 
prompted Pentagon officials to order a lengthy bottom-up 
review of all components. In mid-August, the missile 
interceptor was again set to go when technicians found a 
glitch in the booster's flight computer. Replacing the 
computer created another delay.

Earlier this month, Obering, the MDA's director, announced a 
further postponement after discovering modifications that had 
been made to the interceptor without thorough ground testing.

This leaves the administration proceeding with deployment 
after only eight intercept tests -- the most recent conducted 
21 months ago. Five tests resulted in hits, but all used the 
same limited test range in the Pacific and employed 
surrogates for tracking radars as well as for the booster.

A key X-band radar -- a towering structure being built to 
float at sea on two motorized pontoons the size of Trident 
submarines -- will not be ready for another year at least. 
Also still in development is a satellite network to replace a 
three-decade-old constellation of early-warning satellites. 
Both the X-band and the new satellites are critical in 
assisting the kill vehicle to distinguish the warhead from 
decoys and debris.

Physicists and defense experts, including some affiliated 
with the Union of Concerned Scientists, continue to dispute 
the MDA's claims that the system will be able to identify a 
warhead in a field of decoys -- a process known 
as "discrimination." Tests so far, using only relatively 
simple targets, have done little to resolve the issue.

Pentagon officials say the system has been subjected to an 
extensive array of ground tests and computer simulations. The 
failures on intercept attempts, they note, resulted from 
problems with the quality of individual parts, not from basic 
design flaws.

"If you really look at where we've encountered problems, they 
have not been things that required technological 
breakthrough. They have been in attention to detail and 
quality," said Maj. Gen. John Holly, the MDA's manager for 
what is formally known as the Ground-based Midcourse Defense 
system.

But both Christie and the Defense Science Board, a Pentagon 
advisory board, have cited limits to the computer models. And 
the persistent quality control problems have led a number of 
scientists, defense specialists and Democratic lawmakers to 
argue that the system's sheer complexity makes it highly 
vulnerable to the malfunction of a single part.
'We Needed a Date'

The Pentagon has aimed at having the Alaska site ready by 
Sept. 30. Kadish, the former MDA director, said that date was 
chosen by his agency in early 2002 for "internal management 
purposes," not by political appointees with an eye toward the 
Nov. 2 presidential election.

"We needed a date for people to work to," he told the 
strategic forces subcommittee of the House Armed Services 
Committee in March.

At the time the date was picked, the Alaska site was being 
conceived primarily as a "test bed" that would allow for more 
realistic flight testing and cold-weather ground operations. 
It could be used in an emergency to thwart a real attack, 
defense officials figured, but that would not be its main 
purpose.

In the summer of 2002, the plan began to change. Pentagon 
officials proposed turning the site into a fully operational 
anti-missile facility and deploying more interceptors there 
while still using it as a test area. Bush approved the plan a 
few months later, ordering deployment in 2004.

Despite the slippage in the test program, the administration 
has held fast to that deadline. In recent weeks, Bush and 
Rumsfeld have reiterated their intention to activate the 
system by year's end.

This will not be the first time Pentagon officials have 
pushed a new weapon system into service while it is still in 
its experimental phase. The Joint Surveillance Target Attack 
Radar System (JSTARS), a ground surveillance aircraft, was 
rushed into action in the 1991 Persian Gulf War (news - web 
sites), and Predator and other unmanned reconnaissance 
aircraft were hurriedly deployed in the Balkans and 
Afghanistan (news - web sites).

But JSTARS and the drone aircraft were far simpler to develop 
than missile defense. Coyle, the former Pentagon weapons 
evaluator, compared the idea of deploying while testing the 
missile defense system to building a picket fence, one picket 
at a time, over several years. Until the whole thing is 
complete, such a fence is not much use, he said.

Coyle and others also worry that placing the system on alert 
will distract from further testing and development. They 
point to the experience in the 1990s of a shorter-range anti-
missile system known as Theater High-Altitude Area Defense, 
or THAAD. The Army required the developer of that system to 
produce 40 prototype missiles, reliable and rugged enough to 
use in a combat emergency. The pressure to deploy something 
early led to compromises in design and testing, which 
hampered the program and contributed to years of delay.

Pentagon officials are still wrestling with what balance to 
strike between keeping the system functioning and suspending 
operations to run tests.

"You could say that if you put it on alert, it might be a 
distraction to the development and evolution of the system," 
Rumsfeld said. "But you could say just the opposite -- that 
by putting it on alert, you force up a whole series of issues 
that you need to think through, work through."

Rumsfeld has made it clear that in the absence of an 
international crisis involving a heightened threat of missile 
attack, he would favor giving priority to continued testing. 
Nevertheless, the administration does not intend to wait for 
more proof of performance before expanding the system.

In addition to 16 interceptors already ordered for the Alaska 
site at Fort Greely -- plus four for an alternate California 
site at Vandenberg Air Force Base -- the 2005 budget provides 
money for 10 more interceptors in Alaska. Talks also are 
underway with several countries about establishing an 
interceptor site in Europe.
'The Sky Did Not Fall'

In the early months of the Bush administration, congressional 
Democrats plotted to block White House plans to expand work 
on missile defense. After the World Trade Center and the 
Pentagon were struck on Sept. 11, 2001, they tried to argue 
that the attacks showed that the United States had more to 
fear from low-tech terrorism than high-tech missiles.

But the attacks, by giving new emphasis to homeland defense, 
have played to the advantage of missile defense proponents. 
Amid a general surge in military spending, Bush has received 
nearly all of the money he has sought for missile defense.

Democratic lawmakers opposed to Bush's program concede the 
debate has shifted. It is no longer an ideological battle, 
centered on arms control concerns, over whether to deploy at 
all. Now, they say, it is a more practical argument over how 
much to build and how fast.

"The debate is now about whether or not we continue to press 
ahead at the full speed we're going, with record amounts of 
money being spent, despite the fact that there's been no 
realistic testing," said Sen. Carl M. Levin (Mich.), the 
ranking Democrat on the Armed Services Committee.

Rumsfeld, addressing an audience of government officials and 
contractors last month, said the upcoming deployment 
is "somewhat of a disappointment for those who were convinced 
it would fail." Noting cordial discussions he had held only 
days earlier with Russian officials about missile defense, he 
chided arms-control advocates who had forecast that the U.S. 
initiative would upset relations with Moscow.

"The sky-is-falling group was wrong," he said. "The sky did 
not fall. It's still up there."
__________________________________________________________________
Dr. Paul Patton
Research Scientist
Beckman Institute  Rm 3027  405 N. Mathews St.
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign  Urbana, Illinois 61801
work phone: (217)-265-0795   fax: (217)-244-5180
home phone: (217)-344-5812
homepage: http://netfiles.uiuc.edu/ppatton/www/index.html

"The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious.  It is the
source of all true art and science."
-Albert Einstein
__________________________________________________________________