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Official Defends U.S. Missile Interceptor System By David Ruppe WASHINGTON — The head of the U.S. Missile Defense Agency last week again sought to defend its flagship, multibillion national missile defense program against charges it may never work effectively against enemy ICBMs because it could be fooled by simple countermeasures (see GSN, March 16). Director Lt. Gen. Henry Obering said at an event hosted here by the National Defense University Foundation that the Ground-based Midcourse Defense system has an “ability to deal with simple threats.” Building and linking additional radars in 2005 and 2006 will “allow us begin to address those more complex threats,” he said. The Missile Defense Agency has been rapidly constructing the system — installing interceptors in Alaska and California, constructing numerous sophisticated sensors, and linking up a massive command and control network. It plans to spend at least $20 billion on the Ground-based Midcourse Defense program through fiscal 2011. The agency also plans to conduct an unprecedented, more operationally realistic intercept test of the system at an undetermined date this year. The test, Obering said, would incorporate for the first time the interceptor missile-kill vehicle combination now deployed in the system instead of a previously used prototype, fire the interceptor from an operational silo, use an existing operational radar to track the target missile, and use the same command and control software that is in the deployed system. That test is intended to satisfy a congressional requirement made last year to conduct a more operationally realistic intercept test by Oct. 1, which supposedly would illustrate the system’s potential capability against an actual attack. Critics said last week that even if all of those plans come off, it is still doubtful that the system could be made to work effectively against even a simple threat. Even shiny balloons could easily fool the system, they said. Retired Army Lt. Gen. Robert Gard, the senior military fellow at the Center for Arms Control and Nonproliferation, during a question and answer session at the event, cited to Obering a letter released last month by 22 civilian scientists. “Even if the defense components work perfectly as designed, technical assessments demonstrate that the GMD system will be unable to counter a missile attack that includes even unsophisticated countermeasures,” the letter said. Defining the Challenge Defense Department officials have identified a potential North Korean long-range missile carrying a nuclear warhead as the primary near-term threat that requires the missile defense system. Last week, the director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, Vice Adm. Lowell Jacoby, told lawmakers that North Korea was believed to have developed a miniaturized warhead capable of being carried by a ballistic missile into U.S. territory. The Washington Post reported the assessment, but also that the intelligence community’s consensus view was that North Korea was years instead away from developing such a weapon (see GSN, April 29). Responding to Gard’s comment, Obering said that the critics “are correct [given the system’s available sensors] in terms of our ability to deal with very, very complex threat suites.” He said, though, “It can deal with simple threat suites,” without specifying what those would include. He described as “very complex” countermeasures “Mylar balloons, and chaff and other things.” Thomas Cochran, director of the nuclear program of the Natural Resources Defense Council, disputed the complexity of such countermeasures, arguing they could be included in a rudimentary attack. “I just submit that if you can deliver a warhead from North Korea to the United States, you would not consider Mylar balloons and reflecting tape which could defeat that IR [infrared sensor on the kill vehicle] a complex countermeasure,” he told Obering. Obering said that while launching a Mylar balloon decoy with a warhead may not be difficult, doing it well has proven tricky even for the U.S. missile defense testing program. “I will tell you, it’s a very interesting environment, space is,” he said. Obering said the scientists who issued the letter may be out of touch with the latest capabilities for dealing with countermeasures. “We know a lot more about that than probably anybody on this planet because of our experimentation program,” he said of the agency. Obering said further that previous successful intercept tests of the Ground-based Midcourse Defense system were done in the presence of balloons. “We had balloons in those tests and we were able to intercept a warhead as part of it. People dismiss that from us, they just kind of skim over that as part of our test program,” he said. Stephen Young, a senior analyst at the Union of Concerned Scientists, countered in an interview: “They had balloons that did not look like the warhead. They had large balloons and small balloons.” “That’s not an unreasonable thing to do in the early phases of testing … but there’s no country in the world that’s going to deploy a large balloon decoy with its medium sized warhead. They will either deploy identically sized balloons with the warhead in one of them or balloons that look like the warhead,” he said. Alternatives Sought In addition to addressing the countermeasures challenge, Obering said, the agency is pursuing multiple additional technological strategies for stopping an ICBM attack at different stages of flight, including by striking the missile as it boosts into space and as it heads toward earth. An emerging approach he cited is to develop multiple miniature kill vehicles that can be launched from a single interceptor missile against numerous targets. The agency created a multiple kill vehicle program in its fiscal 2006 budget released this year and projects spending $1.3 billion on it through fiscal 2011. The technology potentially “dramatically alters the statistical probability of kill in favor of the defender and provides for early, decisive engagement of an adversary complex,” an agency budget document said this year. The multiple kill vehicle approach, though, has been considered potentially too costly by officials (see GSN, April 10, 2002). The agency continues to seek innovative ways to reduce the per-interceptor cost down to below $50 million, according to an agency document released last year.
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