ISSUE AREAS:

CONFERENCE

Missile Defence - Threats, Responses and Projections

University of Bradford - Thursday 18 March 2004

Co-hosted by British American Security Information Council (BASIC)
and Bradford Department of Peace Studies

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The Bush administration and missile defense: the love affair continues.

Summary of Presentation by Victoria Samson, Center for Defense Information.

Some time this fall, the United States will put a handful of missile defense interceptors in the frozen ground in Alaska. Pictures will be taken, backs will be clapped, and missile defense supporters will brag that at long last, the United States has a missile defense system that can protect it against rogue intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) attack. The problem is that the system being deployed this year is following a schedule-driven development timeline. In order to meet President George W. Bush's mandate to field some sort of initial missile defense by the end of this year, the United States is unwisely whisking its programs through development. This rush to failure is creating a missile defense system which offers no defense and will spend billions of dollars in the process.

The Bush administration's fervor for missile defense is rooted in a long history of Republican support for the concept. While the United States has been working on some sort of missile defense for the better part of 40 years, it has been most recently under the auspices of the Republican party that missile defense has seen its budget truly wax fat.

Missile defense cost estimates tend to begin in March 1983 with what has become known as President Ronald Reagan's "Star Wars" speech. In this national address, Reagan announced that he was "directing a comprehensive and intensive effort to define a long-term research and development program to begin to achieve our ultimate goal of eliminating the threat posed by strategic nuclear missiles." That is to say, he was looking into research and development for a missile defense program, albeit one that would comply with the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) treaty. Envisioned as eventually creating an impenetrable bubble that would shield the United States, most of Reagan's Star Wars was written off as being far too costly to be viable.

Yet the idea remained attractive to Republican strategists. In 1994, a Republican representative from Georgia, Newt Gingrich, swept into the speaker of the House position through his "Contract with America." One of the few planks which dealt with national security called for a "renewed commitment to a National Missile Defense." However, under President Bill Clinton, the United States shifted its priorities to theater missile defenses, although it did continue to research the national missile defense system permitted under the ABM treaty: ground-based, immobile interceptors based at one site.

This missile defense reluctance on the part of the Clinton administration would be used against it in the 2000 presidential campaign. At a stop in May 2000, George W. Bush promised that, if elected president, he would push to have the United States "build effective missile defenses . . . at the earliest possible date."

Once his administration came into office, Bush wasted no time in putting his mark on missile defense. Naming Donald Rumsfeld secretary of defense was an indication of the priority that missile defense was going to receive. Rumsfeld had headed up a commission which released a report in July 1998 warning that "concerted efforts by a number of overtly or potentially hostile nations to acquire ballistic missiles with biological or nuclear payloads pose a growing threat to the United States, its deployed forces and its friends and allies." The Rumsfeld report was used by missile defense supporters as evidence that missile defense was warranted by an ominous and pressing threat.

So it was not surprising that one of the first things Rumsfeld did in January 2001 as head of the Pentagon was to reorganize the Ballistic Missile Defense Organization into the Missile Defense Agency (MDA). Besides changing the name, Rumsfeld transformed how the agency charged with developing the U.S. missile defenses would function. Instead of pursuing missile defense capabilities through individual programs, MDA would use the block approach. This would theoretically group all missile defense technologies into blocks depending on which point in a ballistic missile trajectory the weapons were attempting to make the intercept (i.e., during the initial or boost phase, midcourse, or terminal). While this was done under the guise of ensuring cooperation across service lines, it made monitoring spending on missile defense programs extremely difficult since funding requests are now hidden under maddeningly vague names like "Boost" or "BMD sensors".

Concerns about how the efforts of the revamped MDA would comply with the ABM treaty were neatly countered by Bush on Dec. 13, 2001. He announced, "Today, I have given formal notice to Russia, in accordance with the treaty, that the United States of America is withdrawing from this almost 30 year-old treaty. I have concluded the ABM treaty hinders our government's ability to develop ways to protect our people from future terrorist or rogue state missile attacks." Six months later, the United States' abrogation of the ABM treaty was complete: it was rendered useless. With its departure from the international scene went any legal limitations on what the United States could do with its missile defense program.

