Missile Defense flails...

This is actually a real headline.
Why doesn't the small government crowd agitate about this? This has got to be one of the most colossal government wastes of money ever.

Look, I'm all for spenidng money for defense against terrorism and rogue states, but I would rather spend money on 1. defenses that work (special forces, pay raises for the military, other homeland defense stuff like port security); 2. against threats that are a higher priority (suitcase bombs hidden in cargo containers, dirty bombs, etc.)


Missile misses target, officials call it a success

(CNN) --The Missile Defense Agency conducted a missile defense test over Hawaii Wednesday, and while the warhead did not strike the target, officials said they still considered the exercise a success.

"I wouldn't call it a failed test, because the intercept was not the primary objective," said Chris Taylor, a spokesman for the MDA. "It's still considered a success in that we gained great engineering data. We just don't know why it didn't hit."

At 1:15 p.m. (7:15 p.m. ET), a target was launched from the Pacific Missile Range Facility on the Hawaiian island of Kauai, Taylor said. About two minutes later, a standard missile-3 (SM-3), the developmental missile for the Aegis program, was launched from the USS Lake Erie, about 160 nautical miles off the coast of Kauai, he said.

"All of the stages separated and the kinetic warhead tracked the target, but did not intercept the target," Taylor said.

Three previous flight tests were successful, Taylor said, but they used an earlier version of a system to control the warhead's aim and maneuvering. Information from the earlier tests was used for a new design of the system, which was used in Wednesday's test, the Defense Department said.

Taylor said part of the missile's navigation and guidance control did not work in the test, but "we obviously don't know exactly what went wrong."

The MDA and the Navy manage the Aegis Ballistic Missile Defense Program, and Raytheon Missile Systems is the prime contractor for the SM-3 missile, the Defense Department said.

The MDA program came under scrutiny earlier this month from two Democratic senators who said the agency is in danger of getting off track, and its efforts impaired, because of President Bush's order for the Pentagon to begin fielding a missile defense capability by 2004.

Sens. Carl Levin, D-Michigan, and Jack Reed, D-Rhode Island, examined a General Accounting Office report that showed the MDA was starting system integration with "immature technology and limited testing."

Levin said the report showed that the administration's planned missile defense system will not be fully tested or proven to work under realistic conditions.

 

More disturbing is the dumbing down of the testing that has been reported in the past (making the dummy warheads more cognizable to the interceptor and/or eliminating the number of MIRVs altogether).

A take on today's test, and the inherent problems in calling it a success:

war stories
The Pentagon's Laughable Weapons Test
Fire missile. Miss target completely. Success!
By Fred Kaplan
Posted Friday, June 20, 2003, at 11:23 AM PT


It looked like a headline from the Onion, but it was from CNN and the story was real: "Missile Misses Target, Officials Call It a Success." The Pentagon's Missile Defense Agency had conducted a test the afternoon of June 18. A Standard Missile-3, fired from a Navy cruiser 160 miles off the Hawaiian island of Kauai, tried—but failed—to intercept a target missile that had been launched a few minutes earlier from the island's test range. And so it seemed another setback had afflicted President Bush's most cherished military program.

However, the Missile Defense Agency's spokesman, Chris Taylor, saw the test differently. "I wouldn't call it a failure," he told CNN, "because the intercept was not the primary objective. It's still considered a success, in that we gained great engineering data. We just don't know why it didn't hit."

Oh, it's hard to be a satirist these days.

The thing is, Taylor's reasoning is common in the Pentagon, and always has been, for tests not just of the missile-defense program but of all weapons programs.

Officials planning a test usually divide it into several discrete phases. If only one of the phases goes off successfully, and if the others at least yield some interesting data, then the test is marked down as a "success" or, if it was an almost (but not quite) total failure, a "partial success." In the June 18 missile defense test, these phases would have included a) launching the test missile; b) detecting and tracking the target-missile in midflight; c) transmitting information about the target back to control panels on the ship; and d) intercepting the target missile.

The system passed a) through c) with flying colors. Three out of four isn't bad. Call it "success." That's what happened, even though the point of missile defense is to intercept missiles. In fact, the specific aim of this test was to assess a new solid-state engine for the interceptor's guidance system. It now appears that the two missiles didn't collide because the engine malfunctioned. In other words, by any serious measure, broad or narrow, the test was an abject failure, regardless of how the Pentagon grades it.

