Missile Defense Budget to Climb Again

By David Ruppe
Global Security Newswire

WASHINGTON — Although it expects to reduce spending in the next fiscal year, the U.S. Missile Defense Agency wants to ramp up its budget over the next four years to more than $10 billion annually by fiscal 2009, according to Defense Department budget documents. Critics say the numbers could climb even higher (see GSN, Feb. 18).

Citing program restructuring, the Bush administration announced this year it would cut the Missile Defense Agency’s requested fiscal 2006 budget by nearly $1 billion, from $8.7 billion to $7.8 billion.

However, budget documents show a plan to spend $1 billion more than earlier estimated over the four-year period of fiscal 2006 through fiscal 2009. Much of that increase appears to come from projected hikes to the fiscal 2008 and fiscal 2009 budgets, corresponding with newly announced plans to buy additional interceptor missiles, radar, and other equipment.

In the six years from fiscal 2004 to fiscal 2009, the agency last year projected spending $53.1 billion, and this year’s budget plan anticipates spending even more in the future, $57.7 billion in the six years from fiscal 2006 through fiscal 2011.

An agency spokesman said the budget could peak in fiscal 2010.

The Missile Defense Agency’s budget documents, published online this week, do not articulate reasons for the projected budget increases.

Agency spokesman Richard Lehner, though, said the increase from the previous six-year period projection to the most recent plan results in part from budget “increases for additional early warning radar upgrades, new forward based air-transportable X-band radars, [the] multiple kill-vehicle program, [and the] Japanese Cooperative Program” (see GSN, Feb. 22).

He attributed the increases during fiscal 2008 and fiscal 2009 “mainly” to boost-phase equipment scheduled to be fielded then, missile defense sensors for fielding over the next six years, and potentially new interceptors under consideration by 2010. The agency’s budget documents, however, also show substantial spending increases for midcourse defense equipment such as land-based interceptor missiles to be deployed during fiscal 2008 and fiscal 2009.

The projected increases parallel newly disclosed plans to acquire by the end of 2009 an additional 20 land-based interceptor missiles through the midcourse program to bring the projected total to about 40, as well as additional sea-launched missiles, terminal-phase interceptors, two additional advanced radars and radar upgrades.

The White House budget office last year and again in February criticized the agency for its practice of not budgeting such hardware procurements six years in advance, but rather a couple of years prior to expected delivery (see GSN, March 19, 2004). The practice, analysts have said, effectively conceals the overall potential cost of programs and could create budget trouble when the costs of new purchases are announced.

In a report published in February, the Office of Management and Budget said the agency’s failure in previous years to budget for such equipment beyond fiscal 2007 could jeopardize funding for such purchases, stating, it “puts at risk the ability of MDA to field operational capabilities.”

Part of the problem, according to the document, is that the military services are not fully committed to the agency’s goals. The Bush administration has not been able to persuade the armed services to pay for much of the equipment, the Office of Management and Budget stated.

“Currently MDA and services are collaborating to determine the responsibilities for funding outyears,” it says.

Generally, research and development agencies such as Missile Defense do not procure equipment for operations. The military services usually buy the equipment, normally after it has been demonstrated operationally effective through testing. 

A process under way for transferring responsibility for funding elements of missile defense [to the services] is “problematic” and “will take a number of years to evolve,” it says.

The Missile Defense Agency’s long-range, multisystem Ballistic Missile Defense System [BMDS] is now not ready for full operational testing, as the Pentagon’s acting director of operational test and evaluation told Congress last month.

Some legislators have argued more realistic testing of the system should occur before fielding additional missiles (see GSN, Sept. 30, 2004). In a letter to members of Congress today, 22 physicists with weapons system expertise including nine Nobel laureates called for the elimination of all funding for building ground-based interceptors “until operationally realistic tests of the system demonstrate that it would work against a real world attack.”

The Government Accountability Office said in a report last month that future budgets could be pressured to climb even higher than projected as the Missile Defense Agency announces more equipment purchase plans and pays for operation and maintenance of fielded systems.

“Fielding costs can be expected to increase in the years to come as more components … are integrated into the BMDS,” it said.

Unexpected cost growth within development programs could also pressure future agency budgets, it said. It said that agency program costs had increased by $380 million than budgeted for in fiscal 2004.

Budgets also could climb if the government decides in the future to develop and field new approaches for defeating ballistic missiles that are currently under consideration, such as space-based interceptors, according to Philip Coyle, a senior adviser at the Center for Defense Information.

He cited a Congressional Budget Office estimate published last year that said alternatives for building, launching and operating space-based defenses could cost between $27 billion and $78 billion.

“I don’t see that it is going to taper off,” he said, of the budget’s generally upward track.

Spokesman Lehner said he anticipates that the agency’s budget would “presumably” peak at about $10.27 billion in fiscal 2010. The fiscal 2006 budget projects a slight drop the following fiscal year to $10.21 billion.

He noted Missile Defense Agency Director Lt. Gen. Henry Obering has said a mobile, land-based Kinetic Energy Interceptor being researched may be considered for replacing — as opposed to supplementing — the in-silo ground-based interceptor being developed and fielded for the midcourse program.

“As Lieutenant General Obering has been saying for several months now, long-term objective is to explore potential for mobile GBIs [ground-based interceptors] rather than fixed sites,” according to Lehner. 

Requested funding was reduced for the Kinetic Energy Interceptor for fiscal 2006 to allow for efforts to demonstrate its key technologies could work and to reduce developmental risks, Obering said in congressional testimony last month.

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