Having freed itself from what it saw as unbearable restraints, the United States was now free to develop as big of a missile defense program that it wished. So it did. On Dec. 17, 2002, Bush said that he had directed the Pentagon to field an "initial" missile defense capability, using the test-bed at Ft. Greely, Alaska, as a springboard. He declared, "We plan to begin operating these initial capabilities in 2004 and 2005, and they will include ground-based interceptors, sea-based interceptors, additional Patriot (PAC-3) units, and sensors based on land, at sea, and in space." While this mandate was very vague, it still had administration and Pentagon officials scrambling to make clear that whatever would be fielded would be rudimentary at best.

MDA took this mandate and created an internal goal of fielding ground-based interceptors by the end of September 2004. While the exact details have changed often over the past year and a half, this rapidly-approaching deadline has forced MDA to show its hand. Now it appears that nine ground-based interceptors will be fielded in Ft. Greely, Alaska, by October 2004 if not earlier. These will be followed by up to ten more interceptors in Ft. Greely and four in Vandenberg AFB, Calif., by the end of 2005. Funding has been requested for an additional 20 ground-based interceptors, 10 of which may be fielded in the next couple of years at a possible third site. Up to ten sea-based interceptors are to be fielded by the end of 2005 as part of the Aegis Ballistic Missile Defense program. The Airborne Laser, a modified Boeing 747 that theoretically would shoot a laser out of its nose to destroy missiles in their boost phase, has suffered numerous technical failures and therefore will not be fielded as part of this block. Finally, MDA will continue to purchase PAC-3 missiles at a high rate of production.

This determination to field some sort of missile defense immediately has had terrible results. According to a report released last month by Congress' General Accounting Office, "No component of the system to be fielded by September 2004 has been flight-tested in its deployed configuration. Significant uncertainties surround the capability to be fielded by September." And the chief weapons tester at the Pentagon, Thomas Christie, replied in response to questioning while testifying recently to the Senate Armed Services on March 11, 2004, that he was not sure if the system being deployed this year would defend against a North Korean missile attack.

Where is the Congressional oversight which would normally put the brakes on such a horrendous waste of dollars?

It has been stymied by the Bush administration's strenuous insistence upon using "spiral development" and "evolutionary acquisition" to describe how the layered ballistic missile system which is being developed will take shape. These concepts refer to MDA's policy of not setting out any developmental or programmatic guidelines; instead, the technologies are to advance as far as possible and use constant iterations to evaluate their development. At some point, MDA is supposed to sit down and determine whether every program should continue to progress.

Unfortunately, spiral development hides the fact that there is virtually no way to evaluate the programs and has caused much frustration on Capitol Hill, as the refusal to establish any tangible and explicit benchmarks has made it very difficult for Congress to conduct oversight.

Even more frustrating is that, while missile defense has been paraded by administration officials as a shining example of what spiral development can create, officially there aren't any programs actually undergoing spiral development. This is an important distinction because, according to the FY 2003 Defense Authorization Bill, once a program is designated to be undergoing spiral development, it must show its development strategy, test plans, performance parameters, exit criteria, and operational assessment. Furthermore, from 2003 to 2008, the secretary of defense must give a report to Congress by Sept. 30 on the status of each program undergoing spiral development. To date, no such reports have been provided to Congress for any of the missile defense programs.

Congress' limited oversight capabilities might be forgiven if the Pentagon's chief weapons tester, the director of Operational Test and Evaluation (DOT&E), Thomas Christie, was content with missile defense programs' development progress. But he is not. Christie recently wrote to in his annual report to Congress, "Due to the immature nature of the system, models and simulations of the ballistic missile defense system cannot be adequately validated at this time." He notes that MDA has left itself only "very limited time for demonstration" of the system which is to be fielded this year since there have been developmental problems with the new booster rockets. Overall, his concern is that only individual missile defense components have been tested to date, "not end-to-end operational testing of a mature integrated system." Christie has also gone on record as saying that because of these limitations, he does not believe his office has been given sufficient data in order to properly review the various missile defense programs' testing plans. His office is scheduled to deliver a report on the state of the various missile defense programs this summer, which may not derail the Bush administration's planned deployment but could at least cast a critical eye on some aspects of it.