"This happens all the time," one Pentagon official told me with a sigh. "It's incredible."

Just recently, the Air Force tested a new type of air-to-air missile for its F-22 stealth fighter plane. The missile missed its target by a long shot, but its firing mechanism worked, so the test was counted as a "success."

The problem with this practice is that, when it comes time to decide whether to move ahead on a particular weapons program, an assistant secretary or deputy chief of staff, not having time to study the raw test data, will look at the summary report. The sheet will say, "Eight successes, three partial successes, one failure." That will seem pretty good, and the program will graduate to the next stage of development. At some point, the flaws might get ironed out in the field, but at great cost, not only financial but—if the weapon has to be used on the battlefield in the meantime—strategic and human.

Of course, the Pentagon's standard of success in testing is not entirely ridiculous. In the early stages of a weapon's R & D, especially if the program involves advanced technology, there is real value in learning practically anything about its performance. If one part of the test fails but the other parts work fine, it might legitimately be called a success. However, President Bush plans to start deploying the missile-defense program in the fall of 2004. In order to do so, he formally abrogated the 30-year-old Anti-Ballistic-Missile Treaty. He has requested, and Congress has approved, $9.1 billion for the program next year, and he plans to ask for more than $10 billion the following year. Either the tests should be judged by the standards of an advanced program, or the program should be scaled back to what it really is, despite its advocates' fervent efforts: an interesting but still quite primitive research project.

 

Most tests have not been successful, although they were called, like the recent one, "successes". The ones that have been successful have been fixed--and the defense department has acknowledged this.

Now, even if it did actually work, is it u seful to spend billions of dollars on this to counter the hypothetical North Korean ICBM when other national defnse needs go unmet? I really don't think so.


Star Wars Spending Spree
Billions for Missile Defense, peanuts for anti-terrorism.
By Fred Kaplan
Posted Thursday, November 7, 2002, at 2:58 PM PT


With all the concern about dirty bombs, bioterrorism, and suicide bombers smashing airplanes into power plants, the public has pretty much forgotten about the Pentagon's ballistic-missile-defense program. (Wasn't that some nutty dream of Ronald Reagan's?) So, it may come as a shock to learn that President Bush will spend $7.4 billion on R&D for missile defenses next year. That's twice the sum that Reagan spent on "star wars" in his final year of office—and for a system that remains sketchily defined and technologically dubious, against an unlikely threat that lies years, if not decades, off. Meanwhile, to defend against "weapons of mass destruction" that we all fear might blow up on American streets next week, the administration is spending—well, not quite zip, but far, far less than would be needed for a minimally serious effort, on technology that exists right now.

What's more, Congress has approved this $7.4 billion, for what is now simply called the Missile Defense Agency, without knowing where the money is going. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, who has been an avid MD supporter from way back, restructured the program into five budget categories, responding to the program's broad missions. These are, along with the amount appropriated in the Fiscal Year 2003 budget:

Boost Defense Segment (space-based weapons to destroy enemy missiles just after they've been launched, or "boosted"), $800 million;


Midcourse Defense Segment (weapons based on the ground, ships, and airplanes to attack enemy missiles in the arc of their trajectory), $3.2 billion;


Terminal Defense Segment (ground- and ship-based weapons to shoot down enemy warheads as they plunge to their targets), $1.1 billion;


Sensors Segment (the radar and other systems that warn of, and track, a missile attack), $400 million;


Ballistic Missile Defense System Segment (the testing and communications networks that tie the other segments into a system), $1.1 billion.


(The remaining $800 million is for Army surface-to-air missiles, most notably an upgraded version of the Patriot, that the Pentagon hopes to use in the system.)
However, beyond some vague sub-categorizations, the Pentagon does not break these dollar figures down in any detail—not even in the "R-2 Budget Justification Book" that it provides to the congressional armed services committees. One congressional staff member told me, "The administration has done a masterful job of not providing real detail, not explaining what the money is for. We say, '$3.2 billion for midcourse defense—what does this mean? How much for developing this widget? How much for testing that?' They don't know, or they don't tell us."

