North Korean Missile Attack Probably Couldn't Be Intercepted
July 14 (Bloomberg) -- After North Korea unsuccessfully tested a long-range missile last week, President George W. Bush said that the U.S. would have had ``a reasonable chance of shooting it down. At least, that's what the military commanders told me.''
Former senior Defense Department officials don't share that assessment. ``I would not have confidence,'' said Thomas Christie, who served from mid-2001 to early 2005 as the Pentagon's top testing official. Christie, in an interview, put the likelihood of success at less than 20 percent.
After spending $95 billion -- and amid plans to spend at least $48 billion more -- the program to develop a reliable defense against missiles is years behind schedule and has yet to prove it can intercept a rocket coming from an unknown location.
The ground-based system designed to protect the nation from rogue states such as North Korea ``has no demonstrated capability to defend the United States against enemy attack under realistic conditions,'' said Philip Coyle, an official with the Center for Defense Information in Washington, who held Christie's post from 1996 until 2001.
The additional $48 billion is budgeted for land- and sea- based U.S. missile defenses through fiscal 2011, the Pentagon's Missile Defense Agency said. The agency said the $95 billion figure represents money spent since then-President Ronald Reagan initiated the program -- then popularly known as ``Star Wars'' -- in 1983 to counter the Soviet Union.
Last Successful Test
More than half the planned new spending -- at least $27 billion -- will go to the ground-based system, which currently consists of 11 interceptors in Alaska and California that could be directed to a target by ground- and naval-based radar. The system's last successful test was in October 2002 against a target whose general location was known beforehand. Subsequent tests failed.
In December of that year, Bush ordered a system to be operating within two years. Congressional investigators said in March that directive led to ``management compromises'' that ``prevented fielding'' a reliable system. ``Quality control problems occurred when the program was accelerated,'' said the report from the nonpartisan Government Accountability Office.
The ground-based system, managed by Chicago-based Boeing Co. under a $12.9 billion contract, remains in development. That's a test-and-fix phase in which the objective still is to demonstrate an ability to hit a missile whose general location in space is already known, Christie said.
Raytheon Co., based in Waltham, Massachusetts, makes the warhead that's mounted on each interceptor rocket, assembled by Dulles, Virginia-based Orbital Sciences Corp. Los Angeles-based Northrop Grumman Corp. is developing the system's communications networks.
`We Don't Know'
``We don't know if it is going to work,'' Steve Hildreth, a missile-defense expert for the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service, said in an interview. ``We just don't have the data to have much confidence in the ground-based system's capability to shoot down things like a Taepodong-2,'' the long-range missile North Korea tested July 5 that might be able to reach Alaska.
The U.S.'s successful October 2002 test was followed by two failures that prompted the Missile Defense Agency to slow the program while two major reviews were held and hundreds of ground tests and simulations conducted in an effort to find out what went wrong.
Bush, in his July 7 news conference, said that ``our missile systems are modest, they're new,'' and that ``it's hard for me to give you a probability of success.'' That was a change in tone for the president, who made a robust missile defense central to his strategy during both his White House campaigns.
`Shoot It Down'
``We say to tyrants who believe they can blackmail America and the free world: `You fire, and we're going to shoot it down,''' he said in August 2004, a month after the first interceptor was installed in Alaska.
The next intercept test, tentatively planned for next month, will be the first since a February 2005 failure, and will be ``the most operationally realistic to date,'' Missile Defense Agency spokesman Rick Lehner said in an e-mailed statement. Another test is planned before year's end, he said.
These tests will use almost all the system's components, including new radar and an interceptor missile of the type that would be used in a crisis, he said. As in the previous tests, the target's location will be generally known ahead of time.
The agency also plans in 2008 for the first time to launch two interceptors, rather than just one, against a mock enemy warhead, he said.
`Confident'
Lieutenant General Henry Obering, the head of the Missile Defense Agency, told reporters June 23 that he was ``confident that we could hit a long-range missile that was fired at the United States.'' Lehner said Obering based his opinion on ground tests and technological upgrades to the system, as well as the five successful intercepts between 1999 and 2002 against targets whose locations in space were generally known.
While ``we have all the pieces in place'' to down an incoming missile, David Duma, the Pentagon's acting director of testing, told a congressional committee March 9, ``I cannot tell you with certainty that we can do it yet.''
Duma said that in the event of a launch against the U.S., ``I would certainly hope'' the operators of the missile-defense system ``would put it on alert and try the best they can with what they have. But the testing to date has not confirmed that you could count on that.'' |
