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U.S. Plans: Navy Theater Defense System Canceled The U.S. Defense Department Saturday canceled its Navy missile defense development program due to poor performance and budget overruns. “It’s unfortunate we’ve reached this point,” said Edward Aldridge, the Pentagon’s acquisition chief. The cancellation of the program came one day after U.S. President George W. Bush announced the United States would leave the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty to have greater freedom to conduct missile defense tests (see GSN, Dec. 13). The Bush administration had said one of the key reasons why the United States pulled out of the treaty was to be able to test a sea-based defense system. The program, called Area Missile Defense, was designed to protect U.S. Navy ships and ports against attacks from missiles and manned aircraft, according to the Washington Post. The system, which was scheduled to be deployed in two years, has cost $2.8 billion since the early 1990s, the Post reported. The Area Missile Defense system was one of the most advanced of the theater defense systems, according to Phil Coyle, former head of the Pentagon’s office of weapons testing and evaluation. He said development of theater defense systems, which are meant to defend against shorter-range missiles, was far ahead of plans for a national missile defense system, which would defend against long-range missiles. “And so for one of the shortest-range systems to be canceled is not a good sign,” Coyle said. “You have to consider this a very serious setback for missile defense programs, because it shows that even the simple stuff is difficult,” said Joseph Cirincione, missile defense expert at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace (Ricks/Mufson, Washington Post, Dec. 16). A major technical flaw in the system was that its ship-based targeting computers did not work well with the Aegis radar systems on missile cruisers, according to the New York Times. The radars are designed to track aircraft, which are larger and slower than missiles. The Navy had been experimenting with new computer systems that could have enabled a ship to receive information from several different sensors, such as satellites and airplanes, the Times reported. The only way the Pentagon could have salvaged the program, according to Congressional rules, was to have certified that it was essential to national security, that costs could be brought down and that there were no other alternatives, the Times reported. Senior Pentagon officials decided that they could not make that case. The cancellation of the Area Missile Defense program will allow the Defense Department to spend more money on developing ship-based missile defenses against longer-range missiles, officials said. Such programs are designed to shoot down missiles soon after launch or while up in the atmosphere, according to the Times. “This is a seriously flawed decision,” said Frank Gaffney, president of the Center for Security Policy. “Everybody understands we have to have missile protection for our carrier battle groups and marines and other forward elements,” Gaffney said. “This is not a way to find resources” (James Dao, New York Times, Dec. 16).
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