Missile Defense Agency Seeks Intercept Success

By David Ruppe
Global Security Newswire

WASHINGTON — The U.S. Missile Defense Agency hopes to demonstrate this year that its flagship long-range antiballistic missile system could bring down incoming ICBMs, senior officials said at a hearing last week (see GSN, Feb. 3).

Critics continue to question whether the system that costs $2.7 billion annually could actually work against a real threat, and whether three planned flight tests of the Ground-based Midcourse Defense system this year — billed as the most realistic to date — would resemble the sorts of challenges the system could face against a real adversary.

Congress required that operationally realistic testing take place last year, but it was delayed after tests in which the interceptor failed to leave its silo in December 2004 and February 2005.

At a hearing Thursday before the House Armed Services Strategic Forces Subcommittee, senior Defense Department officials were asked repeatedly whether truly realistic flight testing would be conducted this year.

Pentagon Operational Test and Evaluation Director David Duma answered in the affirmative.

“Flight-testing to date has not yet reduced the risk to the point where [Missile Defense Agency head Lt. Gen. Henry] Obering is ready to execute an operationally realistic flight test,” he said, but added, “Under the restructured program, MDA plans three operationally realistic flight tests later this year.”

Obering said the tests would include more deployed hardware than previously used, and military personnel at the controls of the system, making them “very operationally realistic.”

Independent experts contacted by Global Security Newswire praised the agency’s move toward more realistic testing, but said the level of realism would still fall short of modeling key challenges the United States might face during an ICBM attack.

“They’re clearly starting to remove some artificiality of the tests, but that’s not the same thing as saying the tests are operationally realistic,” said Union of Concerned Scientists missile defense analyst David Wright.

A key question, he said, is whether the interceptor’s kill vehicle could be successful against countermeasures that prevent it from identifying the target. “A country that could build a long-range missile could add [countermeasures] to its missile,” Wright said.

Obering said the ground-based system has already been successfully tested against countermeasures. The fundamental question the agency seeks to answer with the tests is whether a newly configured interceptor can hit an identified target, the officials suggested. Before the failed launches a year ago, earlier test intercept attempts used different kill vehicles and rocket boosters than those planned for this year.

Philip Coyle, the Pentagon’s top testing official for much of the 1990s, said the agency might need to do 20 to 30 additional developmental interceptor flight tests before it would be ready for operationally realistic testing.

“Tests such as a successful nighttime test, a successful test with a tumbling RV [re-entry vehicle], tests with decoys and countermeasures, and tests with more than one target and more than one interceptor are planned but still haven’t been executed successfully,” he said.

Flight tests are planned for early summer, late summer or early fall, and late in the year. In each case, the target would fly out of Kodiak, Alaska, pass the Beale Air Force Base early warning radar in California, and face an interceptor launched from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California. 

An intercept will not be the primary objective of the spring test, though it will be attempted, an anonymous defense official briefing reporters said in February. The test’s objective was described by the agency as “data collection.”

Congressional and nongovernmental observers have questioned whether the developmental system has sufficiently proven its potential effectiveness to warrant the Bush administration’s ongoing program of deploying system elements, including interceptor missiles in Alaska, California and potentially Europe.

“Even though I support missile defense, I do not think we should give it a blank check or allow it to avoid a thorough testing process,” said Representative Silvestre Reyes (Texas), ranking Democrat on the Strategic Forces Subcommittee.

The Pentagon officials said greater realism was being added to the testing than in previous exercises.

“This year’s [updated testing plan] incorporates greater operational realism in the areas of increased war fighter involvement in flight tests; more end-to-end system testing; use of operationally representative missiles; employment of operational tactics, techniques, and procedures; and inclusion of more complex countermeasures,” Duma said.

The planned tests, Obering said, “will include realistic targets, operational sensors, operational crews, and operational interceptors from operational silos.”

“We believe that that begins to fit the bill of the closest that we can come to an end-to-end test, other than trying to take a missile off the coast of North Korea and launch it back this way, which is very improbable and not practical,” he said.

Obering noted the tests would use an upgraded early warning radar deployed in California to help produce firing solutions for the system. Recent testing, he and Duma said, has given increased confidence that the radar’s data could help guide ground-launched interceptors to their targets.

Analysts have said the system’s most powerful radar, a giant Sea-Based X-band radar, could provide the most precise information for directing the interceptors. However, it is unclear whether the X-band will be ready in time to contribute to the attempted intercepts this year. Obering said the radar has arrived in Hawaii and is expected this year to “be placed on station in Alaska where it will complete its integration and checkout.”

Missile Defense Agency spokesman Richard Lehner by e-mail said the X-band would contribute “when it is available for use, which may be the second test or we may wait for the third based upon its ‘shakedown’ after reaching its mooring site at Adak, Alaska, still to be determined.”

