Speaker:  Philip E. Coyle, former director of Operational Test & Evaluation at the Pentagon, and current senior advisor at the Center for Defense Information

Sponsored by: the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation and the Center for Defense Information.

Held: March, 8, 2002, in Washington, D.C.

Coyle:  Thanks very much. I appreciate you all coming, I know you’re all busy and have lots of things to do and could be at lots of other places than here, so thanks very much for coming, and I want to thank John Isaacs for organizing this. I think John does a spectacularly good job with virtually no resources, and I can always consider it an honor and a privilege to be able to do something with him.  So, thank you, John for organizing this.

There was an important story in the Los Angeles Times about a month ago that actually is pertinent — it’s about the war in Afghanistan — but it’s actually pertinent to Missile Defense.  It describes how an anti-Taliban fighter, a Northern Alliance, had hesitated to ask for air support.  And he hesitated because he remembered his experiences 20 years before in the ‘80s during the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.  He learned then that you never knew when or where the bombs were going to hit.  But on Nov. 8 of 2001, he felt he had no other choice.  He was watching al Qaeda fighters massing to retake the northern city of Kanduz, and he told the U.S. Air Force Special Operations lieutenant, “We need some air.”  Within 20 minutes, the Times story explained, a secession of fireballs erupted over an expanse about the size of this restaurant, killing 259 al Qaeda fighters and taking out a command center, artillery, and armored vehicles.  According to the Los Angeles Times, the anti-Taliban fighter said, “You gotta be kidding!”  I think maybe the LA Times lost something in the translation there, but whatever this guy said, the point was he hadn’t expected the air strikes for days.  And those precision weapons were launched from a B-52, 40 miles away.

So that’s the question for National Missile Defense:  can we build a layered missile defense system that will be better, more reliable, and cheaper than the attack operations that we’ve seen be so successful in Afghanistan?  Gen. [Ronald] Kadish, [director of the Pentagon’s Missile Defense Agency] recognized this in his hearing before the House Armed Services Committee on Feb. 27.  Congressman Gene Taylor [D-Miss.] and Congressman [Ike] Skelton [D-Mo.] asked him about the confidence he would have shooting down a single enemy ICBM given a week’s warning, and assuming that we knew where it was coming from.  Gen. Kadish said that in that situation, “I wouldn’t even use missile defense.”  Then Congressman Skelton, who’s from Missouri, joked that he would use a B2 from Whiteman AFB to bomb the enemy missiles before they even left the ground.  And Gen. Kadish said, “It’d be a lot more effective.”

When authorizing the new Missile Defense Agency, [Defense] Secretary [Donald] Rumsfeld described his top missile defense priorities this way.  First, to defend the U.S.-deployed forces, allies, and friends.  Second, to employ an integrated system that layers defenses to intercept missiles in all phases of their flight — that’s boost-phase, midcourse, terminal — against all ranges of threats.  Then, to field elements of the overall system in limited numbers, to provide initial capability in the near and mid-term, which he said was 2004-2008.  He also ordered that the new Missile Defense Agency use prototype and test assets to provide early capability if necessary; to incrementally improve the effectiveness of deployed capability by inserting new technologies as they become available; and to do all this in a flexible architecture, supporting deployment in different combinations over time, and open to international participation.

In briefings, the new Missile Defense Agency also explains that it’s proceeding on this tasking without choosing any single architecture.  This is a very tall order, and no military system we have today can meet the secretary’s criteria.  So, the secretary has set the bar very high for missile defense — higher than it has been set for any other military system.  And I’ve commented in other forums that missile defense is the most difficult thing that the Deparment of Defense has tried to do — more difficult than the F-22 or any Navy ship or helicopter, or the M1 tank with battlefield digitization.  You pick an example, and there is nothing that the Department of Defense has done that is as difficult as missile defense, especially the way that the secretary has laid it out.

Some people have compared the difficulty of missile defense with the Manhattan project to develop the atom bomb, but the difference is that missile defense is being developed without either the urgency of the threat or the constituency of a world war emergency.  And, in many ways, the development of the atom bomb, which I was involved in myself, was more focused.

Some aspects of what the secretary has asked the Missile Defense Agency to do are virtually impossible.  While North Korea’s missile development program has received the most attention as the threat, important members of Congress and members of the administration have indicated that they believe that the real future threat is China.  As you know, the Bush administration is emphasizing boost-phase missile defenses, but the problem is that boost-phase interceptors fired from ships at sea or from land close to Chinese borders can’t work against ICBMs fired from China at the United States.  This is because China is simply too big of a country and you just can’t get interceptors close enough to enable them to hit the Chinese ICBMs in the boost phase — you have to invade China first.  And so by the time the U.S. interceptors could get to the middle of China, their Chinese missiles would be long gone.  You can see this just with high school physics and geometry and geography.

So, boost-phase interceptor defenses are practicable only against a relatively small country like North Korea.  Not that the Pentagon knows how to do North Korea yet either, but in principle, it’s feasible, whereas against a large country like China or Russia, it simply isn’t.  I’ve been surprised that no one in the press has remarked about this.  Congressman Spratt understands it; he brought this up in the same Feb. 27 hearing, and asked Gen. Kadish about it.  Gen. Kadish’s answer was, “Not unless you go to space.”  And he was referring, of course, to Brilliant Pebbles and the Space-Based Laser, which I’ll talk about a little bit more later.