While this may seem to be an arcane bit of turf battle, normally the DOT&E's support of a program is crucial for its survival. The office of Operational Test & Evaluation was created in response to Pentagon waste. The thinking behind OT&E's birth was that an independent assessor could report directly to the secretary of defense about how the weapons programs being developed measured up during operational testing (which is when the technologies are tested under realistic circumstances which simulate the stressful combat environment in which they would be used). This would ensure that weapons systems would undergo rigorous testing before they were fielded so that they could be relied upon to protect troops and work effectively. According to U.S. law, the DOT&E must sign off on a weapons system, saying that it has successfully completed operational testing before it can move into high rates of production.

But MDA has gone full speed ahead with producing interceptors for the ground-based system that is being fielded later this year - right now, it is producing about one interceptor per month - without having come anywhere close to starting operational testing, much less successfully completing it. Using the excuse that this level of production is simply to build a stockpile of interceptors so that testing can be completed, MDA has more or less skirted this oversight restriction.

Which is a pity because some sort of supervision is very much needed. The Ground-based Midcourse Missile Defense (GMD) program, which will commence its deployment this year with interceptors in Alaska, has undergone only a precursory and limited testing. Its developmental testing is highly scripted, meaning that the testers know exactly when the target missile will be launched, what it will look like, where it will be going, and what kind of (if any) countermeasures or other decoys will be used to try to spoof the interceptor. This 'a-priori' information has weighted the test results in favor of the testers. Another way the tests have been rendered artificial is that a beacon is placed on the target warhead, apparently to allow the interceptor to know where to look since the radar which would be used in real life to identify threat missiles does not exist yet. However, the beacon could be placed somewhere else on the target missile, say on the booster rocket, so that the interceptor would still know where to look but would not have all of the discrimination work done for it.

And yet, with all these artificial constraints placed on the GMD testing program, MDA has achieved an intercept in only five out of eight attempts. How administration and program officials can say with a straight face that their limited successes so far equal a dependable working system boggles the mind.

The GMD system has also suffered delays with its booster rocket. During tests, a modified Minuteman ICBM has been used to power the interceptor since the boost vehicle that is supposed to be used in the planned deployment is still being built. In fact, Lockheed Martin was doing so poorly at building the boost vehicle that MDA officials gave a second contract to Orbital Sciences in the hopes that a little competition would spur the program along. Now it seems that Orbital's boost vehicle will be part of this year's deployment. But even with Orbital's relatively successful booster development program, there still has been a six-month delay in the upcoming flight test that will assess how the booster rocket would fare when flying against a target coming out of Kodiak, Alaska (instead of Vandenberg, which is where all of the targets have been launched out of thus far). This flight test delay has the ripple effect of pushing back other scheduled tests, resulting in a schedule which will allow, under the most optimistic of circumstances, for only one integrated flight intercept using the interceptor and new booster rocket before the October 2004 deployment deadline.

The sensors needed to aid with missile detection and tracking are years away from being fielded. A sea-based, X-band radar is being pieced together in a shipyard in Texas. Once it has been built, this 20-story radar will be towed around the tip of South America and eventually positioned off the coast of Alaska. It will improve situational awareness but presently is only intended to help with missile defense testing; and even if it were able to be used to detect hostile missile launches, it won't be ready for at least a year. The ground-based radar which will have to make do in the mean time is Cobra Dane. It is positioned at the tip of the Alaskan Aleutian islands facing Russia. Cobra Dane was created to detect a Soviet missile attack and is not in the right configuration to see if North Korean missiles are coming over the horizon.

Some external early warning systems are being upgraded as part of the 2004/2005 missile defense deployment. This is where Fylingdales comes in. Boeing will spend $111.7 million to sufficiently upgrade Fylingdales' capabilities so that it can be brought into the U.S. missile defense system by the end of 2005. The Fylingdales radar, currently a phased-array radar which has been used since 1963 as part of the U.S. early warning network, will receive an increased discriminatory capability to allow it to identify and track missiles more reliably. Another potential for upgrading is the early warning radar in Thule, Greenland, but that is dependent upon the Danish government's acquiescence. MDA officials tentatively believe that they may upgrade it by 2006.

