First appeared in The Washington Post, June 11, 2002

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The Pentagon has made a decision that threatens to keep the American public and Congress in the dark about how things are going with the Bush administration's high-priority missile defense program.

As revealed in Defense Daily, a defense trade publication, the Pentagon's Missile Defense Agency has decided to classify as "secret" details of targets and countermeasures to be used in all future flight intercept tests of the Ground-Based Midcourse Defense system. Beginning with the next test, now scheduled for late July, the policy will be to withhold specifics about the targets or decoys used.

On its face, this new classification policy seems reasonable. If the Pentagon reveals which kinds of targets it can hit and which it misses, an enemy will have an advantage. Similarly, if the Pentagon reveals which decoys and countermeasures work against this system, an enemy can employ only the most effective decoys.

But the fact is that this program is not at the point where the types of decoys being used have even begun to be representative of the likely enemy countermeasures against missile defense. Up to now, the target cluster has consisted of a mock re-entry vehicle — simulating an enemy warhead — and various countermeasures or decoys. So far, the decoys have been round balloons, which do not look at all like the target re-entry vehicle. The latest test, last March, had three such balloons; all the earlier flight intercept tests had just one.

Some 20 developmental tests (each costing about $100 million) will be needed before the Ground-Based Midcourse Defense program is ready for the next step: realistic operational testing. It may be the end of this decade before such testing with "real-world" decoys can begin.

Thus, the current test program is not giving away any secrets; nor is there any danger of that for years to come. The new classification policy is not justified by either the progress in tests so far or by the realism of the tests.

The Missile Defense Agency denies that it is trying to keep the American public and the Congress in the dark. Nevertheless, it has been moving rapidly to change its classification guidelines so that previously unclassified information is now classified. For example, a flight-test schedule showing dates and the basic makeup of planned tests was published by the New York Times two years ago. By the new standards, this information would now be "secret." Equally disturbing is the agency's new policy of withholding information from the Pentagon's own independent review offices, such as the Director of Operational Test and Evaluation. If independent review of testing progress is stifled, the Pentagon itself will be unable to make reasonable judgments about the program's viability.

Of course, if the intent of the Missile Defense Agency is to prevent unwanted criticism, it could go further. It could make the classification policy retroactive. It could apply it to all missile defense programs, air-, land-, sea- and space-based. It could classify descriptions of flight tests. Finally, it could also classify information used to prepare budget requests for congressional review.

If this were to happen, it would become practically impossible for Congress, the popular press, defense trade journals and the American public to evaluate missile defense development. Defense Department press releases on missile defense tests might become undependable, revealing the good news on successes but using classification to skirt the bad news in failures.

Oversight might not be such an issue if missile defense weren't so costly. Most experts expect the Ground-Based Midcourse System alone to cost more than $70 billion, and the full, layered system planned by the Bush administration to cost more than $200 billion. In today's dollars, this is roughly eight times the cost of the Manhattan Project to develop the atomic bomb. Because of the massive planned expenditures, greater openness and transparency — not less — is what's needed.

Ironically, these new classification policies also will complicate the efforts of the thousands of government and contractor workers involved in missile defense development — at a time when the Pentagon is attempting to speed the programs. They now must protect as "secret" information that used to be unclassified. Computers must be scrubbed, and conducting business over the Internet becomes cumbersome. Computer hard drives must be removed each night and stored in repositories because of the supposedly "secret" information they contain.

Given the monumental challenges in missile defense development and the Bush administration's ambitious schedule, the Pentagon can hardly afford the delays that can come from excessive classification.

The writer was assistant secretary of defense and director, operational test and evaluation, from 1994 to 2001. Currently he is a senior adviser to the Center for Defense Information.

 

By Philip Coyle CDI Senior Advisor pcoyle@cdi.org

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