Newhouse News Service November 01, 2004
Missile Defense System Still Inactive a Month After Deadline
Expert speculates delay caused by fear of failure, politics
By Shelby G. Spires
At the press of a button, Army Maj. Gen. John Holly can look down on Fort Greely in Alaska through a fiber-optic-linked camera and a large, flat-screen, color monitor mounted on his office wall in Huntsville.
Holly is in charge of developing the nation's first line of defense against nuclear missile attack, and he likes to see what's going on at the Greely outpost home to the first five missile silos of the Missile Defense Agency's ground-based missile defense system, developed by Boeing Co. in Huntsville.
The five missiles, each tipped with a "kill vehicle," would be hurled toward incoming nuclear-armed missiles at closing speeds of up to 20,000 mph.
The equipment has been ready for activation for almost a month, Holly said, after more than 40 years of development.
Holly said a decision could be made on activating the missile shield before the end of the year. Until then, his people continue to work on instructions and protocols for how the system would be used.
The Bush administration promised the system would be ready to defend the country by Oct. 1.
Some observers have wondered at the absence of any form of ribbon-cutting or other official fanfare at Fort Greely to mark the occasion.
"We have brought the system up to a launch-ready state, and then we brought it back down into a developmental condition," Holly said. "The men and women of this program delivered on the promise made by the internal schedules. It was an internal schedule, not an external one. We set a date. It was an aggressive date."
The indecision has puzzled many defense watchdogs. GlobalSecurity.org's John Pike, who has spent two decades studying missile defense, said he cannot understand why there was a big buildup by the Bush administration toward Oct. 1, but then nothing after Sept. 30.
"I'm kind of confused as to what is going on," Pike said. "The theory was that there would be a ceremony, a ribbon-cutting and perhaps a building would be named for (the late President) Reagan, but nobody held much stock that the system would actually work.
"The Pentagon claims it is ready for use, but my guess is that this is all wrapped up in politics now," Pike said. "The Bush White House has some reason for not going ahead with it."
Holly said the system will continue to grow as more missile fields are prepared and interceptors go in the ground.
The government hopes the missiles will prevent a thermonuclear war one that could be set off by North Korea or Iran, two of the Pentagon's prime suspects for developing or possessing nuclear weapons and the technology to shoot them across continents.
The interceptors require a complex network of radar and other sensors strung across the globe from Huntsville to Colorado to California, to Alaska to Navy ships plowing through the Pacific Ocean.
Rep. Bud Cramer, D-Ala., says he is confident the missile defense system is ready to go.
"I don't know why (Bush administration officials) are waiting on this, other than maybe wanting to wait until after the election," Cramer said. "I feel certain it's going to be deployed soon."
Over the past eight years, the Pentagon has spent about $10 billion to develop the ground-based segment of missile defense and plans to spend more than $3 billion a year for the next five years improving the missile shield in phases.
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Many compare the missile defense costs about $80 billion since 1985, including the ground-based portion with those for such programs as the Apollo moon landings and the Manhattan atomic bomb project. Both were crash programs that developed new technologies and left America with high-tech research centers that lasted longer than the original projects.
Missile defense isn't going to be that way, Pike said.
"It's certainly on the scale of the Apollo program in terms of costs, and it is probably five or six times the cost of the Manhattan Project," he said. "But the government has been working on it for two decades and doesn't have very much to show for it.
"Within four years of the Manhattan Project, we had bombed Hiroshima, and within eight years of Kennedy's commitment to go to the moon, astronauts were on the lunar surface," Pike said.
"Here we are, 20 years later, and it is amazing to me they have been able to eat up an Apollo program's worth of money and have nothing to show for it."
To Holly and others within the Department of Defense, there are many things to show for the money.
There are 20,000 miles of fiber-optic cables laid down for the ground-based missile defense program that link half the globe. And the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers developed new building techniques to work on Fort Greely's missile defense buildings in all seasons.
"The normal construction season there is five months at the most, but we worked year-round by doing things like heating the ground and building temporary shelters over the construction sites," Holly said.
© Copyright 2004, Newhouse News Service