But although Congressman Spratt understands this, other important members of Congress do not; nor does much of the American public.  As a result, boost-phase interceptors are being hyped unrealistically by some as the best hope for a future missile defense system to protect the continental United States from any adversary, including China.  You might say, “Well, what harm is it if we can only build a boost-phase intercept system that only works against North Korea, let’s say, or other small — relatively small — countries?”  But the problem is that some members of Congress think that the Missile Defense Agency funds are going to produce a boost-phase interceptor defense against China, which it won’t. 

In principle, the layered missile defense system also would include a terminal layer, where the enemy missiles would be shot down as they would reenter the atmosphere.  But protecting a country the size of the United States in the terminal phase is so difficult and expensive, that even the most ardent missile defense proponents are saying little about it.  It’s basically the same problem whether you’re going up or you’re coming down: the area you’re trying to defend is very large — it’s very difficult to do.

Well, where do the various missile defense systems stand?  In general, the shortest-range systems like PAC-3 and others I’ll talk about are the farthest along. That’s because they basically are defending themselves; they’re defending a small number of troops, in a small area; they’re not trying to defend the whole United States or a very large region.  Then the mid-range systems like THAAD [Theater High Altitude Area Defense] and Navy Theater Wide are next along in the queue.  And the national missile defense systems are the ones that are the farthest off in the future.

Let me go back to PAC-3.

Last year, at about this time, full rate production was supposed to be in the first quarter of ’02 .  I believe now they are talking about September of ‘02 as what they’re looking for, so the program has slipped a little bit, but not too bad as defense acquisitions programs can go.  They’ve had 11 – I think it is — tests so far of PAC-3 at White Sands; one every three or four months, which is really quite an amazing pace.  A number of defense reporters have reported these 11 tests as all successful, which they have not been.  So-called Developmental Test Number Six, and so-called Developmental Test (actually, there was some operational test aspect of this test) Number Nine that was fired last July, both had problems.  During the one last July, they fired two PAC-3’s:  one hit its target, basically an airplane; and the other one, that was trying to hit a missile, missed.  But then, last October, they had their 10^th test, and it went just fine.

In February of 2002, they had their most recent test, and here, the PAC-3, which was trying to hit a low-flying cruise missile, missed; PAC-2, that was trying to hit a subscale drone, also missed.  A second PAC-2 that was aiming at an F-4 jet drone — this is a full-scale airplane that was carrying a jammer — did hit the target.

The PAC-3 missed basically because of multi-path reflections from the ground radar into the missile.  If you get reflections of radar waves bouncing off a rock or something and they go back into the seeker on the missile, the missile may think that it’s going at the right thing, but if the reflection comes from something other than the real target, the missile will just keep going towards the wrong reflection, and my understanding is that’s what’s happened in this Feb. 16 test.  I saw an article in one of the defense trade journals just yesterday where they said it was a computer problem, and indeed the program intends to fix this problem with a software fix.  But basically, there is always something physical that goes on behind these computer problems, and often the programs don’t describe physically what really happened.

The PAC-2 missed because of [an] arching problem, which occurs periodically in these high power radars in the traveling wave tube, and it happened at the wrong moment and basically caused the radar not to be able to see for a second.  So, now they’re going to have to repeat that test with this new software, and I understand they plan to do that towards the end of this month. 

My former office has pointed out in its latest annual report that the PAC-3 program is going to need to demonstrate the ability to shoot down an anti-radiation missile before they go into full-rate production.  The reason that’s important is the PAC-3 radar is a big radar — it’s quite a wonderful radar , but it’s huge — and so an anti-radiation missile that homes on that big radar has a big target to shoot for.  So one of the things the program is going to have to do is test where they show they can shoot down a HARM-like missile, an anti-radiation missile, which will be a small missile.  They haven’t tried that test yet; obviously, they’ll want to be real sure of themselves before they do, because if they miss, they’re going to blow up a big, expensive radar system.

Let me go onto THAAD.  Last year, full rate production was supposed to have been in Fiscal ‘08; I expect just because not much has happened that that probably has slipped.  You’ll recall that from 1995 to 1999 they had six failures in a row, but then finally later, in 1999, they had two successes, which they were very happy about.  But there’s been nothing since.  They haven’t done another test since those last two successes in 1999.  So, there’ve been no intercept tests by the THAAD program in 2000 or 2001, and the reason is because they’re developing a new missile to take the place of the missile that was used in those early tests.  They have a lot of problems with reliability and performance in that older missile, so they’ve basically gone back to the drawing board and are developing a brand new missile — which is something I support and I think it’s the right thing to do, but it’s part of the reason why I say I think they probably won’t make full rate production by 2008.  It wouldn’t surprise me if it were a couple years later. 

The Navy Area program, as you know, was canceled Dec. 14, 2001, because of a series of Nunn-McCurdy breaches that, as you probably all know, doesn’t let you have problems get too huge with costs and schedule.  It creates a breach, and you have to go back and re-justify the program.  I was surprised that the Pentagon canceled the Navy Area program, and have said that to some of you.  The reason I was surprised is because the Navy still has a legitimate self-defense mission, which is the main reason for the Navy Area program.  And I’ve read that supposedly this was the first program that was ever canceled because of a Nunn-McCurdy breach.  Undersecretary Aldridge has indicated that he’s going to be tougher than his predecessors were in complying with Nunn-McCurdy, and I think that’s terrific; but it took a lot of people, including me, by surprise. 

