Wall Street Journal
June 15, 2001
Pg. 1
Troubled System Shows Hurdles Missile-Defense Plans Will Face
By Carla Anne Robbins, Staff Reporter of The Wall Street Journal
WASHINGTON -- Before the U.S. can shoot down enemy warheads hurtling through space, it will have to find them. And for that, the Pentagon will have to solve the problems of SBIRS Low.
This little-known plan for a constellation of low-orbiting satellites, scheduled to be launched during the next 10 years, is supposed to resolve what is probably the toughest challenge of missile defense: finding and tracking with pinpoint accuracy complex warheads traveling at 15,000 miles an hour and surrounded by dozens of decoys.
But even as President Bush argues the case for missile defense in Europe this week, there is substantial debate over whether defense contractors can come up with the crucial satellite technology -- especially on the timetable that Congress and the Pentagon are demanding.
"Much of what SBIRS Low is trying to do has simply never been done before," warns Philip Coyle, the Pentagon's chief weapons tester during the Clinton administration who has raised questions about the missile-defense effort.
Warning From the GAO
The Government Accounting Office, Congress's investigating arm, warned earlier this year that there was a "high risk" that five of the system's six critical technologies wouldn't be ready for the 2006 first-launch deadline. The hurdles include coolers to keep infrared sensors at nearly 400 degrees below zero and software to run the system. Perhaps the biggest question is whether SBIRS Low -- the abbreviation stands for Space-Based Infrared System and is pronounced SIB-bers -- will be able to handle its primary mission of sorting out warheads from enemy decoys. A study by the Union of Concerned Scientists, a longtime critic of U.S. missile-defense plans, warns that an enemy can trick all current sensors with simple countermeasures.
"If a country is smart enough to build a ballistic missile, it will be smart enough to figure out a way to trick the system," says noted physicist Richard Garwin, one of the report's authors.
Defense contractors agree that the technical problems they face in building SBIRS Low are considerable, but believe they can be solved. Pentagon officials, meanwhile, say that tricking the system won't be that easy, especially for the so-called rogue states. "We talk to everyone in the intelligence community and people tell us that it's much harder to do" than the Union of Concerned Scientists argues, says Air Force Col. Randall S. Weidenheimer, manager of the SBIRS Low program.
Many Unknowns
The story of SBIRS Low offers a reminder of just how many unknowns remain as the Pentagon tries to push new technologies to perform untried tasks. And like the rest of the missile-defense program, SBIRS Low has suffered from years of wavering support, shifting priorities and politically driven deadlines, all of which has only increased the challenge.
In the past two years, the Air Force's cost projections for SBIRS Low have grown by 50% to $12 billion, an estimate that Pentagon cost analysts say is still several billion dollars too low. Jacques Gansler, a former Pentagon undersecretary for acquisitions, says he was so uncertain about SBIRS Low's real price tag, that last December he refused to transfer the program from the Air Force to the Pentagon's Ballistic Missile Defense Organization -- as Congress has demanded -- until he got a better estimate and assurances there would be enough funding. At about the same time, the Pentagon decided to move back the full deployment of the 20 or so satellites from 2010 to late 2011 to allow for more testing.
Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld privately told the European allies last week that the U.S. could have a very rudimentary missile defense ready in the next two to four years. He argues that accepting some risks, and even some failures, is the only way to ensure that missile defenses get built.
"Most systems are imperfect," Mr. Rumsfeld said in early May, arguing that an imperfect system could still sow enough uncertainty to dissuade an adversary from attacking the U.S. "They need not be 100% perfect, in my opinion, and they are certainly unlikely to be in their early stages of evolution."
President Bush has yet to spell out what sort of system he plans to build, but he has made it clear that his goal is "layered" defenses. That is supposed to increase the odds of success by targeting missiles and warheads throughout an intercontinental missile's average half-hour of flight: in the first three to five minutes after takeoff; in the more than 20 minutes as warheads hurtle through space; and in the minute or so as they re-enter the atmosphere and fall toward their targets.
In the near term, most of the destroying will be done by kinetic kill vehicles designed to smash head-on into warheads in space, or by an energy beam from an airborne laser burning a hole in a rocket soon after it is launched. For these weapons to be able to find their prey, the U.S. will have to build several sets of new sensors to provide what is known as "birth to death," or more piquantly "lust to dust," tracking.
One of the hardest tasks falls to SBIRS Low. It will be used primarily to track warheads in the midcourse, the longest section of an ICBM's flight and the one that presents both the best chance to get off several shots as well as the most difficult tracking and discrimination challenges.
Once a missile's booster rockets have stopped burning, the remaining warhead is cool and dim, making it hard to find in the cool, dark environment of space. Midcourse is also when more-advanced weapons can release several warheads, as well as decoys and chaff, to confuse pursuers.
Since the early 1970s, the U.S. has had an early warning system of high-orbit satellites to detect the hot flames of enemy missile launches. That system can quickly identify where a missile is coming from and predict where it is likely to land -- enough information for an American president to decide how big a retaliatory attack to launch. But the system can't pinpoint the position of a warhead during the eight to 10 minutes after the booster rockets have burned out and before the warhead comes over the horizon and into radar range.
"That's the missing link, ... the Holy Grail of missile defense," says missile-defense skeptic John Pike, director of GlobalSecurity.org, a Washington-based group analyzing defense and space policy. With SBIRS Low, the system should be able to use that extra time to start tracking complex warheads, sort decoys and launch its first shots before missiles come into radar range.
