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Opening
Statement of Rep. Curt Weldon
Chairman, Research and Development
Subcommittee
Hearing on National Missile Defense Program
The subcommittee will come
to order.
This morning, the Military
Research and Development Subcommittee meets in
open session to receive testimony on the
national missile defense program. I want to
welcome my distinguished ranking member and my
good friend Owen Pickett and also welcome
today's witness, Lt. General Ronald T.
Kadish, U.S. Air Force, Director of the
Ballistic Missile Defense Organization.
General Kadish, thank you for joining us
today.
Recently, long time
ideological opponents of missile defense have
attacked the ground-based NMD system we are
now planning to deploy by claiming it will be
hopelessly ineffective. These critics maintain
that simple and inexpensive countermeasures
will easily confuse or overwhelm the system.
These criticisms are difficult to address in
public because of the very sensitive nature of
the technologies and capabilities involved in
defeating these countermeasures. If BMDO
reveals these capabilities, it may compromise
them and allow rogue nations to develop the
means to make their countermeasures more
effective. Yet if BMDO can't address these
issues to members of Congress, the critics get
a free ride and support for the program may
erode.
Consequently, I asked
General Kadish to provide the committee and
other members a classified briefing on how the
NMD program is addressing countermeasures that
rogue nations may be able to deploy. General
Kadish came over yesterday and gave us a
detailed description of a range of
technologies, techniques, and phenomenologies
that I believe will provide a high degree of
confidence that we can defeat the expected
threat both in the near term and and in the
future.
The purpose of the hearing
today is to receive an update from BMDO on the
status of the NMD program, and to explore in
open session, to the extent that we can, some
of the same issues we heard about in the
classified briefing yesterday. I know this
puts you, General Kadish, in a somewhat
awkward and delicate position, so I want thank
you for taking on this difficult task.
I don't want to steal any
of your thunder, General, but I do want to
take a few moments to provide a little more
background for the members of the
subcommittee. The United States has had more
than four decades of experience, both trying
to develop and trying to understand how to
defeat countermeasures. Our military concluded
long ago that effective ballistic missile
countermeasures are costly and technically
very challenging.
In fact, NMD critics may be
half right-some countermeasures may be cheap
and easy. But that does not mean they will be
effective. Anyone who claims they will be does
so on the basis of incomplete information or a
misunderstanding of the NMD program. In
essence, cheaper and easier means easier to
defeat. I would note that, although you wouldn't
guess this from the press coverage, the review
panel headed by retired General Larry Welch
also concluded that the NMD program was on
track and that technologies are available to
defeat the countermeasures threat that the
intelligence community-not BMDO, but the
intelligence community-says we can expect to
face around the middle of the decade.
Could rogue nations get
better at countermeasures over time? Probably,
but those countermeasures will be more
expensive and technically more difficult. And
the NMD program is designed for evolutionary
improvement to address new threats as they
arise.
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