Missile Defense Still on Hold

Wade Boese

Despite deployment of the first contingent of long-range ballistic missile interceptors in Alaska two months ago, the Bush administration has yet to declare its limited missile defense system ready for action. Various military commands that will have a hand in running the system say they are still evaluating the defense and working out its operating guidelines.

President George W. Bush announced in December 2002 that the United States would begin operating a national missile defense in 2004. The Pentagon’s Missile Defense Agency (MDA) set Sept. 30, 2004, as its target date for achieving the president’s goal.

That day has now come and gone, but the system is not yet operational. Still, Major General John W. Holly, who oversees development of the ground-based midcourse missile defense system, told a Washington audience Oct. 14 that MDA successfully met its objective. “We’ve delivered the infrastructure for an initial capability,” Holly said.

In addition to the now half-dozen missile interceptors housed in concrete and steel underground silos at Fort Greely, Alaska, MDA also laid more than 32,000 kilometers of optical cables connecting the missile interceptor site to other key elements of the system, including a battle management command and control center in Colorado Springs and an upgraded early warning radar on the western tip of the Aleutian Islands.

Upon receiving U.S. satellite warning of a hostile ballistic missile launch, the command and control center will help relay information and coordinate activities between the various components of the system that extend over nine time zones. The upgraded early warning radar gathers tracking data on the missile’s flight path that is fed to the interceptor. If all goes as planned, the interceptor’s exoatmospheric kill vehicle (EKV) will zero in on the enemy missile’s warhead in space and destroy it through a high-speed collision.

Pentagon officials outside MDA are now seeking to determine how and whether this infrastructure will work as intended.

Although MDA developed the system and will sustain and upgrade it, the duties of operating the system daily and firing it during a real attack rests on Strategic Command, Northern Command, and Pacific Command. Strategic Command is charged with defending against foreign missile attacks, Northern Command is assigned with U.S. homeland defense, and Pacific Command oversees U.S. military activities stretching from the Pacific Ocean to the Indian Ocean. Some of Pacific Command’s naval vessels are outfitted with advanced radar designed to help track the early flight path of a ballistic missile launched from Asia.

The initial deployment is geared toward protecting against a ballistic missile launch by North Korea, which has not successfully flight-tested a missile capable of striking the continental United States.

The three commands are currently putting the system through a “shakedown.” Holly explained that the shakedown could last through December and involves uncovering any “bugs” that could prevent the system from functioning properly. As part of this process, the system has been brought to the verge of launching an interceptor several times.

Aside from putting the system through its paces, the three commands are also hashing out lines of authority for firing the system. MDA spokesperson Rick Lehner told Arms Control Today Nov. 15 that the various shakedown exercises are contributing to decisions about overarching command and control procedures.

One factor complicating the defense’s future management is that the system will undergo testing at the same time that it is supposed to be operated by the military. This reflects the Bush administration’s “spiral development” approach, which calls for deploying combat systems earlier in their development and then evolving them once they are already in use by troops in the field.

The Fort Greely based interceptors are comprised of a booster and EKV that have not been flight tested together. In the system’s eight total intercept tests, five of which succeeded, a slower substitute booster carried a prototype EKV into space because of development delays plaguing the more powerful booster intended for actual use. The first flight test of an interceptor model mirroring those deployed in Alaska is now scheduled for December following several postponements this year. (See ACT, October 2004.)

A decision to put the system on alert is not tied to the upcoming test, according to Lehner, who said the combatant commands are responsible for making final operational recommendations to Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld.

Some reports exist that the commands, particularly Strategic Command, lack confidence in the system. “The soldiers who are supposed to operate the system say it doesn’t work operationally,” Sen. Jack Reed (D-R.I.), an outspoken critic of the Bush administration’s deployment plan, asserted in a Nov. 17 interview with Arms Control Today.

Still, Rumsfeld has said, “By the end of this year, we expect to have a limited operational capability against incoming ballistic missiles.” In the Sept. 30 presidential debate, Bush also stated, “We’ll be implementing a missile defense system relatively quickly.”

Rep. John Tierney (D-Mass.) told Arms Control Today Nov. 17 that, if the administration declares the system operational soon, the American people will be getting a system that has not been “rigorously or operationally tested.” Moreover, he said the system offers “no defense” against the “most urgent threat facing our country…the prospect of terrorists obtaining a weapon of mass destruction and detonating it on American soil.”

The U.S. intelligence community has assessed that an enemy would more likely use other means than a ballistic missile to carry out a chemical, biological, or nuclear weapons attack against the United States because alternative delivery mechanisms would be cheaper, easier to acquire, more reliable, and more accurate.