The Navy Theater program is not as far along as anything like PAC-3.  A year ago at this time, full-rate production for the Navy Theater program was supposed to be in the third quarter of ‘07, now it’s probably ‘08 or ’09.  They’re basically trying to do two things.  They’re trying to do the Navy mission of defending a large battle group or a large area as you might in the Sea of Japan, someplace like that, which is basically a Navy mission.  Then, they’re also looking at using the Navy Theater-Wide program for a sea-based midcourse national missile defense layer.  Those are two different missions.

For the national missile defense layer, however, the Navy Theater-Wide missile isn’t fast enough.  It’s only got about half the speed that it needs either in the boost-phase or in midcourse.  Either way, you need a missile that’s about twice as fast as the one they’ve got.  You need a different kill vehicle:  the light-weight kill vehicle that’s on the Navy system now probably can’t take the accelerations that you need to do in national missile defense, and you need a radar with more power and range than the radar on the existing Navy ships.

So, basically, for the national missile defense mission, the Navy’s going to need a new missile, and a new radar — a bigger radar, a more powerful radar than the one that’s on current Navy ships.  The existing Aegis radars are quite wonderful radars, but they’re not good enough for NMD-class intercepts.  And it appears that while the Navy might be willing to volunteer a Navy cruiser to demonstrate this sort of thing, the missiles have to be bigger — physically bigger, fatter, and taller — and so they won’t fit in the existing launchers on a Navy cruiser.  So before you’re through with the new missile and new launch system and new radar, you probably need some new ships. 

This would be a big development, and could take a lot longer than the regular Navy Theater-Wide mission.  David Wright of Union of Concerned Scientists put out a paper a few days ago pointing out that in the most recent test — the Jan. 25 Navy Theater-Wide test — that the Aries target was too big.  It’s physically a very large target.  It’s also non-separating, so it not only presents a big target to start with, but also presents a big target at the end because it doesn’t split off, there’s no re-entry vehicle that splits off.  And so, he pointed out, that that wasn’t exactly realistic.  Nevertheless, if you saw Gen. Kadish’s testimony at the end of February, he was quite pleased with the result, and I understand because it was the first time that he had been able to testify about a successful intercept in the Navy Theater-Wide program.  While he acknowledged that it was still a very early test, it was the first time that he had been able to report any kind of a success at all. 

With respect to Dr. Wright’s paper, I think he did some very nice work there.  But from my point of view, there is a larger issue than the size of the target:  that is, the prior information that you have to have in order to do missile defense.  It’s a very difficult thing to report on, but basically missile defense only works if you have the right prior information ahead of time so you know what to look for.  You need to know what the missile looks like, because all of this is done with computer software and with sensors that are not as smart as the human brain or as good as the human eyes, and so you’ve got to basically teach that system what to look for.  And you can’t tell it what to look for if you don’t know what it looks like yourself.  So, you need to know what its trajectory is, you need to know when it’s fired, where it’s fired from, where it’s going, and, as I say, what the missile you’re looking for looks like. 

That prior information is the difference between all of the early developmental tests that you hear about in these programs, and the later-to-come operational tests where they won’t have that kind of prior information.  Obviously, in wartime, the intelligence community and the military would do everything they could to get information about what the enemy was doing, but you might not get all of the information you wanted or some of it might be wrong.  You might think [the enemy missile] looked like this and it really looked like that, because they did something different. 

This is a tricky area to report on; it’s difficult for the press and for the Congress to penetrate, but it’s the most important thing from my point of view about the difference between the early developmental tests and the later operational tests that will be coming.  If I throw a rock at you, you have a better chance of hitting it aside if I say, “Okay, are you ready?  I’m going to throw this rock at you now.  Okay, here it comes,” — than if I surprise you, or if I lob at you this way, or I throw it this way, or I throw it underhanded or whatever.  However, I do it [without warning], it makes it harder for you to hit it down.  If I throw a handful of rocks at you, it’s even harder still.  And if I’m throwing rocks at everybody in this room, and it’s your job to stop them all, which is sort of the analogy to national missile defense, it gets harder still. 

Let’s go onto national missile defense.  Last year in my annual report to the secretary and to Congress, we reported that the NMD program office was saying that the IOC for the so-called Capability One (which was a few interceptor missiles able to shoot down only a few missiles from North Korea with no decoys) was to be in Fiscal 2005.  I don’t see anything that’s happened since that would make it anytime sooner, and it probably will be later. 

The most recent tests were what they call IFT-6, which was last July, and IFT-7, which was last December, and those were both repeats of IFT-5, which for all practical purposes was also a repeat of IFT-3 and IFT-4 before it.  For all practical purposes, while there’ve been some minor differences, all of the five intercept flight tests (not counting IFT-1A and IFT-2, which didn’t involve intercepts) have been essentially the same. 

IFT-6 was pretty much successful except the real time hit assessment that was done by the ground based X-band radar prototype incorrectly reported it as a miss, even though it was a hit, which wouldn’t be a good thing in battle, because that would cause you to fire more missiles at the thing you had already hit.  But, from all we know, IFT-7 was successful.

