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THE CAMPAIGN FOR THE ACCOUNTABILITY OF AMERICAN BASES (CAAB) |
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THE CAMPAIGN FOR THE ACCOUNTABILITY OF AMERICAN BASES (CAAB) |
FAIRBANKS
Thorough testing will not be conducted on a radar on Shemya Island before its deployment in a national missile defense system, a congressional agency said this week.
Critics of President Bush's plan to launch a missile defense system by late 2004 said the agency's report shows the administration's goal is unrealistic. Supporters said the lack of a radar test shouldn't be used as an excuse to hamper development of the system.
Defense Department officials said a Shemya radar test, integrated with a missile launch, would be a good idea, but they lack funding and time. Besides, nonintegrated foreign and U.S. missile launches will likely provide usable radar test subjects, they said.
The General Accounting Office, Congress' investigatory arm, said in a report released Tuesday that the military should establish an integrated test for the Cobra Dane radar at Shemya's Eareckson Air Force Station in the far western Aleutian Islands.
Contractors for the Missile Defense Agency are adding computer programs to the radar, which was built to watch for intercontinental ballistic missiles coming out of Russia during the Cold War. The new programs will allow the radar to communicate early next year in "real time" with other parts of the proposed ground-based midcourse missile defense system.
Originally, the Cobra Dane upgrades were to enhance the military's North Pacific "test bed" for missile defense. In December 2002, however, Bush said he wanted a working system by late 2004.
Sen. Daniel Akaka, D-Hawaii, said the GAO report, which he requested, indicates Bush is pushing too hard, the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner reported.
"The United States needs a national missile defense system that is effective," Akaka said. "We should not be funding an expensive rush to failure in order to meet an artificial deadline set by the president for October 2004. The Missile Defense Agency has done its best to achieve a goal it did not originally set at a cost of almost $8 billion."
Without an integrated test, the GAO said, the missile agency won't be sure the radar really works.
The report shows that core elements of the system won't be reliable by the time the administration wants them working, said Phil Coyle, an analyst with the Center for Defense Information and a former head of the Pentagon's internal testing office.
Having information in real time, or virtually instantaneously, is critical to the defense system's success, he said. The ground-based midcourse interceptors that rely on the radar data are designed to shoot down an intercontinental missile as it travels through space during the middle portion of a 20-minute arc.
"You might think, 'Well, gee, we've got 20 minutes,'" Coyle said. "But it turns out that from the time you detect the missile and know what you've got, say when it breaks through the clouds, you have very little time, just a couple minutes."
Supporters of the missile defense said the lack of an integrated radar test isn't a serious problem.
The agency will want to know that the radar will work at some point, said Baker Spring, a defense analyst for the Heritage Foundation in Washington. But there's nothing wrong or unusual about trying to make the system work before it has been completely tested, he said.
"We're giving operational capability to a test bed. There will be some concurrency," he said.