U.S. Plans:  Interceptor Contract Won Without Real Competition, GAO Finds

By Jay Newton-Small
Global Security Newswire

WASHINGTON — Raytheon won a key missile defense contract in 1998 largely because Boeing admitted to corporate espionage and withdrew from the contract competition, a congressional watchdog found this week (see GSN, Feb. 12, 2002).

In a 12-page letter to U.S. Representative Howard Berman (D-Calif.), the General Accounting Office describes how Raytheon won the contract to develop exoatmospheric kill vehicles — the device mounted on a missile that seeks and destroys incoming warheads — after Boeing admitted to breaking Pentagon rules and its own ethical codes.

The letter says Raytheon’s winning bid was granted by default and was not based on “any formal comparison of the related technical merit or proposed cost of the two EKVs.”

Raytheon told Global Security Newswire today that the company had won the contract legitimately.

“Raytheon believes that our company won by virtue of the superiority of our design and this EKV prototype has proven to be very adept in tests,” Raytheon spokesman David Shea said.

“There have been five successful intercepts in eight attempts.  That’s pretty good for early stage testing,” he said (see GSN, Dec. 11, 2002).

The Pentagon launched the missile denfense competition in 1990 and contracted Boeing in April 1998 to supervise overall development of the project.  Boeing had to choose between one of its subsidiaries and Raytheon in a smaller competition to build the kill-vehicle component.

In July 1998, Boeing employees found a copy of Raytheon’s software test plan on the floor of a conference room, presumably left by accident by an Army official, the GAO letter says.

Boeing reported the incident, but three months later investigating lawyers discovered that Boeing had waited three days before reporting the document’s discovery and had lied about the lag time.  In addition, some Boeing employees had retained a copy of the software for analysis, the letter says.

Initially Boeing wanted to continue with the competition because “either system was sufficiently advanced to permit its selection for further flight testing,” the GAO letter says.

However, Boeing ultimately concluded it could no longer compete in the kill-vehicle competition and withdrew in late 1998.  Boeing fired or reprimanded several employees who had been involved in the incident, and three of them were barred by the Air Force from participating government contracts for up to two years.

The GAO letter concludes that Raytheon had, therefore, won the contract not by submitted the best technology or lowest bid, but by default.

The Defense Department considered an attempt to recoup some of the $800 million it had spent on setting up what turned out to be a defunct competition, but later abandoned the idea, the letter says.

The Justice Department chose not to pursue civil or criminal charges.

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Turkey:  Ankara Wants NATO Patriot Missile Batteries

A Turkish official said yesterday Ankara wants NATO to provide Patriot missile interceptor batteries to Turkey as a defense against a possible Iraqi counterattack to a U.S.-led military action (see GSN, Jan. 29).

“An important part of the security measures in the (NATO) package involve[s] supporting Turkey’s preliminary defense measures,” Turkish Foreign Ministry spokesman Yusuf Buluc said.

The United States has asked NATO to deploy the interceptors in southern Turkey as part of preparations for any conflict with Iraq, according to the Pakistani news daily DAWN.  The United States has also requested that NATO increase radar surveillance over the area and reinforce naval patrols in the Mediterranean, according to diplomatic sources (DAWN, Jan. 30).

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Israel:  Germany Ships Patriots

Germany shipped two Patriot missile interceptor systems to Israel yesterday, the Associated Press reported (see GSN, Jan. 17).  The shipment left the German port of Nordenham and is expected to arrive in Israel within two weeks, German officials said.  Israel signed a two-year lease for the Patriots with Germany earlier this month (Associated Press/Jerusalem Post, Jan. 30).

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British Plans:  Parliamentary Committee Backs U.S. Radar Upgrade

By David Ruppe
Global Security Newswire

An influential British Parliament committee today decisively supported a Bush administration request to upgrade a U.S. early warning radar on British soil for use in the U.S. national missile defense system (see GSN, Jan. 15).

“We have concluded that the U.K. should agree to the upgrade,” according to a report released today by the bipartisan House of Commons Select Committee on Defense, headed by a member of the ruling Labor Party.  Improvements to the existing U.S. early warning radar at the Fylingdales air base are justified and the benefits of approval outweigh the costs, the report says.

However, the committee also concluded that upgrading the radar would not itself enhance British or European security — because there are no immediate plans to deploy U.S. missile interceptors in Europe — and questioned whether the overall missile defense system would work.

Nevertheless, “the factors in favor of that agreement — the importance of the U.K.-U.S. relationship, the improvement to the early warning capability, the opportunity to keep open the prospect of future missile defense for the U.K. and the potential for U.K. industrial participation in the program’s further development — outweigh the arguments against,” the committee report says.

Criticism Persists

British Defense Minister Geoffrey Hoon this month announced a “preliminary conclusion” to approve the U.S. request that would enable the radar to play a major role in an expanding U.S. missile defense system.