That sort of midcourse precision wasn't necessary in the mid-1970s when the U.S. briefly deployed a missile-defense system armed with nuclear warheads that could destroy targets in space from miles away. After four months, it was declared obsolete against the Soviets' new multiple-warhead missiles and shut down.
Carter and Reagan
The Carter administration started looking for ways to plug the midcourse tracking gap in the hope of being able to monitor enemy satellites but quickly found the design challenges too hard. When Ronald Reagan unveiled his Strategic Defense Initiative, the search took on new urgency. In the early years of his program, when the goal was to stop thousands of Soviet warheads, the Pentagon proposed launching dozens of massive satellites for midcourse tracking.
The first President Bush scaled back that vision. His post-Cold War take on the Star Wars program called for putting in orbit 1,000 tiny "Brilliant Pebble" interceptors designed to smash into enemy missiles soon after launch and in space and scores of tiny "Brilliant Eyes" sensors to do the midcourse tracking. Neither got beyond the research stage.
Under President Clinton, the national missile-defense program lost its White House backing and much of its funding. But the search for a midcourse sensor continued, driven forward by congressional Republicans determined to salvage at least part of Ronald Reagan's dream.
That's when the current SBIRS Low was born. In 1995 and 1996, the Pentagon signed contracts with TRW Inc. of Cleveland and Seattle-based Boeing Co. to build and launch three prototype satellites. But without a committed executive-branch patron, the effort quickly ran into trouble.
The Air Force's top brass paid scant attention, while the other services piled on new requirements for the satellites, from intelligence gathering to monitoring ship and tank movements to predicting the weather and geological mapping. Meanwhile, the Republican-controlled Congress -- convinced that the Pentagon and the White House were at best dragging their feet or at worst trying to kill the program off -- kept adding more funding while demanding that the launch date be moved up.
By 1999, the troubles were undeniable, as the Pentagon suddenly canceled its contracts for the prototypes. As then-Defense Secretary William Cohen explained in a letter to Senate leaders, a demonstration project that was supposed to cost $724 million was already more than $300 million over budget, "behind schedule [and] slipping further."
The senators were furious at what they saw as yet another attack on a favored program. The fury abated somewhat when, six months later, the Pentagon awarded competing contracts, each worth $275 million, to TRW and Spectrum Astro Inc. to design a production-ready system and a way to test it on the ground.
Filling Out the Teams
The SBIRS Low constellation is still seen as one of the hottest projects in a slow satellite business, and the two lead contractors have recruited nearly every other major player in the defense industry for their teams. TRW, which built the first early-warning network, brought in Raytheon Co., Motorola Inc. and Aerojet, a subsidiary of GenCorp Inc. Spectrum Astro, a feisty upstart with 13 years experience building research-and-development prototypes, allied itself with Northrop Grumman Corp., Boeing and Lockheed Martin Corp.
With the deadline for awarding the production contract still more than a year away, the two teams are wary of giving up what they say is competition-sensitive information. They decline to show any models or hardware under construction, and both are quick to point out that drawings of SBIRS Low satellites emblazoning briefing books and screen savers are simply "artists' concepts."
Both also insist that the program's critics have overestimated the difficulties involved. "There's nothing here that has to be invented, the challenge is all engineering, making it work and making it work for a long time," argues W. David Thompson, president and chief executive of Spectrum Astro. His competitor, Patrick Caruana, vice president and SBIRS Low program manager for TRW, agrees: "There's a lot of engineering experience going into this. I don't see anything that can't be solved."
According to Air Force officials, the No. 1 technical challenge is the question of how to keep the sensors cold enough to do their job. If SBIRS Low is going to detect the scant heat put off by a faraway warhead speeding through space, its sensors will have to be kept much colder than its prey so it can pick up any difference in temperature. If the satellites were just going to be in orbit for a year, that could be easily done with a tank of super-cold gas. The plan however is to keep SBIRS Low in orbit for a decade, and any tank that could last that long would be far too large to loft into space.
Meanwhile, building a reliable refrigeration unit that throws off almost no heat or vibration, uses very little power and can last for that many years has confounded several generations of designers. "We have the refrigerator working in the lab right now, and we've gotten down to the temperature. The question is how long can we make it last," says Mr. Thompson.
Critics have also raised questions about the system's ability to share information between satellites, many traveling in different planes. The task has been likened to two baseball fans looking through soda straws to find a fly ball and together guiding a blind outfielder to make the catch.
The 2006 first-launch date is another gamble. With the prototype program canceled, that will be the first time the SBIRS Low technology will actually be tested in space.
For outside critics, though, the most daunting unknown is whether SBIRS Low will be able to handle the challenge of sifting through decoys to find real warheads. The study by the Union of Concerned Scientists details a host of tricks it says would be available even to a less-than-sophisticated adversary. Among those are replica decoys designed to look and behave like a warhead, and so-called antisimulation, in which a warhead is disguised to mimic the decoys that surround it.
In one scenario, a warhead could be concealed in a large, balloon coated with metal to reflect radar signals. At the same time, a number of similarly shaped decoy balloons would be deployed with small heaters inside or a special external coating to reflect the sun's rays and mimic the heat of the warhead balloon to trick SBIRS Low's infrared sensors. As a sign of how much information is readily available to a determined adversary, the report lists 10 different coatings that could be used, and the level of heat they would emit. "There's nothing classified here. ... This is all just basic physics," says Lisbeth Gronlund, another of the report's authors.
Pentagon officials say government scientists have tested the group's claims and that their system of satellites and advanced radar, as well as sensors on the interceptor, can together handle most of the challenges of distinguishing between decoy and warhead. The rest of the tricks, they argue, are simply too hard to build for the sort of rogue states the U.S. is planning to defend against.
