Colorado Springs Gazette August 23, 2002
Long-range missle test postponed
By Dan Nowicki
WASHINGTON - A controversial long-range missile defense test over the Pacific Ocean has been postponed for at least another month.
The test, which would have been coordinated with the help of the Joint National Integration Center at Schriever Air Force Base east of Colorado Springs, was postponed Tuesday because of technical concerns. Local military boosters are hoping that the command and control center for any national missile defense system one day will be in Colorado Springs.
The eventual goal is to be able to shoot down a long-range missile fired at the United States by a rogue state such as North Korea or Iran.
To critics, the delay is symbolic of the problems that have plagued the multibillion-dollar missile defense program over the past several years and another reason to question the reliability of the system. But missile defense officials downplayed the significance of this week's setback.
"It's a disappointment, obviously, because we were ready to go," said Lt. Col. Rick Lehner, spokesman for the Missile Defense Agency. "But if you've been around space and missile programs a long time, these things happen."
The plan for the test, which has not been rescheduled yet, is to knock out in midcourse over the ocean an intercontinental ballistic missile fired from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California. It would be the seventh such test since October 1999 and the first of the post-Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty era.
The USS Lake Erie, a Navy Aegis cruiser equipped with SPY-1 radar, was to have taken part in this week's test, which previously would have been a violation of the ABM Treaty, Lehner said.
The U.S. officially withdrew from the treaty in June, allowing for most aggressive missile defense research and development.
The Joint National Integration Center at Schriever will be examining the Aegis cruiser's performance to determine whether the ship can someday play a more significant battle-management role, he said.
As in earlier tests, Schriever will act as the simulated command center and help coordinate the test. Center workers also helped design the "brains" of the missile-test system.
The six earlier long-range midcourse intercept tests have had erratic results. Pentagon officials consider four tests to have been successful and two to have been failures due to technical malfunctions.
Test results for the PAC-3 interceptors, a state-of-the-art update of the Patriot missiles used against Iraq's Scuds during the Persian Gulf War of 1991 that Lehner said is ready for deployment, similarly have been mixed.
The PAC-3s are designed to hit incoming warheads as they get closer to their targets.
This hit-or-miss testing history continues to fuel debate over the reliability of missile defense, for which the Bush administration wants to continue to spend about $8 billion a year.
"Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't," said John Pike, director of GlobalSecurity.org, a defense policy group based in Alexandria, Va., and a missile-defense skeptic. "It goes to the question of whether you want to spend an awful lot of money on a capability that has been known to work on occasions, when the risk of failure is incinerated cities."
The problem that delayed the test seems illustrative of what any new system normally would face and "why I wouldn't necessary bet the country on what they're planning to have deployed 10 years from now," Pike said.
But proponents, generally Republicans, defend the missile-defense concept, saying the Department of Defense largely is at the point of just working out bugs. Testing is never a sure thing since the whole point is "to get it right, and to check the limits of your system," said Sen. Wayne Allard, R-Colo., the top GOP member on the Armed Services Strategic subcommittee, which has jurisdiction over missile defense.
"With each passing year, I get more optimistic about missile defense," Allard said. "Five years ago, my view was, 'Well, we need to develop the technology,' and, today, I think we have the capability."
The Bush administration has aggressively boosted missile defense efforts and is pursuing parallel programs to develop systems that could hit incoming missiles in their early, midcourse and final stages.
Recently, ground was broken at Fort Greely in Alaska on six interceptor missile silos and support buildings that will become the crux of a rudimentary ground-based midcourse missile defense system that could be ready for use in an emergency by 2004.
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