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Missile Defense System Not Yet Ready, Official Says By David Ruppe WASHINGTON — Currently fielded components of the U.S. national missile defense system are not yet capable of defending against a long-range missile attack, a senior Defense Department official said yesterday (see GSN, March 10). “I don’t think that you can say the system is operationally ready today,” said David Duma, acting director for operational test and evaluation, in unusually candid testimony about the Ground-based Midcourse Defense (GMD) system’s limitations during a missile defense hearing before the House Armed Services Strategic Forces Subcommittee. Duma’s office rates a number of key elements of the system’s performance, from detecting an ICBM launch, to discriminating the target from other objects, to engaging the warhead. “We have test data on all of those elements to some degree,” he said, but, “We do not have test data that would tell me that I could complete that chain with confidence and repeatably at this time.” His comments echoed testimony by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld before the full committee last month, in which he suggested repeatedly that he believed the system was not yet capable of effective defense. “What’s being done here is … deploying the pieces of the capability that will evolve into an early missile defense capability,” he said (see GSN, Feb. 18). Some military officials, however, have claimed that the eight missile interceptors now in silos in Alaska and California could work immediately if needed. “If directed, we could provide a limited defense against an attack out of Northeast Asia,” GMD program chief Maj. Gen John Holly told Alaskan lawmakers yesterday, the Associated Press reported. Democrats on the House subcommittee have expressed concern that the Bush administration might declare the system operational before tests demonstrate that it works. “While GMD holds promise, it remains unproven. … Do we let successful flight tests dictate when we declare this system to be operationally ready, or do we let our desire for a defense — no matter how sincere and well-intentioned — take precedence over cold hard facts?” ranking Democrat Silvestre Reyes (Texas) said yesterday. He noted that President George W. Bush had last year already portrayed the system as effective in a comment, “We say to those tyrants who believe they can blackmail America and the free world, ‘You fire. We’re going to shoot it down.’” “Since that statement, the GMD interceptor has unfortunately failed twice, once in December and again in February, unable to even leave the launch pad,” Reyes said. “If we go back further, to December 2002, and just look at intercept flight tests, the system is now 0 for 3. In baseball, you’d be sent back to the dugout.” Subcommittee Chairman Terry Everett (R-Alabama) also raised concerns about the two recent failed intercept tests. Both failures were attributed to technical glitches thwarting the launch of the system’s interceptor missile (see GSN, Feb. 15). “I have a real problem with the fact that a latch did not drop away, that seems so elementary,” he said of the aborted February test. Duma said “confidence is lacking” that the system can perform well repeatedly, because of quality control issues and “the maturity of the system at this point.” Missile Defense Agency Director Lt. Gen. Trey Obering said past quality issues prompted his recent decision to order a “major overhaul in our mission assurance approaches in our programs.” Democrats also questioned whether the system could operate effectively given that some key pieces, including an advance radar and an early warning satellite network, are not yet deployed. Asked whether he had confidence the system could defeat countermeasures a country such as North Korea might deploy as part of a nuclear attack, Duma said there other problems to solve first: “Right now I’m having confidence [issues] getting it out of the tube,” he said. Duma did say the system shows promise to one day be operationally effective. Representative John Spratt (D-S.C.) said that statement contained “Three qualifiers. [You are] pretty tentative about the system at this time.”
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