The defense official briefing in February had said the X-band would participate but not help target the interceptors this year. The Cobra Dane radar at Eareckson Air Station in Alaska, which will be out of testing range, also will not contribute. Lehner said it is uncertain whether sea-based Aegis radar data would be used.

It is not clear what if anything will assume the roles of sensors absent from the tests. 

In some earlier testing, data from transponders on test targets was used to simulate data that radars might have provided for aiming and launching the interceptors toward the expected interception point, according to MDA spokesman Lehner. 

“Data was made to look like data the command and control system would have received from a radar if we had one in the middle of the test range, which, of course, we didn’t have,” he said.

“The data was used in the same way it would have been used if we had a radar, namely to create the weapon task plan to aim the booster rocket to the proper point in space, and then the kill vehicle is released,” he said. 

For the first test this year, Lehner wrote, the target will fly past the Beale radar and the interceptor will rely on the radar’s data to identify and track the target and direct the interceptor.

For all the tests, he added, “No simulated data is planned” for determining when and where to fire the interceptors “at this time.”

Wright and colleagues have said the presence of transponders or beacons providing precise target tracking data appeared to be an important factor in the successes of earlier tests. “What we found is that the simulated radar data that we gained seemed to be much better than what you’d be getting from an actual radar. The beacon … told you where the warhead was within the target cluster,” he said. 

Former Missile Defense Agency chief Lt. Gen. Ronald Kadish disputed that claim during a November 2001 briefing. The transponder-aided “weapons task plan that’s issued would be equivalent, in my view, to an X-band radar,” he said.

Wright noted that a flight test in October 2002, the last time a transponder was used to help direct an interceptor, also was the last time the system successfully intercepted a target. “It’s not as though they can say we’ve done a lot of testing without the beacon.” So far the entire system has successfully intercepted its target five times in 10 tries.

A test in December 2002 failed apparently not for lack of such data, but rather when the kill vehicle failed to separate from the interceptor, according to the agency. The two subsequent intercept tests failed to launch the interceptors, the agency has said.

More crucial for conducting operationally realistic testing than using real systems and real data, however, is to test the interceptor against a target concealed by countermeasures or decoys, Wright said.

“There are two halves to a successful intercept. One is to be able to identify a target that you want to shoot at [despite countermeasures], and the other is to shoot at it and hit it [known as hit-to-kill]. They’re working on that second piece. They’re saying if we can identify a target can we shoot at it. … It’s hard technically, but I would say it’s not the hardest” challenge,” he said.

Obering before the committee suggested that countermeasures were not part of the test plan this year. Asked when they would be used, he said, “If we’re successful in that test series — actually, I have already given the direction to look at how we can add countermeasures to part of that test regime.”

Obering said the agency successfully tested prototype interceptors against countermeasures from 1999 to 2002. “There were countermeasures involved in those intercept tests.”

Wright and colleagues have argued that decoys used in prior tests were readily distinguishable from the targets, and that transponders also may have provided artificially precise knowledge of the target’s location.

“The countermeasures that we’ve seen in the past and looked at have not been credible countermeasures. They were objects that had very different signatures from the warhead. They were easily distinguishable by measurements that they knew the kill vehicle could do,” Wright said.

Asked by Reyes whether future countermeasures would reflect what North Korea or Iran might launch, Obering said, “I don’t know of anybody that can say with any certainty what kind of countermeasures those countries are capable of. However, based on the physics, based on what you would try to conjecture in terms of vulnerabilities, those are the kinds of things that we would use as part of our test program.”

Duma at the hearing said the remaining “fundamental” uncertainty about the Ground-based Midcourse Defense system is whether the operationally configured interceptor, never before flown against a target, would be able to strike a missile.

“The fundamental technical unknown at this point is to demonstrate the intercept capability on the ground-based interceptor. We have modeled that.  We have done a tremendous amount of work down in Huntsville, and actually across the nation, linking models and simulations together for integrated ground tests,” he said.

“While we’ve demonstrated technology for hit to kill, we haven’t done it on the operational booster and operational kill vehicle,” he said.

From “this test that’s unfolding this year, we will get a better understanding of just exactly the effectiveness of the [kill vehicle] in an endgame, and the interceptor,” Lt. Gen. Larry Dodgen, Space Command director, told the subcommittee.

The defense officials said successful tests this year could change the way the military operates the system.

Duma suggested that successful flight-testing could build confidence in the system’s capability against a real threat.

“War fighters must have confidence the system will defend on demand,” he said.

Dodgen said successful tests could enable the military to reduce the number of interceptors it plans to fire at any particular ICBM. The number is not publicly known.

The testing “will allow us to optimize the use of our inventory and maybe change our techniques and procedures to get the most out of the missiles we have,” he said.

About a dozen interceptors are currently emplaced and a total of 22 are expected to be deployed by the end of 2007, Obering said.

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