Hollow US defense for an empty
threat By David Isenberg
WASHINGTON - The news that North Korean is
preparing to test-fire an intercontinental
ballistic missile (ICBM) for the first time since
1998 is the latest "threat" to roil the
international scene.
Predictably, duly certified
experts have gone public to wring their hands,
intone what a grave menace such a launch
represents, and prescribe solutions. Thus far, the
most ludicrous is the June 22 Washington Post
op-ed by Ashton B Carter and William J Perry, who
were respectively assistant secretary of defense
and secretary of defense under US president Bill
Clinton and are now professors at Harvard and
Stanford universities, who wrote that the
United States should immediately make clear its
intention to
strike and destroy the
North Korean Taepodong 2 missile before it can be
launched.
This is premature, to say the
least, considering North Korea may
not
even have an ICBM. According to DefenseTech, a
leading website on military technology, the North
Koreans have previously launched exactly one
intermediate-range ballistic missile. That
missile, a combination of smaller Nodong and Scud
missiles - went about 2,000 kilometers or so.
Now, US intelligence assumes the North
Koreans have been working on strapping together
more Nodong and Scud engines for an ICBM -
something that can reach three to five times as
far, and hit the United States. But no one has
actually seen the missile. Even how many stages
the mystery missile has is unknown; some folks say
two, others say three.
But, by far, the
most laughable news is the US government
announcement that it is activating its missile
defense system. This, no doubt, is causing the
North Korean leaders to shake - in fits of
laughter. One can only imagine some flunky saying,
"Good news, Dear Leader: the American imperialists
have activated their missile defense system. Now
we can launch."
The activation of the
system is what one can only call a Pyrrhic
readiness gesture, considering the system has a
particularly distinguished record of failures in
its operational tests to date and is still
considered to be in the laughing-stock stage by
most impartial experts.
As most people
have learned in the 20-plus years since the late
president Ronald Reagan announced his Strategic
Defense Initiative in 1983, shooting down an
incoming ICBM even under the best of conditions is
a daunting challenge.
And the US missile
defense system is far from perfect. Phillip Coyle
III, a senior adviser at the Center for Defense
Information and former assistant secretary of
defense and director, operational test and
evaluation, said this in January:
The Pentagon's Missile Defense
Agency has not had a successful flight intercept
test with its Ground-based Missile Defense (GMD)
system for three and a half years. In the most
recent two flight-intercept tests, the
interceptor never got off the ground.
Nevertheless the GMD system is being deployed in
Alaska and California. The MDA plans 20 or 30
more developmental flight-intercept tests before
they will be ready for realistic operational
testing. At the current rate of success it could
take over 50 years before the system was ready
to be tested under realistic operational
conditions.
If spending rises as
estimated by the Congressional Budget Office, US
taxpayers could spend more than a trillion dollars
on missile defense in that period. This does not
include the roughly US$100 billion already spent
on missile defense since Reagan's "Star Wars"
speech in 1983.
Currently, the Pentagon
spends about $8 billion a year on national missile
defense. The ground-based missile-defense
component was over budget by more than $365
million last year and delivered fewer interceptors
than planned without proof they would work,
according to a review by the Government
Accountability Office this year.
Even the
few so-called successful tests of the GMD system
are dubious. According to Coyle, flight-intercept
tests have been conducted under artificial and
unrealistic conditions.
Examples include
prior knowledge by the defender as to the time of
attack, the type of attacking missile, its
trajectory and intended target location, and the
makeup of its payload. No real enemy would ever
knowingly provide such information to the US
military in advance of an attack.
As a
result, while there have been 10 flight-intercept
tests of the GMD system since 1999, five of which
were successful, the GMD system has no
demonstrated capability to defend the US under
realistic operational conditions. In fact, the
system has not successfully intercepted a single
missile in its current configuration.
The
Washington, DC-based Center for Arms Control and
Non-Proliferation put out a news release noting
that the past tests of the system prove an
intercept is feasible only:
When operators know in advance the location of
a single target missile, the date and time of its
launch and its flight trajectory.
When a surrogate booster rocket launches the
missile, which flies at slower than normal speed
in daylight and good weather.
When the target re-entry vehicle is equipped
with global-positioning technology and a radar
beacon to send its position to a surrogate
ground-control radar.
Actually, things are
even worse. According to Victoria Samson, also of
the Center for Defense Information, the GMD
program has nine interceptors on the ground in
Fort Greely, Alaska, and two more in Vandenberg
Air Force Base, California. And the last test
intercept was made in October 2002. The past two
times - December 2004 and February 2005 - the
Missile Defense Agency (MDA) tried to attempt an
intercept, the US rocket didn't even leave the
launch pad. (For the latter, it turned out that
the arms holding the missiles up in their silos
weren't properly built for the salty environment
in which they were fielded, so the MDA is
replacing those components in all the silos.)
Furthermore, Samson notes, the radar
system that is needed to help detect missile
launches, the sea-based X-Band Radar (SBX), is
still undergoing tests outside Hawaii - nowhere
near its home port of Adak, Alaska. The satellite
network being built to track missiles once they're
launched - the Space-Tracking and Surveillance
System (STSS) - isn't planning its initial launch
of two test satellites until next year, with the
goal of getting the system up and running
somewhere around 2012.
And the command and
control system necessary to link everything
together was cited in a recent report by the
Pentagon's Inspector General's Office as having
such poor network security that it very well could
be hacked. That report proved so embarrassing that
the Pentagon subsequently removed it from the
inspector general's website.
However,
there is one bit of good news. Samson said the
program did have significant success in that last
December the MDA held a flight test where the
major goal was to get the rocket off the ground.
That they were able to do.
David
Isenberg, a senior analyst with the
Washington-based British American Security
Information Council (BASIC), has a wide background
in arms-control and national-security issues. The
views expressed are his own.
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