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Pentagon report: 'Limited capability' to thwart N. Korean missile
President Bush's fledgling missile defense system should provide a limited capability to thwart a North Korean missile attack, the Pentagon's top weapons tester said in a report made available Wednesday.
Oh. Well. If it's not 100 percent effective we shouldn't have it, right?
A system "testbed" put together by Boeing Co. "should have some limited capability to defend against a threat missile from North Korea," Thomas Christie, the Pentagon's director of operational testing, said in his annual report to Congress on top U.S. weapon programs. "Ground testing has improved our confidence that military operators could exploit any inherent capability that may exist in the testbed, if needed in an emergency," he wrote. He said it was not possible to estimate the system's capability with "high confidence" because of a lack of flight testing of the Pentagon's costliest weapons program. But Philip Coyle, Christie's predecessor as the Pentagon's top weapons tester and now an adviser to the private Center for Defense Information, said it was not even possible to estimate with "low confidence." The interceptor missiles "have no demonstrated capability to defend against a real attack because they have only been tested with artificial targeting aids, with location beacons onboard the target and with advance information about the attack that no enemy would provide," Coyle said by email. Since October 1999, the interceptors have hit their targets in five of eight highly scripted flight tests.

Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has delayed a decision to put the system on alert. Bush had initially planned to do so by the end of last month. The first eight interceptor rockets were installed in silos last year -- six at Fort Greely, Alaska, and two at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California. Christie's analysis preceded the December 15 test failure of what was to have been the first full flight test of the interceptor, designed to deliver a "kill vehicle" that collides with enemy warheads to pulverize them. Last week, the head of the Pentagon's Missile Defense Agency, Lt. Gen. Henry Obering, blamed the failure on a "very minor" software glitch that he said could be easily fixed.

The Pentagon plans to spend roughly $10 billion a year for the next six years on a restructured drive to protect against ballistic missiles carrying warheads that could be tipped with chemical, nuclear or biological warheads. Christie said tests so far had demonstrated the system's "basic functionality." Boeing is the prime contractor for the ground-based leg designed to knock out warheads in space. Northrop Grumman Corp. handles the command-and-control system. Raytheon Co. builds the kill vehicle. Lockheed Martin Corp. and Orbital Sciences Corp. make the booster rockets.
Posted by: tipper 2005-01-23
http://www.rantburg.com/poparticle.php?ID=54446