But the issue here is that all of these tests so far have been more or less the same.  When I was in the Pentagon, IFT-6 was supposed to be the test that’s coming up — Gen. Kadish said on March 15 – the test that adds some decoys.  Added to the large balloon that they’ve had in all of the flight intercept tests so far are two small balloons.  So there will now be four objects, plus whatever debris floats along, for them to sort through [in trying to pinpoint the incoming missile].  That test, called IFT-8, used to be what was called IFT-6.  IFT-6 [originally planned to have decoys] instead was a repeat of the earlier test, as I said.  So the objectives of what used to be IFT-6, now planned for IFT-8, are going to take place about two years later than when we thought they would as recently as a year or so ago, when I was in the Pentagon.  Depending on how you want to look at it, the objectives of IFT-8, originally planned for IFT-6, have slipped 20 months in the last 24 months, or 14 months in the last year or so — either way, it’s basically a day-for-day slip rate.  I don’t mean to imply that they made no progress at all in the last year or two; that’s not correct, but it’s not the progress that they meant to make. 

This brings up an issue about the testing rate.  As many of you have reported, there are about 20 successful tests that have to be done — different kinds of decoys at different distances, and all the rest — for each of the phases: 20 midcourse developmental tests, 20 boost-phase developmental tests (if there are Navy and Army versions, it will be 20 of each), 20 terminal phase tests (and if there are Navy and Army versions again, it will be 20 of each), before they get to realistic operational testing.  And, obviously, if each one of those takes a year, then it’s going to take you 20 years before you even get to realistic operational testing. 

Now, to their credit, they have done two flight intercept tests in the midcourse from Vandenberg, the so-called IFT-6 and IFT-7, in 2001.  So, if they can keep up that rate of two tests a year, let’s say, or maybe three, they could do those 20 tests in 10 years, or maybe seven years.  But, if, as has happened, they have to repeat tests, the way IFT-3, IFT-4, IFT-5, IFT-6, and IFT-7 were repeats, because things go wrong, just like it did the other day with the PAC-3 tests (this is going to happen), then that is a test you have to go back and do again to show that you fixed it and that the fix that you did didn’t louse up anything else. 

One of the biggest problems for the Missile Defense Agency is how to keep up the rate of testing so that they can get through the developmental program — forget about the operational test program, which as I say is always much more difficult because you don’t have the same prior information, the same advance information.  Basically, these 20 tests are required to get any phase of national missile defense to about the same place that PAC-3 is today; namely, where you’re getting started on operational testing. 

To have a layered system, that’s an even bigger problem, because for all practical purposes there haven’t been any flight-intercept tests in either the boost phase or the terminal phase, as yet.  All of the tests you’ve seen so far have just been the ground-based midcourse system, where the tests are at Kwajalein.  I think there is a tendency in the press to talk about making national missile defense out of these other longer-range missile programs: ‘We’ll just take PAC-3 and we’ll turn it into a terminal system.  Or we’ll take THAAD and we’ll turn it into a terminal system. Or we’ll take the Navy programs and we’ll turn them into terminal boost-phase systems.’  I think there’s a misunderstanding, because people think where you’re hitting a bullet with a bullet, it doesn’t matter whether it’s a short, close bullet or a long, far-away bullet; you’re still hitting a bullet with a bullet.  People get the idea that you can just sort of schmooze over from the short-range systems to the long-range systems.  But it’s basically a quantum kind of jump.  It’s a very difficult problem.  Lee Butler, former acquisition executive for the Navy, made this point in his testimony a few years ago.  But, basically, there’s been very little testimony about how difficult it is to go from an area or theater mission to a national defense mission.  It isn’t simply like you just sort of move the technology over; it really is almost like starting from scratch with a whole new mission.

To go back to the hearing on Feb. 27, Congressman Taylor and later Congressman Skelton asked Gen. Kadish what the probability would be that we could shoot down a simple, pre-announced North Korean ICBM.  Congressman Taylor put it this way, and I quote: “If the North Koreans were to launch one missile telling you the exact time of day they were going to launch it, and also inform you that there’d be no decoys, no chaff, just one missile, and they told you where you were going to target it, Washington, Los Angeles, whatever — if you had all that information, what’s the probability that you could shoot that one missile down?”  Gen. Kadish didn’t answer that question when Congressman Taylor asked it, nor later when Congressman Skelton asked it again, but he did say that he thought he could do it with test assets in 2004 against, as he put it, a very, very limited activity of the sort that Congressman Taylor described.  Of course, the test bed capability that Gen. Kadish is referring to is the set of interceptors being planned for Ft. Greely in Alaska, and a forward-based radar in Shemya.  That work still has a long way to go also.

Well, I’ve been talking mostly about rocket interceptors, and I haven’t said much about some of the other programs.  I just want to make a few comments about that, and then I’ll stop. 

The Airborne Laser:  last year at this time, full rate production was supposed to be 2008, which was seven aircraft at a little over $500 million apiece, a quarter or a fifth the cost of a B-2 (but I doubt it will come in that low).  About a $6 billion program was reported about a year ago.  Recently, Gen. Kadish has announced, in the hearing he had yesterday and in the one at the end of February, that the first test of the Airborne Laser against a short-range missile target, like a Scud, has been delayed until 2004, and I’ll be surprised if they can do it that soon.

The things that you always hear about the Airborne Laser are: that the laser won’t fit in the aircraft, which is true; and that if it would fit, there’s not enough power anyway to shoot down a missile.  Those are legitimate questions.  In addition, my former office [Pentagon Office of Test & Evaluation], in its new annual report, raised the issue of survivability.  Namely, [the Airborne Laser] has to get close enough to the target to be able to do some damage and then it becomes vulnerable.  They [DOT&E] had some comments about that in the annual report. 