Less publicized are the problems MDA has been having with the sea-based missile defense it is trying to field by the end of 2005, which centers around Aegis Ballistic Missile Defense's Standard Missile (SM)-3 interceptor. According to the FY 2005 MDA budget request, only up to 10 SM-3s will be fielded, instead of up to 20, because there are problems with the interceptor's guidance control system. The Solid Divert Attitude Control System (SDACS) was the cause of the intercept test failure in June 2003; a follow-up test, held in December 2003, achieved an intercept but used a simplified version of the SDACS. Funding is put aside in this budget request to develop an alternative attitude control system, implying that there may be a fundamental flaw with the SDACS.

The Airborne Laser (ABL) has been teetering on the brink of cancellation for some time, yet somehow it keeps hanging on. Because of what MDA euphemistically calls "program and schedule uncertainties," the ABL will not be included in the 2004 initial deployment as originally planned. Instead, it may be added during the Block 2006 timeframe. A recent Senate hearing released the news that the ABL is projected to have $2 billion in overrun costs, which has pushed back the program's first shootdown attempt from the end of this year to some time next year. In its FY 2005 budget request, MDA asked for $493 million for ABL and indicated that it plans to spend about $3 billion on the project through FY 09. Whether the ABL will still exist at that point still has to be determined.

The final major component of the 2004/2005 deployment is the most advanced portion of the Patriot missile defense program, the PAC-3 interceptor. The PAC-3 did very well during its early developmental testing, achieving an intercept nine times out of ten. However, when it progressed to the more challenging operational testing, it made a mere two intercepts out of seven tries. The program's testing was halted as officials tried to rearrange the schedule to allow for more testing and iron out the faults before increasing its rate of production. But the war in Iraq came along in the meantime and four different versions of the Patriot were deployed, including the PAC-3. The Patriot's performance in Iraq was questionable. The United States is claiming that nine engagements came out of nine attempts. This has yet to be proved (remembering claims from the first Gulf War of a 100% interception rate which later proved to be gross exaggerations). The PAC-3 may have made one ballistic missile intercept; but it definitely made one aircraft intercept, shooting down a U.S. F/A-18 and killing its pilot. Another version of the Patriot, using the same radar as the PAC-3, shot down an RAF Tornado and killed both pilots on board. Yet despite the friendly fire incidents and the lack of clarity as to whether any Iraqi missiles were shot down by Patriot missiles, MDA has ramped up its production of the PAC-3. A contract was awarded in February to Lockheed Martin where $505 million would buy 159 PAC-3s and related ground support equipment.

Overall, $10.2 billion was requested for missile defense programs in the FY 2005 budget documents. This represents an increase of 13% from last year. And looking at the budget request, missile defense spending is now projected to cost a total of $53.1 billion over the next six years - $3.2 billion more than previously estimated. The increase has been partially ascribed to MDA's plans of deploying more interceptors than originally planned and building a potential third site for ground-based interceptors, but those activities cannot fully explain the increase. Every year since the Bush administration has come into office, missile defense spending has seen a serious expansion in funding to the point where it is now one of the costliest Pentagon programs.

One final note: a small yet ominous FY 2005 budget request demands more attention. $10 million was asked for a space-based weapons program. This would be for research into space-based kinetic energy boost phase interceptors, with the goal of holding on-orbit experiments around 2010 and bringing a space-based capability into the missile defense program around 2012. This funding request is worrisome for two reasons: 1) it echoes efforts made over the past three years by the Bush administration to establish space-based interceptors; and 2) if it passes as worded, it would negate the United States' decades-long policy of eschewing weapons in space.

Thus, one constant of this administration is its tenacity. The Bush administration will push on with this year's missile defense deployment to be sure to hold onto a schedule that nicely coincides with the upcoming presidential elections. In order to meet this predetermined deployment deadline, MDA has been forced to cut through most of its required testing and speed up its programs' development cycles. This has resulted in a "rudimentary" defense capability which in actuality provides no defense.