VIII. Farewell to Testing
Government auditors and scientists aren't the only ones anxiously hoping for more realistic testing of missile defense. There has yet to be an unscripted, "end-to-end" test in which all the elements of the ground-based missiles in California and Alaska are run to see if the system can really shoot down an ICBM that is launched without warning and with countermeasures designed to fool an interceptor. "I want to see it happen," a frustrated Rumsfeld declared last year when he visited the new interceptor missiles now in the ground at Fort Greely, Alaska. "A full end-to-end process where we actually put all the pieces together - that just hasn't happened."

The shield's primary military base is outside the little village of Delta Junction, Alaska -- a town that nearly returned to frontier wilderness before missile defense moved in. On a morning when the weatherman talks about minus-something temperatures, I grab a cup of coffee at the Jitter Junction before heading out to the base for breakfast at the Ballistic Bistro. The crew that operates the field's nineteen silos is, like the crew on the SBX, not part of the Pentagon's four traditional services. Instead, government personnel are drawn from National Guard units as far away as Florida -- all of whom are outnumbered by the private contractors buzzing about the site to care for all the high technology.

In a van with an entourage of escorts, we drive past the silos where our ground-based missile defense resides in climate-controlled underground security. The entire field is surrounded by fences, high-tech motion detectors and infrared cameras, which sometimes are triggered by moose. Inside the silo compound, sandbags are arranged at various angles so that soldiers can take cover and return fire in the event of a land invasion. As the van slowly crunches its way around the perimeter, I ask an officer what it was like to see one of these interceptors fly during a test.

"There have been no tests," he says. In fact, the only physical tests of such interceptors have been done out of decidedly warmer fields in the South Pacific and at Vandenberg Air Force Base near Santa Barbara, California, where there's no need to launch the missiles over populated areas. In fact, the missiles at Fort Greely are not even scheduled for testing. "Right now, we don't have that on the books," says Gen. Obering.

Last year, three weeks of heavy rain did what no invading army could pull off: It penetrated Fort Greely's defenses and took out a quarter of the missiles. The silos and the electronics vaults adjacent to them were flooded -- one silo was filled with sixty-three feet of water. Boeing blames the military, the military blames Boeing. According to the Missile Defense Agency, it is not cost-effective to repair the damage. Moreover, it is now considered too dangerous to work near missiles in the undamaged silos. The latest budget has a line in it to start from scratch: The government plans to build a completely new field of twenty missiles.

"Rain," says Coyle, reminiscing about the good-old knowledge-based days. "That's a battle condition that would typically have been tested for."

The cost of rebuilding the system every time there's a malfunction appears to have pushed missile defense into a new status: The most costly procurement program with the least return in American history. "The Manhattan Project cost about $22-billion in today's dollars -- and we got a bomb," says Cirincione of the Center for American Progress. "So far, missile defense has cost more than $100-billion, but there is no set of brilliant people running it. We didn't get the smartest people we know, put them in a desert and say, 'Give us a bomb.' Instead we say, 'Let's find the most advanced defense contractors and give them billions and ask them to build something. There is not a Robert Oppenheimer or Edward Teller or Hans Bethe associated with this. It's just a bunch of contractors and people who administer contracts."

In fact, leading scientists are skeptical if not outright critical of missile defense. In 2003, the American Physical Society convened a study group of top scientists from MIT, Cornell, Stanford, Sandia Labs and Los Alamos to examine the physical reality of shooting down an ICBM in the boost phase, those first few minutes when a rocket is most vulnerable to attack. The scientists called into question the practical physics of all boost-phase technology. They noted that the interceptors we're building are not fast enough to "reach the ICBMs in time from international waters or neighboring countries." They also observed that if the enemy merely shifts from liquid to solid fuels, "which have shorter burn times," it would render any boost-phase interception "unlikely to be practical when all factors are considered, no matter where or how interceptors are based." The Airborne Laser, if it is ever built, "would be ineffective against solid-propellant ICBMs." And for the Aegis to work, it would have to be "positioned within a few tens of kilometers of the launch location of the attacking missile."

Their conclusion: "With the technology we judge could become available within the next fifteen years, defending against a single ICBM would require a thousand or more interceptors." Currently, we have twenty-two.

Other reports suggest that basic operational issues have yet to be addressed. A group of retired Navy and Coast Guard officers examined the SBX last year and concluded that the vessel lacks a "well-trained, experienced crew." What's more, it has three separate leaders who could find themselves at odds during an attack: the master of the vessel responsible for the ship, an operations manager dedicated to the military mission and a security officer assigned to protect the key national asset.

An engineer on the SBX plays down the significance of the report, telling me that the radar unit "is not a Navy combatant and is not built to those standards. It is built to commercial standards, for better or worse, and those are just different from what the Navy does. They intend their hulls to get shot at, and we are really hoping that doesn't happen to us." In fact, the Navy officers brought up that very issue as well, noting the embarrassing issue of security. The SBX is protected by sixteen guards toting .50-caliber machine guns -- not much defense against anything, even a "large fishing trawler which would have the capability to inflict physical damage in an intentional collision."

Another report by the Coast Guard foresees even greater catastrophes. The report frets openly about the SBX's permanent mooring area in Adak, Alaska, where arctic swells exceed "thirty feet for many days" and violent tempests have earned the area a reputation among natives as the "birthplace of the winds." Buffeted by such conditions, the SBX might not be able to hold her position or make contact with her resupply vessel, a situation that "presents an imminent safety threat to the platform, her crew and the pristine environment of the Aleutian Islands." Gen. Obering responded in writing, saying that he had every reason to believe that the SBX can hold its own in one of the world's stormiest seas. The reason for his confidence? The stability and performance of the SBX, he said, was shown to be excellent in various "scale-model tank tests."

• « Previous Page
• 1
• 2
• 3
• 4
• 5
• 6
• 7
• 8
• 9
• Next Page »