What has not really been talked about, however, is the basic process of the laser.  The Airborne Laser uses dangerous reactive and caustic chemicals.  You basically mix hydrogen peroxide with a bunch of alkaline hydroxides to make a form of oxygen, and that oxygen reacts with chlorine gas, which is also toxic, and that frees up the oxygen to later react with iodine, which is again a dangerous material.  That excited iodine is what produces the laser medium. 

The program has been having some difficulty with this chemistry.  There was an explosion in one of the hydrogen peroxide tanks late in ’99 — August of ‘99.  There are rumors that there has been another explosion since, and so the program is having a lot of difficulty with just this chemical laser.  There’s not a lot understood about chemical lasers, let alone high-powered chemical lasers, and so I expect that the program still has quite a long ways to go. 

I was surprised that the Congressional Budget Office produced a cost estimate for the Space-Based Laser and not for the Airborne Laser.  That may be simply because of the way their tasking was worded … for the report that they did.  But I was surprised because the Space-Based Laser itself is so difficult.  I mean, if you think the Airborne Laser is hard, the Space-Based Laser is going to be much more difficult.  If I were CBO, I would much rather try to do a cost testimony on the Airborne Laser, even though it’s got a tremendous amount of work still to be done on it, and it’s a question in my mind as to whether it will ever work.  Still, it’s much more straight-forward than the Space-Based Laser, which is something else again.  But I guess they did the best they could. 

Another program of interest here is the Space-Based Infrared program, both SBIRS-High and SBIRS-low.  That program also has been slipping.  It has slipped another couple of years just since I left the Pentagon a year ago, and their cost estimate I think went — some of you will know this better than me – from, I think, $10 billion to $23 billion recently.  So they have a huge amount of work to do.  When I was in the Pentagon a year ago, the operational test for SBIRS-High, not -Low, was to be in Fiscal ’07.  We didn’t know when the operational test might be for SBIRS-Low; it was beyond that point — it was beyond ‘07.  And I would guess that all of that has slipped some more.

So, there all still other programs I could talk about, but I think to give you some time for questions, I’ll stop at this point.

Q:  Would you please explain what the difficulties are in moving from short-range theater to long-range systems?  Are the problems that of physics or technology or both, and secondly, what are the difficulties of the chemical laser?  Are those intellectual or technological or both?

A:  The problems in going from short-range systems to long-range systems, national missile defense-class systems, are both of physics and engineering.  The target’s re-entry vehicle isn’t that big, you know?  I mean, it’s this big, and you’re looking at them at tremendous distances.  They’re going very fast — 15, 16, 17 thousand miles an hour.  To get to them, you have to be very fast, so, as I said, with the Navy program they need a new missile if they’re going to adapt, so to speak — which is not even the right word to use — they’re going to adapt Navy Theater-Wide to a midcourse or boost-phase mission, they need a missile that’s twice as fast, and that doesn’t exist, so they’ve got to develop that.  You can say, “Well that’s just a matter of engineering,” but the development of the new booster for the ground-based midcourse system has slipped; I forgot, but by two or three years from when I was at the Pentagon.  And you would think, ‘Well, this is just rocket science,’ but we’ve had trouble with it. 

The intercept becomes much more difficult.  You’re looking at a cold object out in space.  It’s cold because it’s out in space, but you’re not exactly sure how cold.  You’re trying to measure it against a cold background.  Some of that is physics; some of it is engineering.  It’s very hard to calibrate how cold the object is and how cold your sensors are and to know what you’re seeing there.  Again, it’s very hard to visualize this, I think, for humans to visualize this, because if you show me a picture of the reentry vehicle, I know what it looks like.  But to those infrared seekers, they’re just little pixels, or as Ted Postol puts it, “just little blinking lights.”  And it’s hard to tell from those little blinking lights what you’re really looking at.  So, it’s a combination of the distances, which are huge; the speeds, which are very fast; and trying to discriminate objects against a background, which are themselves trying to disappear into that background.

What was your second question?

Q:  Chemical lasers.

A: Chemical lasers.  There’s not been a lot of academic work done on chemical lasers.  Most of what is understood about them is in industry.  There’s nothing wrong with that, that’s fine.  But just understanding the fundamental chemistry and physics of how chemical lasers work is something that still needs a lot of work.  I worked at Lawrence Livermore for many years, where we built high-powered lasers, some of which have not gone so well, as you’ve reported.  They’re huge things that you sat on concrete granite benches, isolated so that when trucks went by, they weren’t vibrated, and it was very tough.  And now you’re going to take this same kind of idea – it’s a different laser medium than what we worked on at Livermore – but you’re going to take this same kind of idea and put it on an airplane where there’s vibration and motion and these caustic chemicals, some of which have to be poured overboard?  The chemicals – this mixture that I mentioned, the hydrogen peroxide/alkaline hydroxide mixture – has to be kept cold or else it will explode, which is why that had the one accident that’s been reported.  It also has to be kept cold or else it has a shelf life and loses its ability to work properly.  So, there’s a lot of stuff that has to be sorted through still here. 

Q:  What’s your feeling on space-based interceptors and this idea that they’re looking at a sort of alternative Brilliant Pebbles sort of program?