Hoon’s announcement provoked considerable criticism in the British press and from a large number of Prime Minister Tony Blair’s own Labor Party members, though from backbenchers, those not holding government office.

A retired senior British defense official, former Assistant Defense Staff Chief Timothy Garden, today warned that the radar upgrade would make Fylingdales a target for potential enemies.

“Enemies intent on using weapons of mass destruction would see the need to take on our infrastructure, of which the ballistic missile warning radars would be a very important and perhaps the most vulnerable part,” he told the BBC, in comments disputed by Hoon.

Garden asserted if the British experience participating in the Strategic Defense Initiative backed by former U.S. President Ronald Reagan was an indication, British costs would greatly outweigh the benefits of further participation in missile defense.

“I think the best estimate was that over the whole project, which spent billions upon billions of dollars, we got about 1 million pounds of business,” he said.

“The U.S. is concerned, just as other nations are, about not letting work go overseas that could be done at home,” he said.

A “Real and Increasing” Threat

The committee report says U.S. efforts to develop a national missile defense system are justified.

“There is a real and increasing threat from the proliferation of ballistic missiles.  The United States is justified in believing that it is a principal potential target of that threat.  It is therefore justified in taking steps to counteract it,” the report says.

Nigel Chamberlain, a missile defense critic at the British American Security Information Council, took issue with the committee’s reasoning.

“Missile proliferation is an undoubted problem but it does not follow that the either the U.K. or the U.S. is under threat from an attack.  I think the threat perception is exaggerated, in part to justify the deployment of missile defense systems,” he said.

“Missile control and verification regimes backed up by intensive diplomacy are, in my opinion, more likely to produce the desired results, even if deployed missile defense systems worked in practice, which is highly questionable anyway.”

The committee acknowledged persistent questions about whether the system might ever be made to work effectively.

“There are still significant technical obstacles to be overcome, and at great cost, before an effective system could be deployed.  But the U.S. has made substantial progress.  In doing so it has so far not caused the international instability which many had predicted,” it said.

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Jordan:  Patriot Systems Arriving in Jordan by Early February

The United States will provide Jordan with three Patriot anti-missile batteries “in a few weeks,” a Jordanian official told Agence France-Presse yesterday (see GSN, Jan. 28).

The missiles, and a U.S. team to train Jordanian personnel, are scheduled to arrive at the “beginning of February,” a diplomat said, speaking in Amman.

The moves comes less than a week after Jordanian King Abdullah told the visiting commander of U.S. forces in the Gulf, General Tommy Franks, that he was interested in buying an air defense system “to control the airspace and protect it against any foreign intervention” (Agence France-Presse/Jordan Times, Jan. 29).

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U.S. Plans:  Pentagon Awards X-Band Radar Contract to Boeing

The U.S. Defense Department has awarded Boeing a $747.5 million contract to develop a sea-based X-Band Radar, the Pentagon announced yesterday (see GSN, July 19, 2002).

The floating radar will be part of the Ground-based Midcourse Defense program, according to Pentagon plans.

Defense officials want a test version of the radar completed by the fourth quarter of fiscal 2005.

Raytheon Electronic Systems, a Massachusetts subcontractor, will be mainly responsible for completing the order (Defense Department release, Jan. 27).

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Jordan:  Officials Say United States Will Supply Patriot System

The United States will send a Patriot missile defense system to Jordan in the event of a conflict with Iraq, the Financial Times reported today (see GSN, Jan. 21).

U.S. troops would accompany and operate the Patriot system, according to a U.S. official.

Meanwhile in Israel, the U.S. embassy said yesterday the Pentagon would withdraw three Patriot batteries from Israel after joint military exercises end there in early February (see GSN, Jan. 21).

“A number of Patriot missiles missed their targets in 1991 and caused significant damage in Israeli urban areas,” said Mouin Rabbani, a Middle East analyst in Jordan.  “It would therefore technically make sense to locate them in the relatively unpopulated deserts of eastern Jordan instead,” he added.

U.S. officials would not confirm the report (Nicolas Pelham, Financial Times, Jan. 28).

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Bahrain:  Country Deploys Patriots

Bahrain has deployed Patriot missile interceptor batteries as a defense from any potential missile threat, Bahraini King Hamad bin Isa al-Khalifa said Saturday (see GSN, Jan. 21).

The Patriots “would bolster the Bahrain Defense Force capabilities to defend the nation with competence and efficiency,” Khalifa told the Royal Field Artillery Unit.

All necessary measures have been enacted to defend Bahrain in the event of a U.S.-led war on Iraq, Bahraini Defense Minister Gen. Sheikh Khalifa bin Ahmed al-Khalifa recently said (Mohammed Almezel, Gulf News, Jan. 27).  During the 1991 Gulf War, Iraq launched two Scud ballistic missiles into Bahrain, where the U.S. Navy’s 5th Fleet is based (Adnan Malik, Associated Press/Miami Herald, Jan. 26). 

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