Delays Continue to Affect MDA Testing Schedule

By Joe Fiorill
Global Security Newswire

WASHINGTON — The U.S. Missile Defense Agency plans this month to conduct the first flight test of a Lockheed Martin rocket competing to be the booster rocket for the agency’s national Ground-based Midcourse Defense system, which the Bush administration has vowed to deploy one year from now, MDA spokesman Chris Taylor said yesterday.

Lockheed Martin and Orbital Sciences are competing to win the GMD booster contract and Orbital conducted the first test of its version in August (see GSN, Aug. 18), but the Lockheed Martin booster verification test has been delayed.  It was once scheduled to take place before the Orbital test (see GSN, Aug. 6).

In addition to the delay in testing the Lockheed Martin rocket, MDA has also pushed back the next Orbital test from next month to December, according to an Orbital source.  Taylor said that test and the equivalent Lockheed Martin test, designated Integrated Flight Test (IFT)-13a and -13b, will both be completed “before the first of the year.”

The first flight test of Lockheed Martin’s product now comes nearly two months after Orbital’s booster verification test, but delaying the next Orbital test would put tests of the rival rockets back on a roughly parallel schedule.  In any case, Maj. Gen. John Holly, MDA’s manager for Ground-based Midcourse Defense, said in August that the agency would field both rockets at least through 2005 at bases in Alaska and California (see GSN, Aug. 21).

The booster verification tests involve rockets with dummy payloads, rather than actual kill vehicles, and the IFT-13 tests are to involve real kill-vehicle payloads but no attempt will be made to intercept targets.  A subsequent series of booster tests involving actual intercept attempts ― IFT-14a and -14b ― is planned for next year, but the agency has not disclosed when.

The Bush administration has set an October 2004 deadline for deployment of Ground-based Midcourse Defense, a target critics call unrealistic.

Center for Defense Information senior adviser Philip Coyle said today that the latest booster-selection delays should have no significant effect on the overall timeline.  Coyle added, though, that repeated past delays in developing the GMD booster rocket have slowed the overall development of national missile defense.  Originally, the agency tried to use boosters based on a Minuteman ICBM design, but that approach proved unsatisfactory.

“If you go back far enough, there was a point in time in the ground-based program … when the booster development was to have been finished in the year 2000. … Depending on how you do the arithmetic, the booster development program itself has delayed the program for about three years.”

In addition, MDA has canceled a number of flight-intercept tests this year, fueling criticism of the administration’s deadline (see GSN, April 18).  Industry and military representatives indicated this week that MDA appears to be seeking ways to condense its schedule as the deadline for deployment draws closer.

Lt. Gen. Joseph Cosumano, head of the U.S. Army Space and Missile Defense Command, repeated yesterday that Ground-based Midcourse Defense, initially using six interceptors in Alaska and four in California, “will be operational” by this time next year.

An extensive series of tests that goes well beyond booster selection is still required before the system can be deployed in October, and missile defense officials acknowledge that next October’s deployment will provide only a preliminary capability.  Holly said in August that he expects the system as initially deployed to be a “70-percent” solution.

Coyle cited planned satellite and radar capabilities as two key elements that are not likely to be in place by next October.

“The president is determined and the Missile Defense Agency is determined to deploy something.  They may not be able to deploy much, but they’ll deploy something,” Coyle said.

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Agency Web Site Touts Ball Game as Missile Defense Model

By Joe Fiorill
Global Security Newswire

WASHINGTON — The U.S. Missile Defense Agency is using a ball game to instruct Web surfers about national missile defense, but agency critics say the game fails as an analogy of a missile interception and is no fun.

The game involves throwing two “synthetic foam (or equivalent) soft-sided balls” at each other ― one designated “the target missile” and the other “the interceptor” ― to illustrate that “missile defense is very difficult to accomplish.”  The instructions feature diagrams illustrating boost-phase, midcourse and terminal-phase interceptions.

The agency posted instructions for playing the game about a year ago as part of a redesign of its Web site, according to MDA spokesman Chris Taylor, “just for the casual Web surfer.”

“We frankly have thought, as we redesign the Web, ‘Wouldn’t it be nice to put some things out there for a younger audience and people that surf the Web?’”  Taylor said.

GlobalSecurity.org Director John Pike said the simple game illustrates that the United States has been spending far too much on less cost-effective missile defense activities.

“I’m surprised they didn’t have the video game [Missile Command].  As long as they’re having games, that’s a good one,” Pike added.

The game is “silly,” said Union of Concerned Scientists Global Security Program Co-Director David Wright, because the agency’s analogy with missile defense does not hold up.

“The reason that intercepting in ballistic missile defense is hard is not for the reason this simple experiment is hard,” he said.

The game fails to illustrate key issues faced by missile defense developers, Wright said.  For starters, “there’s no guidance on the [interceptor] ball,” he said.  In addition, the shape and size of target ball are known, the target has no countermeasures and the interceptor does not need to maneuver in difficult atmospheric re-entry conditions, Wright said.

“So the actual missile defense problem is in some ways more difficult … than this problem because of all those things, but it’s a very different set of reasons than what this illustrates.  So it seems to me that this little thing that they’re trying to talk about here just sort of misses the point from a physical point of view,” Wright said.

MDA spokesman Taylor suggested the agency created the game in part to keep up with Web site features produced by other U.S. agencies.

“You look at the NASA Web site, and you look at all the stuff they’ve got, and it’s like, ‘Wow,’” he said.

A five-launch Global Security Newswire test of the game resulted in four misses and one midcourse hit that failed to significantly alter the path of the target.

Said GlobalSecurity.org’s Pike of MDA’s bid to spruce up its site, “They’ve got too much time on their hands.  I mean, it’s not even a good game.”

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Former Defense Official Pans U.S. Missile Defense Plan

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).

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U.S. Northern Commander Praises Missile Defense Airship Concept

A senior U.S. defense official last week praised the High-Altitude Airship and described the program as the “most exciting” cruise missile defense system on the table, Defense Week reported today (see GSN, Sept. 30).

Air Force Gen. Ralph Eberhart, commander of the U.S. Northern Command, said Thursday that he was at first skeptical about using airships for missile defense, but he has learned more about the idea and has grown to like it.

Although they could one day be supplanted by satellites, according to Eberhart, the airships offer a viable interim method of detecting small, fast and low-flying cruise missiles.  Under the current concept, the airships would be about 500 feet long and 160 feet in diameter, 25 times larger than the blimps seen at athletic events, Defense Week reported.  Hovering at 65,000 feet, the airships would be able to cover a large expanse of territory and provide missile defense systems with a longer warning time, Eberhart said (Donnelly/Laurenzo, Defense Week, Oct. 6).

The Air Force Research Laboratory is also planning to demonstrate a mirror that would be attached to the airship and used to relay ground-based lasers toward over-the-horizon targets (see GSN, July 25).  Pentagon planners have budgeted about $30 million over three years to complete the demonstration, Space & Missile reported (Space & Missile, Oct. 6).

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Correction

An Aug. 15 GSN story, “U.S. Plans I:  Sea-Based Defense Against Boosting Missiles Could Work, Scientist Says,” incorrectly reported where a study estimated the United States would need to deploy its sea-based missile defense systems to intercept enemy missiles launched from U.S. coastal waters.  The American Physical Society estimated that those systems would need to be “within a few tens of kilometers of the launch location of the attacking missile.”

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