A:  Well, Brilliant Pebbles was one of the systems discussed, and as you all know, that’s a system of maybe 1,000 miniature satellites that float around the Earth in a cocoon, and they get a wake-up call when the enemy is about to launch a missile.  Then, they start looking – along with SBIRS satellites – for any missile that might have been launched.  They come down from above and whack into the target, the enemy missile.  The original idea was, I believe, born at Lawrence Livermore when I was there, and the original idea was that you could make them really small, therefore they’re cheap; that you could use off-the-shelf components, therefore you could afford to put up 1,000.  This hasn’t turned out to be the case.  So while this administration is continuing this work, and I expect will continue it because of what Gen. Kadish said in the hearing the other day, it’s going to be very difficult.  If the Brilliant Pebbles satellites end up costing as much as SBIRS-Low satellites, you probably can’t afford to do Brilliant Pebbles, even a country as well-to-do as the United States. 

Q:  The interim system using the tests in Alaska will require X-band radar.  I haven’t seen results from the testing on that…

A:  A little over a year ago, Gen. Kadish and the Pentagon were saying that putting the XBR on Shemya was the “long pole in the tent” – I think you’ll recall that he used that description.  The view that the Pentagon was advocating a little over a year ago was: if we don’t start building this XBR at Shemya, it’s going to delay the whole schedule for NMD.  So, it was the long pole in the tent:  the thinking that if you didn’t do that first, the rest of the schedule was going to slip.  I never believed that construction of an XBR was the long pole in the tent, but that was our official position.  And so you could ask why is it that money for that wasn’t even in President Bush’s first budget?  Why is it that something that supposedly was on the critical path has not even been emphasized by the new administration since? 

I think that they got themselves into a — I don’t know exactly what happened, but my impression is that they got themselves into a fix with the ABM [Anti-Ballistic Missile] Treaty.  If the ABM treaty was going to be a problem, they couldn’t go ahead with the work [on XBR] that you could argue maybe shouldn’t be done under the ABM treaty.  I think in order to stay true to the idea that the ABM treaty was a problem, they decided not to do work on the XBR at Shemya. 

I also believe that there was a period early in this administration where they flirted with the idea that maybe they could do more with SBIRS.  The problem with XBRs is that they’re just spectacular radars, but you’ve got to put them in different places around the world.  If you’re going to defend from North Korea against Alaska, you need one in Shemya, you need one in England, maybe you need one in Maine or Cape Cod or other places.  Maybe the people in England are going to not like having a radar there.  You get into geopolitical issues when you start putting radars around the world.  So, I think they flirted early in this administration with the idea of doing more with SBIRS-Low, of doing the detection job with SBIRS-Low.  But, obviously, with the problems that SBIRS-Low has had, and the delays and cost overruns that it’s had, they’re having to go back now and take a second look at the XBR.  I don’t know if that answers your question.

Q:  The radar itself is not the problem – it’s where to put them?

A:  Yes, I believe they could build an XBR at Shemya.  There’s also talk about putting one on a barge or like an oil platform and hauling it to wherever you wanted.  That’d be expensive, but given the resources, in principle you could do it.  In many ways, I think that the XBR development is the most successful part of missile defense so far, even for short-range missile defense.  These radars are really quite spectacular radars.  But when you get to NMD, where the ranges and speeds and sizes are so challenging, it’s a hard job.  Yes?

Q:  To what extent do you see the Pentagon moving to the parallel testing approach that you recommended for the ground-based midcourse system?

A:  Gen. Kadish has testified that he’s going to do – a year ago he said this, and he’s said it since – that he’s going to do a test every month: namely, a boost-phase test, or a midcourse test, or a terminal phase test.  Not necessarily all of these, but a major intercept test every month.  Basically, he has to do one every quarter because if he’s going to do 20 tests and he’s going to get there in four or five years.  So, his testimony is consistent with the notion of being able to do something by 2004, 2008.  He’s said that they intend to try to do that; it’s just real hard.  It’s just very difficult.  And I think I notice a tendency for them [the Pentagon] to start counting other kinds of tests as (flight) tests now.  You know, I never saw a test I didn’t like, so don’t get me wrong, but these tests are not flight intercept tests.  There’s a tendency now – and you see this in Gen. Kadish’s testimony – to count this kind of test and that kind of test to show large numbers.  Those are important tests, I wouldn’t do without a single one of them, but they’re not all the really tough flight intercept tests.

Q:  Sir, I wonder if you’ve had the change to look at the GAO [General Accounting Office] report that came out this week on the allegations of fraud by TRW?  What’s your reaction?

A: Yes. I’ve read both reports – they’re essentially the same, but I’ve read both versions.

Q:  What do you think? 

A:  I think they basically made Dr. Schwartz’ case.  They laid out what Dr. Schwartz had been claiming. 

Q:  So what’s your reaction to that?  How do you think it should affect the way missile defense is being tested?

A:  It goes back to the point I made before about prior information.  What you saw in the GAO reports was even after the test – 45 days after the test, 60 days after the test – what you saw was that even after the fact, knowing afterwards what happened, as well as before what you were going to be doing, they had a hard time sorting through the signals they had and figuring out exactly what had happened.  So, it reinforces the point I made earlier about prior information.  In the case of the IFT-1A, even having the prior information for 45 days after, it still wasn’t easy for them to sort through what had happened.  That’s the main point I would take from it. Yes?

