Failure to Launch - By Tom Z. Collina

A report by the National Research Council (NRC) released Sept. 11 finds that the U.S. Ground-based Missile Defense (GMD) system deployed in Alaska and California to defend against potential long-range missile threats from North Korea and Iran is expensive and ineffective. To fix it, the report recommends replacing the current system with a revamped, but largely similar, system -- and expanding it by adding a new site on the East Coast, in either New York or Maine.

But given the report's scathing assessment of current GMD missile-interceptor technology, which cost more than $30 billion to deploy, it makes little sense that it calls for building a new system that has some of the same weaknesses as the old one -- and that missile defense supporters in Congress would use the report to help their cause, as they have begun doing.

It should come as no surprise that the current GMD system is a lemon. The system was rushed into operation by the Bush administration in 2004 without adequate testing and has been in trouble ever since. Five of the seven intercept tests that have been conducted since November 2004 have failed, and there have been no successful intercept tests since 2008. Hardly reassuring. 

The 260-page report, which was commissioned by Congress, finds the GMD system's "shortcomings" so serious that it recommends the system be completely redesigned, rebuilt, and retested, with a faster missile booster and heavier interceptor or "kill vehicle" and more capable sensors -- a process that could take up to a decade or more and billions of dollars at a time of tight defense budgets.

The NRC, which is part of the National Academy of Sciences, says that its proposed system of two-stage missiles, stacked AN/TPY-2 radars, and additional interceptors will fix the problems of the old one. But these fixes cannot change the fundamental dilemma that faces all systems that seek to intercept targets in outer space: they need to be able to tell the difference between real warheads and fakes, which no one has yet been able to do after decades of trying. Until this capability can be shown under realistic testing conditions, buyer beware.

In addition to trashing the GMD system, the NRC report -- Making Sense of Ballistic Missile Defense: An Assessment of Concepts and Systems for U.S. Boost-Phase Missile Defense in Comparison to Other Alternatives -- finds that "boost-phase" missile defenses, which seek to intercept missiles before they release their warheads and other cargo, are not feasible. A missile's boost phase is simply too short -- just a few minutes -- to get an interceptor there in time. Far-out concepts like space-based interceptors would require hundreds of satellites and cost as much as $500 billion over 20 years, the NRC's experts estimated.  

As a result, the report's authors concluded that any practical missile defense system must intercept enemy missiles in space, in the "mid-course" of their trajectory. The mid-course approach provides more time for the intercept, but it must confront the "discrimination problem" of telling the difference between real warheads and decoys.

"In short, there is no practical missile defense system that can avoid the need for midcourse discrimination, and the midcourse discrimination problem must be addressed far more seriously if reasonable confidence is to be achieved," the report states.