Instead, for Missile Defense, the Pentagon has created a "National Team" concept. The team consists of MDA officials and the MD contractors (mainly Lockheed-Martin, Boeing, and TRW). The idea is: Congress gives us a chunk of money; we'll figure out how to spend it once we have a better idea what we're doing. It would be as if the Navy presented a budget item called "Defense of Indian Ocean—$35 billion." A footnote might mention that the task involves aircraft, carriers, cruisers, frigates, missiles, radar, pilots, and sailors, but that the precise details—how many of these things, at what price per item—are still to be worked out. This is not the way the program was managed under Reagan, Bush I, or Clinton. Nor is it the way any other military program is managed, even now.

A little scrutiny of the program would suggest that, despite the accelerated spending, things are not going very well. The Pentagon has boasted of tests in which an interceptor missile has knocked down a mock warhead ("a bullet hitting a bullet"). For example, on July 14, 2001, one of the first of these bull's-eyes, a 55-foot-long "kill vehicle," fired from Kwajalein Atoll in the Marshall Islands, soared to 140 miles above the Earth, homed in on a mock warhead that had been launched from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California, and slammed into it at 15,000 mph, smashing it to smithereens.


However, in that test, by the MDA's admission, the mock warhead had been fitted with a beacon that transmitted a radio signal, making the target much "brighter" for the radar-guided kill-vehicle. The MDA defended this practice, noting that the test was not a simulation but rather a demonstration of principle. Such demonstrations are common in early-stage testing programs. But that's the point. After 18 years and $65 billion, this is still an early-stage program. And nobody knows when it will reach its late stage. The Justification Book runs budget estimates for Missile Defense, as it does for all other Department of Defense programs, out to Fiscal Year 2007. The final column is labeled "Cost to Completion"—in other words, how much more needs to be spent, after 2007, to complete the program. Usually there are numbers under that heading. For each segment of the Missile Defense program, the last column reads "CONT"—short for "continuing." Nobody knows when the program will be completed, or how much completion will cost. And this document is just talking about research, development, and testing. There's no pretense of making estimates for procurement or deployment.

Ever since Sept. 11, few in Congress have felt like scrutinizing a program billed as the ultimate in homeland security—especially since the president has deemed it his No. 1 defense priority. But what makes the monumental vagueness of the administration's Missile Defense budget especially glaring is the contrast with comparable programs in the civil, domestic branches of Homeland Defense—programs designed to detect, track, and intercept chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons brought into this country, or transported to our cities, by car, truck, train, plane, or boat (all easier and cheaper means than launching them on the tips of ballistic missiles).

Such programs do exist, but their funding is miserly. The Department of Energy has a division called the Nuclear Emergency Support Team, which is equipped with sensors—some on vans, a few on helicopters, most handheld—that can detect radiological emissions. But the personnel who staff this team are not permanent; they are on revolving, part-time loan from the DOE's national weapons labs. Before 9/11, these scientists participated in annual exercises. Now they are stretched beyond their limits.

Several of these labs—Lawrence Livermore, Los Alamos, Sandia, and Brookhaven—have developed prototypes of more sophisticated sensors. One of them was deployed in Salt Lake City during the Olympic Games to sniff out biological agents in the atmosphere. A few radiological monitors have been set up, randomly and briefly, at key bridges and facilities in other cities, including New York. But no agency has allocated money to evaluate or coordinate these efforts, much less purchase the sensors in any quantity. The entire budget for radiological detection in the region from New York to Boston totals $400,000—barely enough to do a study of the requirements for a system (which, by the way, nobody has commissioned).

A few specialists, who ask not to be identified, suggest some relatively cheap ideas. For $9 million, 100 officials in each of the 30 largest cities could be investigated for security clearances so they could sit down with DOE scientists and work out the most effective local measures. For $20 million per city, in many cases much less, emergency-management officials and scientists could set up a formal testing program. For $100 million, top weapons-lab scientists—who are currently competing for crumbs—could be brought together for a two-year project to look at existing projects in high-energy physics (say, those involving detection and measurement of very faint chemical and radiological signals) and figure out how to apply the technology to practical, deployable sensors. Many lab scientists are eager to do this work, but nobody's given them the money, much less a plan and certainly not a free pass