Global Security Newswire

The Bush administration’s plan to field a national missile defense system by September 2004 has “lowered the bar on the acceptable standards for an effective military system,” a former top U.S. Defense Department official wrote last week in Arms Control Today (see GSN, Sept. 25).

The Missile Defense Agency failed a missile intercept test only six days before President George W. Bush announced his goal for fielding the Ground-based Midcourse Defense System, according to Philip Coyle, former assistant defense secretary for test and evaluation and currently a senior adviser at the Center for Defense Information. Agency officials were surprised by Bush’s announcement and immediately shifted their priorities from developing an effective missile defense to establishing the necessary facilities in Alaska and California, Coyle wrote.

Coyle harshly criticized the decision to field the program before it completes the usual battery of testing.

The system “has not shown that it can hit anything other than missiles whose trajectory and targets have been preprogrammed by missile defense contractors to eliminate the surprise or uncertainty of battle. … The Pentagon’s current missile defense plan marks a radical shift from a half-century of military testing carried out under Republican and Democratic administrations alike,” Coyle wrote. “For the GMD system to work in 2004, it requires the MDA getting advance notice from the enemy — say, North Korea,” he added.

Coyle said that his criticisms are not politically motivated, but rather a reaction to an unorthodox and ineffective procurement strategy.

“A choice must be made: [Defense Secretary Donald] Rumsfeld can either meet a political imperative by October 2004 or build a missile defense system that works. But the technical and operational challenges of an effective missile defense system are such that the Pentagon cannot do both,” according to Coyle (Philip Coyle, Arms Control Today, October 2003).

Meanwhile, Pentagon officials said they have planned as many as nine missile defense tests before the GMD system is deployed in 2004.

“There are six to nine planned Ballistic Missile Defense System flight tests, which include Missile Defense Agency-conducted tests, as well as one PAC-3, conducted by the Army, and one Arrow conducted by [the] Israeli Ministry of Defense,” an MDA official said.

Two GMD booster tests, Integrated Flight Tests 13A and 13B, are scheduled to take place this fall. The Pentagon has planned IFT 13C to be a radar test.

The next scheduled intercept test is IFT 14, which could happen in late winter or spring, according to Coyle.

“Five tests are on the docket, but dates are subject to change,” a U.S. defense official said.

Matt Martin, assistant director of the Missile Defense Project at the Center for Arms Control and Nonproliferation, agreed with Coyle’s pessimistic view of the testing schedule.

“It’s looking awfully tight,” he said (Randy Barrett, Space News, Oct. 6).