The Huntsville Times July 9, 2006
Missile Defense chief says system ready; experts note limitations
By Shelby G. Spires
If a North Korean long-range missile is ever launched at the American West Coast, decades of Huntsville missile defense work will be aimed at stopping it.
Between the Missile Defense Agency, Boeing Co. and many subcontractors in Huntsville, the Rocket City supplies 1,200 people doing about 80 percent of the work toward fielding the $50 billion missile defense system that ties advanced radar to interceptor missiles in the ground in Alaska and California.
"I can't imagine there being anywhere else we could perform this work," said Brig. Gen. Patrick O'Reilly, head of the Huntsville-based Ground-based Midcourse Missile Defense Joint Program Office.
But here's the question on many minds, given last week's North Korean test of a long-range missile: Will the Huntsville-developed missile-defense shield work?
Short answer: Nobody knows for sure.
Air Force Gen. Henry A. Obering III, head of the Missile Defense Agency, told reporters last week the complex system of radars and interceptors is ready to take on an incoming missile.
But John Pike, a defense expert who runs GlobalSecurity.org, said that based on test results, the missile-defense system seems limited.
"It can't really take on decoys, and it hasn't been all that stressed in testing," Pike told The Times in a recent interview.
Huntsville born
For more than four decades Huntsville engineers have been developing and testing variations of a missile defense shield to protect U.S. cities from nuclear combat.
But even with Rocket City missile expertise dating back almost 60 years, experts agree missile defense is a difficult, seemingly impossible, challenge.
It's something Dr. Wernher von Braun, head of the German rocket team brought to Redstone Arsenal by the Army in 1950, once said was like "hitting a bullet with another bullet."
O'Reilly likened the complex challenge of detecting and hitting a missile with a missile to the 1940s Manhattan Project that developed America's first atomic bomb or von Braun's 1960s Apollo program to put astronauts on the moon.
"Both are very correct analogies given the challenges," he said in an interview last month.
No margin
Von Braun's "bullet hitting a bullet" description was apt, but perhaps understated given that the two "bullets," or missiles, are approaching at combined speeds of about 20,000 mph.
"The margin for error sometimes is not in the seconds," said Scott Fancher, Boeing vice president and Ground-based Midcourse Defense Program director in Huntsville. "It's in the milli-seconds. It's a difficult challenge."
Since 1999 there have been 12 flight tests of the ground-based missile defense system.
Of those, eight tests were flown against targets between 1999 and 2002 and five were successful intercepts, according to Missile Defense Agency and Boeing figures.
The most recent successful ground-based missile defense launch was a Dec. 13, 2005, test of a new Orbital Sciences-built booster rocket.
The program suffered several setbacks in 2004 and early 2005 when two interceptor rockets did not launch from silos at Kwajelein Atoll.
That forced the ground-based program into what Missile Defense Agency head Obering called "a building year."
One test failed because silo doors did not close properly and another suffered a software glitch.
"We learned from those test results and have made changes and enhanced the testing program," Obering said during a recent visit to Huntsville. "We spent the year restructuring for better results."
Obering added expertise and additional engineers to test programs and shifted about 400 jobs from O'Reilly's office in Huntsville to other MDA efforts as part of the "natural progression of the program," from fielding to testing, he said.
MDA managers hope the beefed-up testing and engineering for ground-based missile defense will lead to successful tests later this year and possibly early next year, O'Reilly said.
North Korea has been working since 1992 to develop an intercontinental ballistic missile. Last week, North Korea grabbed the world's attention by testing at least seven missiles over the Sea of Japan, including at least one ICBM.
The ICBM - assumed to be a variant of North Korea's Taepodong - failed and was destroyed about 40 seconds into its test. Intelligence experts believe the Taepodong-2 variant, if perfected, has the potential to fly more than 5,000 miles and reach Hawaii and parts of Alaska and California.
The current version of the ground-based missile shield has been under development for more than a decade, but major work started in 1998 after North Korea launched a satellite into orbit.
An actual North Korean nuclear-tipped missile launch on the United States seems "highly unlikely," said Victoria Samson, a missile defense expert with the Washington D.C.-based Center for Defense Information.
"You know where the ICBM came from, and, frankly, it would be a last resort for North Korea to launch a nuclear attack on the United States because of massive retaliation," Samson said. "There would be no North Korea if they launched a missile at" the United States.
Samson questioned the reliability of missile defense shield testing because "the Missile Defense Agency uses beacons to track (targets) in flight. That makes it much easier to find and identify the target for an intercept."
When the system is complete, Samson said, the Air Force is supposed to have a network of satellites in place to track the target and help guide the interceptors. The target beacons emit a signal that makes up for the current lack of targeting satellites. "They really can't track them in flight without the beacons, but it's not a good, solid test of the system either, in my mind."
Samson said the $50 billion missile defense program has limitations. "It can't detect nonconventional nuclear weapons such as a suitcase-sized bomb, and it can't destroy an incoming solid-fueled rocket because of the speeds involved," she said.
Pike said the money might be better spent on a ship-based missile defense system that would be highly mobile and able to shoot down a missile as it launches.
The Missile Defense Agency has split its $8 billion-a-year resources between ships, aircraft and the ground-based program, and Obering said ground-based missile defense is the most mature missile defense technology at this point.
The future
The Missile Defense Agency and Boeing are planning a series of improvements to the ground-based system over the next decade, Boeing's Fancher said. "Each block of improvements adds a capability to the missile defense system," he said.
This year new radars, including a giant sea-based floating detection radar, are being added to the system. In coming years, upgraded detection radars and additional missiles will be put in new silos in Alaska and California.
"Also, the program is preparing for a third site, possibly in Europe," Fancher said. "That would give (missile defense) an extended capability."
The ground-based missile defense program is merely a stop gap, Obering said during a recent visit to Huntsville. "What we want is not to be tied too closely to missile silos. We want a more mobile option."
Missile silos can be targets for enemies, Obering said, and the future for missile defense will be upgraded versions of the Patriot missile system and a new missile, today known as the Kinetic Energy Interceptor, that would be easily transportable to nations such as Japan and South Korea.
To MDA's O'Reilly and Obering, the ground-based system is a start, not an end, for missile defense.
Other programs, such as the Patriot missile, are designed to intercept short-range missiles and cannot intercept ICBMs because of the speeds.
"It's not perfect," O'Reilly said, "but it's all we have. There is no protection (for incoming missiles) without it."
© Copyright 2006, The Huntsville Times