Q: (muffled)

A:  I recommended the Kodiak launch-site myself when I was at the Pentagon because we could see that there were some engagements that they were never going to be able to do between Vandenberg and Kwajalein.  And for longer-range engagements, engagements of different angles and altitudes and all, there were some engagements they were going to need to do.  In the report that I put out in August, for the employment readiness review that lays out the flight envelope, so to speak, we could see that you weren’t going to be able to get to some of those [engagements] without another launch site.  So, I recommended the Kodiak launch site and would still support it today. 

Fort Greely is a different matter.  Fort Greely is pretty far inland, as you know from having been there, and so you’ve got to launch over populated areas.  And it’s a question in my mind as to whether the Missile Defense Agency will do that.  Fort Greely is different in that they may never be able to actually do intercepts from there.  Now you might say, “Well, why do they have to, if they do it from Kodiak?”  And I would confirm that [question].  If the tests work well from Kodiak, I don’t think you necessarily have to do them again from Fort Greely.  One of the main reasons they want to operate at Fort Greely is because it’s miserably cold there in the wintertime.  The Army has maintained a cold regions tests center there, and practically any piece of military equipment ever made stops working when it gets up there.  So one of the things they will learn from the silos at Fort Greely, if they build them, will be, you know, what happens to those operations in cold weather.  You might question why you put them at Fort Greely at all, since it’s such a miserable place for military operations.  But that’s another matter. 

Q:  I was going to ask you: Why do you continue to use the term “National Missile Defense?”  The Missile Defense Agency as you know says that it no longer applies…

A:  Right, The only reason I use that phrase is to distinguish it from theater or area missile defense.  Now, Secretary Rumsfeld has said correctly, what’s national depends on where you live.  And if you’re defending South Korea from North Korea, or Japan from North Korea, those are missions that we would define as theater missions, or perhaps area missions, even, in South Korea.  But to those countries, they’re national.  But I’m trying to talk about defending the United States as a territory in addition to these other missions.  And so I use the phrase to distinguish the much greater ranges and the larger area that you have to deal with when you’re trying to defend the homeland of the United States.  That’s the only reason.

Q: But do you think it’s disingenuous of the Pentagon to throw these systems all together in the notion of Missile Defense, when as you point out…

(break in recording due to change in tape)

*****

A:  So I read for –the other day where Adm. [Dennis] Blair [commander in chief, U.S. Pacific Command] said that he was for missile defense.  Well, you have to now ask, as a CINC, what does he mean?  Does he mean North Korea, does he mean South Korea/Japan, or does he mean NMD as I’m using the phrase?  So, I think it’s made it more confusing, and I think it’s made it easier for people to smash them all together and think they’re all the same when they’re really not.

Q:  Maybe we should call it Continental Missile Defense.

A:  Yes, yes.

Q:  Seeing as there are so many problems with boost-phase defense, be it laser, or ABL, or the need to get closer to the actual launch site, should the administration, or do you think the administration should focus more on midcourse intercept and perhaps even terminal intercept programs instead of boost-phase?  And I have a follow-up question.

A: Yeah. It’s an interesting kind of thing that’s happening, because for all practical purposes there is no boost phase program as yet, and because it’s going to be very limited, if it ever works.  It’s going to be very limited as to where you can use it anyway. And because there is also no terminal program yet, in a way, the Bush layered system is defaulting to the Clinton ground-based midcourse system.  Now, obviously, the Bush administration hopes that that eventually won’t be the case.  But since they’re not defining what the architecture is on purpose, the single architecture, it makes it very difficult for the developers to figure out where they’re work fits in, let alone people in the press or in Congress.

So, in a way, the Clinton midcourse — ground-based midcourse — segment is the farthest along.  However, it still hasn’t dealt with the issue that the Union of Concerned Scientists brought up over a year ago: how do you deal with decoys.  That’s why this next test will be important with the addition of the two small balloons.  And then the many, many other tests that they’ve got to do.

One thing they’ve got to [test against] is tumbling re-entry vehicles.  We say North Korea isn’t smart enough to do decoys.  I question the premise, but nevertheless, if that’s the case, maybe they’re not going to even bother to spin up their re-entry vehicles.  We have trouble ourselves sometimes spinning up re-entry vehicles.  When they don’t spin up, they tumble.  Well, when they tumble, you get this blink-blink-blink picture on your seeker as [the incoming missile is] tumbling over and over and over again, and that blink-blink-blink looks like other debris and other objects that are tumbling around.  So now it’s a whole other discrimination challenge.  Just one of these tests will be very important.

Q:  I did have a follow-up.  In your opinion, concerning land-based versus sea-based interceptors:  do you have a preference yourself or should there be a mix?

A: I don’t have a preference.  Probably it will always be more difficult to do it at sea.  I mean, the environment is more difficult at sea.  The advantage is you can get closer, although Dick Garwin and others have said you can put a land-based boost-phase interceptor sort of down-wind from North Korea so to speak, on Russian soil, as close as you can get to North Korea, but in the direction that the missiles would be going if they were going to the United States.  The reason he proposes that is, if you are down-wind, you are not on a tail-chase, and it’s as close as you can get without being in North Korea or China.  The difficulty is there are a lot of geo-political issues in that area, and I don’t know how happy China would be with Russian missiles that close to them or North Korea.

Q:  I think you may have contradicted yourself by saying that in some ways the ground-phased midcourse is the furthest along, and the other thing you had said was that it was the furthest out.

