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Missile Defense Testing Delayed Again By David Ruppe WASHINGTON — The U.S. Defense Department has further delayed major testing of its developmental national missile defense system, a senior official said yesterday (see GSN, April 19). The Missile Defense Agency had planned three flight tests of its Ground-based Midcourse Defense system from spring to fall of this year. The series now is not expected to finish until next year, agency director Lt. Gen. Henry Obering told the Senate Appropriations defense subcommittee yesterday. The first test, which was expected to occur late this month or in early June, will be delayed to mid-to-late July. A second test scheduled for late summer has been pushed into the fall, while the final flight is expected to be shift from late fall to early 2007, Obering said. In all three tests, Obering said, a kill vehicle launched by a booster rocket will attempt to strike a target warhead, though only in the latter two tests would interception be the primary objective of the mission. The primary mission of the first would be to test the system’s command and control and a key tracking radar, according to Missile Defense Agency spokesman Richard Lehner. Lehner confirmed the schedule shift today by e-mail, but said it amounted to “no real change.” When asked, he said there was no specific cause for the delay. “Schedule is really just a guesstimate to give folks a timetable to work to. If you didn’t have that folks would always keep pushing tests back because there is always something they want to continue to check or inspect or redesign,” he said. A former senior Pentagon official, however, criticized the delay. “Once again, Lt. Gen. Obering has failed to deliver on his commitments. It’s another example of broken promises by the Missile Defense Agency,” said Philip Coyle, a senior adviser at the Center for Defense Information. “As a result, Congress has no way of knowing whether a test will take place in 2006, or 2007, or 2008, or never.” Officials said earlier this year they hoped that a successful intercept of a mock warhead would demonstrate that the system could be effective again a realistic ICBM attack. Originally, they had hoped to do that in 2004. The U.S. missile defense program, though, has had several high-profile testing failures since late 2002. The Bush administration has not activated the system for regular use as it has yet to demonstrate the system’s effectiveness by flight testing against a realistic threat. About a dozen long-range interceptors have been fielded in Alaska and California. The agency has indicated plans to deploy a total of 50, including at least 10 in Europe, following on an initial deployment order by President George W. Bush in December 2002. Critics have said that deploying the developmental system was premature and ultimately could waste of billions of dollars if the technology cannot be made to work effectively. The agency last reported successfully intercepting a mock warhead with the system in October 2002. That test used a prototype interceptor, whereas the testing scheduled for this year are set use the type of interceptors that the agency is actually deploying. The agency delayed scheduled flight testing for much of 2005, after two interceptors reportedly failed to leave their silos during two such tests. The agency attributed the failures to poor quality control of equipment, which Obering said yesterday had been addressed. Obering yesterday sounded optimistic about the system. “Comprehensive reviews and our recent successes indicate that we should continue interceptor deployment,” he said, noting two successful flight tests in recent months that did not involve attacking targets. He told the committee that “especially” good progress had been made toward developing and fielding the long-range system. Army Lt. Gen. Larry Dodgen, who heads the Army Space and Missile Defense Command, which is responsible for operating much of the system, said that “currently the system is not alert. However, we do have some capability that we can reach and put at the nation’s disposal, if called.” Several amendments to the fiscal 2007 defense authorization bill, which is up for consideration by the House of Representatives, have been proposed that would significantly scale back the missile defense program. The most extreme proposal, from Democratic Representatives John Tierney (Mass.) and Rush Holt (N.J.), would block further Ground-based Missile Defense interceptor deployments and cut the agency’s planned $9.3 billion budget in half. Analysts have charged that the system’s fatal weakness is that it could easily be fooled by simple countermeasures. In response to a question yesterday, Obering said the system being fielded “does not have a robust capability against very complex countermeasures.” Still, he said recent technological developments including sensors “get us very far down that path to be able to meet that very complex threat.” Critics have said they do not believe some of those developments would make a difference, as warheads could be concealed among decoy balloons. An Army Missile and Space Command online fact sheet makes the same point for another developmental technology, multiple kill vehicles. “A priori knowledge of threat signatures [what an enemy warhead looks like] will likely be inadequate for reliable discrimination even with good measurements,” it says. Obering pointed to miniature kill vehicles, many of which could be launched at one time from a single interceptor against multiple objects, as a potential solution to the countermeasures problem.
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