Missile Defense Failures

This was supposed to be the week that the nation’s missile defense system would begin operation. But the recent failure of the first test of it in two years punctuated what must have disappointed the administration: The system doesn’t appear to be close to ready. Disappointed but not defeated. Despite failed tests in the past and government reports that call the system “rudimentary” and “limited,” the administration pushes ahead with a project that grabs resources from the war on terrorism, which is not being fought with intercontinental missiles.

Recently, an interceptor missile, to be sent airborne from the Marshall Islands, failed to launch and was automatically shut down. A spokesman for the Missile Defense Agency blamed an “unknown anomaly.” Officials from the agency plan to study data from the launch to see what went wrong.

The missile program has suffered before from this sort of difficulty. Under highly scripted conditions – unlike those the system would face in a real attack – missiles have hit their targets five out of eight times. In the last test, in December 2002, the test missile failed to separate from its booster rocket. The current test, which cost $85 million, was delayed four times because of bad weather and radio transmitter failure.

Last year, the Government Accountability Office warned that the Missile Defense Agency was moving ahead with “immature technology and limited testing.” “While doing so may help meet the President’s deadline, it also increases the potential that some elements may not work as intended,” the agency said in a prescient warning. President Bush said in 2002 that he wanted the system running by the end of this year.

The system actually involves 10 separate high-tech systems, including six satellites and ships at sea. Despite poor test performance, the Pentagon has waived some testing requirements to rush the system, which will initially only repel a missile attack from North Korea, into operation. This, despite the fact that intelligence assessments have warned that terrorists trying to infiltrate the United States and obtain weapons are a much larger threat than missile attacks by North Korea or rogue states.

Still, Congress has appropriated more than $10 billion for the missile defense system in the next fiscal year and the Missile Defense Agency estimates costs will run as high as $53 billion in the next five years. The entire system could cost up to $1.2 trillion.

Shortly after a U.S. soldier asked Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld why he and his comrades in Iraq are left to rummage through landfills to find metal and bullet-proof glass to armor their vehicles, further expenditures on this complex and still unproven missile system are an extravagance the United States can’t afford.