A:  Well, I’m sorry.  The short-range missile systems are the furthest along.  Period.

Q:  Sorry?

A: The short-range missile systems are the furthest along, like PAC-3.  I didn’t mean to contradict that in the slightest.  And things like THAAD and Navy Theater-Wide are mixed.  I didn’t mean to contradict that.  When I said that the ground-based midcourse system was the farthest along, I meant of the various segments of the layered system.  So excuse me.  I was not precise in how I spoke, but what I meant was of the national missile defense – I like the phrase “Continental Missile Defense,” – programs, compared to boost-phase and terminal phase, the midcourse is the farthest along of those.  That’s what I meant, I’m sorry.

Q:  Given your expertise for so many years and watching these programs now, what would be your overall recommendation: would you abandon national missile defense because it’s just too hard to do, and stick with the theater-type systems — or what should they be doing at this point that actually makes sense?

A: I think the emphasis ought to be where the threat is greatest.  A little over 10 years ago, in the Persian Gulf, we lost 28 soldiers and 100 or so wounded from Scud attack.  Scuds are out there.  We know that’s a real threat to our troops overseas, and I would emphasize the work on that, I’d put the money there, I’d put the priority there.  I would do that first.

Next, I would do the theater threat, because some of those are out there also.  Joe Cirincione of [the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace] has done some very nice work on that (if you haven’t seen it, it’s worth checking out, I’m sure it’s on their Web page), where he shows that the number of countries having long-range missiles has gone down in the last 10 or 15 years, and the number of long-range missiles that those countries have has gone down. So, he shows that the long-range missile threat has actually gone down in the last 10 years, not gone up.  He doesn’t claim that Scudshave disappeared; to the contrary; and that’s why I would put priority on that threat first.

Q:  If you did get to solve that problem with Scuds, would that be a basis for moving forward on theater and continental missile defense?

A:  Yes, it would help.  I’ll contradict myself again here. I’ve said that it’s a leap from short-range missiles to long-range missiles, and it is.  And some of that you simply can’t learn by working with short-term missiles.  But an awful lot of discrimination work that you have to do – characterization work you have to do — an awful lot of that you can learn from [work in short-range missiles], and to that extent it would be helpful.

Q:  Could you elaborate on what you said before, when you said that you didn’t think that the ABL will fit into the aircraft?  Are you talking about the turret or the laser? 

A:  I don’t think it’s what I think, I think it’s pretty well established in the press that the physical laser that they’re building right now, if they had to make it all go into the airplane, it just wouldn’t fit.  Obviously, they intend for it to [eventually], so if you call up Boeing, and you say, “Hey, Phil Coyle said it won’t fit,” they’re going to say, “Well, that’s ridiculous.  Of course it’s going to fit — we’re going to make it fit.”  I’m just saying it doesn’t today. 

Q:  About a year ago, Israel announced that it had a laser system to work against Scuds/short-range systems.  What’s been happening since?

A:  They’ve done some work on that, and have worked with the United States as well.  We have a Tactical High Energy Laser program ourselves that connects with that.  But it’s very early in the development program.  Again, you have to have the right prior information, you have to know where the missile is, and they [the enemy] can’t make the outside of the missile shiny so that the laser bounces off, so we haven’t gotten to anything that’s close to operational realism with that program either.

Q:  But it is a development program.

A: It is a development program, yes.

Q:  Do you think that lasers are ultimately going to work?  They’ll be strong enough and not easily defeated?

A:  I think it’s a very tough job. I may be biased from having spent too many years in the laboratory working on high-power lasers.  It’s hard to make them work.  Perhaps I shouldn’t put it that way.  At places like Lawrence Livermore, where I used to work, they are making high power lasers work.  So I shouldn’t say they can’t make them work.  But it takes a lot of photons to kill something.  And to do that reliably, so that they’re impervious to counter-measures like reflective coatings, that’s a very tough job.  I don’t expect to see it happen in my lifetime.  I don’t want to say  — it’s hard to get anybody with a scientific background to say — that anything is impossible.  Too often, we’re surprised by what is possible, but I don’t expect to see it happen in my lifetime.

Q:  So for the next 50 years…

A:  Right. (laughter)

Q:  Mr. Madison referred to missile defense as the Pentagon’s largest single program?  Should that be the largest single development program?  Does the superlative apply here?

A:  Depends on how you do the arithmetic.  The CBO put out their report, which you’ve probably all seen.  They said, don’t add up these numbers, because this doesn’t include everything that is going on in missile defense, and there’s probably some overlap in the pieces that we did.  So, don’t add up these numbers.  But everybody did, and it came out to $238 billion, I think.  I think the Joint Strike Fighter is $250 billion, so it’s close.

Q:  It’s $200-plus billion, right?

A:  I don’t know.  So it’s close.

Q:  The current level of funding for development is $7.8 billion requested in last year’s request.  How does that figure in the panoply of development programs in the Pentagon?  Is that the largest single development program?

A:  I don’t know, and it may not be.  I mean, I don’t know what the development effort is for the Joint Strike Fighter, for example.  I just don’t know.  And in fact, that’s one of the arguments.  Somebody could say, “Well, $8 billion, out of $400 billion, that’s two percent.  Is that too much for the United States of America to be spending on missile defense?”  It’s an argument that you’ll hear made about the rate.

Well thanks so much for coming, I appreciate it, thanks a lot.

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