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| March 23, 2000 |
| March 23, 2000 |
Missile Defense Update
Colonel Daniel Smith, USA (Ret.), Chief of Research, dsmith@cdi.org
The race against ourselves to field a National Missile Defense system continues to gather steam.
On March 21, Lt.Gen. Ronald Kadish, Head of the Ballistic Missile Defense Organization, announced a postponement of the Pentagon's estimated $100 million Integrated Flight Test 5 (ITF-5) of the National Missile Defense system. The original test date of April 27 was premised on the success of the January 18 test; however in that test the kinetic kill vehicle (the NMD's "warhead") missed the target missile because its infrared detectors failed. It then took the Pentagon two months to determine the exact cause of the failure and to devise a solution.
The two month delay for IFT-5 has had a domino effect on subsequent program events. Under the original schedule the Pentagon felt it would have had enough time to evaluate the data from the third test, hold an internal Deployment Decision Review (DDR), and formulate a recommendation for the President by late June. Driving this ambitious schedule is the self-imposed target deployment date of 2005 for the first 20 missiles and necessary ground based radars at sites in Alaska. With all the earlier program setbacks and the relatively short building season in northern Alaska, the Pentagon had time for only three flight tests (the first was in October 1999) as contracts have to be negotiated this autumn for spring construction work to get underway.
Although the next test has slipped two months, the Pentagon has slipped the DDR by only one month to late July. Assuming the third test hits the target -- which by Pentagon rules it must do if the program is to get a green light on technology -- BMDO says that in 30 days it can accomplish about 85% of the data review and "provide a proper technical analysis." Even though the Pentagon's internal DDR will be dealing with incomplete data and will be accomplished in half the original interval, Lt.Gen. Kadish denied that this amounted to "cutting corners," characterizing the situation instead as "a very prudent approach to a high risk schedule."
What also emerged from Lt.Gen. Kadish's remarks is a suggestion that even if the June test does not score a hit, the Pentagon might still recommend a positive decision to deploy based on other technological criteria. The BMDO chief said that "in the absence of any other criteria, the requirement that we would like to meet [is to] have two successful intercepts." He then continues: "If you look at that very same criteria that we set for ourselves, the one intercept that we have successfully made so far allows us, in our own criteria, to proceed with the award of the construction contracts." The "two successful tests" criteria are reduced to a public relations milestone, what Lt.Gen. Kadish called a "benchmark," against which to measure technological progress. But because BMDO "also set about 999 other criteria...it becomes an integrated assessment of many factors, not only the outcome of the flight tests." How else can this be understood other than the two-out-of-three hit result was never taken seriously by the Pentagon?
If the DDR finds that the system is technologically advanced enough to warrant initial work on the deployment site, the President will be hard pressed to put a hold on NMD. He has already accepted two of three other milestones for deployment: the existence of a threat (even though no adversarial nations other than Russia and China have ICBMs able to hit the U.S. -- which they have been able to do for decades) and acceptable cost. On the latter point, perhaps reflecting internal BMDO discussions, Lt.Gen. Kadish estimated the 20 year life cycle cost of the planned NMD system at $38 billion, but the Pentagon subsequently said total costs had yet to be determined. What exactly might be included in (and excluded from) this figure is unclear. By comparison, in July 1996, before the present NMD architecture took shape, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimated annual operating costs at between $2 and $4 billion in then year dollars ($40 to $80 billion for 20 years). The Administration projects $12.7 billion over FY2000-FY2005 to develop and deploy the 20 missile system, to which the CBO added more than $5 billion to deploy the 100 missile system. That's almost half the projected $38 billion life cycle cost mentioned by Lt.Gen. Kadish and does not include the nearly $9 billion spent just by the current Administration on NMD between 1993-1999.
The Administration"s fourth deployment criteria is obtaining Russian agreement to modify the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty to allow more than one NMD site and to permit a site in Alaska. So far the Russians have refused to agree to any changes. The mood in Congress is such that the President may have to proceed with deployment, which would abrogate the Treaty that the Russians regard as the cornerstone of the entire arms control regime. Thus the Pentagon's DDR recommendation could create an election year political football with potentially significant international repercussions.
Furthermore, should the ABM Treaty be abrogated, all restraints will disappear. In fact, the Pentagon may be anticipating abrogation, for this week it took another concrete step toward the eventual deployment of space-based weapons. Following the award of a contract to evaluate the potential for a space-based high power laser for use against ICBMs, BMDO made on-site visits to three locations as part of the site selection process for a laser test facility. This effort, which the BMDO head told Congress in February would probably not be tested in space until 2012, will draw on results from the U.S. Air Force's Airborne Laser program which is being developed as a boost phase theater missile defense interceptor.
At the close of his press briefing, Lt.Gen. Kadish also rejected the contention that BMDO has "dumbed down" the tests by reducing the number of decoys from nine to one so that the detectors in the NMD warhead would have an easier job of finding hitting the real incoming warhead. (This point is related to a charge by a scientist who accused her former employer, defense contractor TRW, of falsifying detector test results, a charge denied by TRW and the Pentagon, which chose a system made by Raytheon.) Lt.Gen. Kadish emphasized that the real object of the three flight tests is to prove that NMD can hit another missile. The only reason there was even one decoy was to avoid making it "too easy" to find and hit the target. Over the next four or five years, "we're going to be adding more and more complexity into the discrimination problem....We got enough complexity in the program, in the early phases, without compounding our difficulty," he said.
But that very absence of complexity would seem to argue for delaying the DDR and the subsequent presidential decision before we go further down this $38-plus billion road. NMD is under-tested and under-challenged, and its real capabilities against real enemy missiles will never be known until it must be used -- and then it will be too late.
UN Report Reveals Sanctions Violators
Rachel Stohl, Senior Analyst, rstohl@cdi.org
A United Nations report released earlier this month identifies countries and parties that have violated a United Nations embargo banning fuel, arms and diamonds to UNITA, the rebel group involved in a civil war with the government of Angola for over twenty-five years. In reaction to the 1992 resumption of the civil war by UNITA (the National Union for the Total Independence of Angola) after UNITA's leader, Jonas Savimbi, lost an election and refused to accept the results, the Security Council imposed an arms and fuel embargo in 1993, added a travel and financial ban on UNITA's leaders, and embargoed diamond trading in 1998.
The UN report is the product of the Angola sanctions committee headed by Canadian Ambassador Robert Fowler. The United Nations is not known for enforcing and verifying embargoes, but this report marks the first attempt to outline the details of the violations and directly names those parties involved in the sanctions-busting.
The six-month research effort that backs up the report was done by an investigative panel headed by former Swedish Ambassador to Angola, Anders Mollander, with panelists from Botswana, Namibia, South Africa, Zimbabwe, China, Russia, France, Switzerland, Sweden, and the United States. Investigators visited 30 countries and took testimony from UNITA defectors. Critics maintain that the panel was unable to uncover hard evidence of specific violations, but the report's author, Zimbabwean lawyer and arms expert Stanlake Samkange, told reporters that "evidence collected against government officials was of a higher legal standard than necessary in a court of law."
The report revealed substantial embargo violations involving arms, fuel, and diamonds. Among the most significant findings: Belgium has imposed few controls against UNITA-source diamonds that came to Antwerp to be put on the international diamond market; Bulgaria has been the origin of most UNITA arms since 1997; Rwanda has organized diamond and weapons deals for UNITA; Cote d'Ivoire has facilitated travel for UNITA officials; Zambia and Gabon have shipped fuel to UNITA; UNITA uses Togo as a base for its operations and President Eyadema has allowed Savimbi's family to live and attend school in Togo in exchange for diamonds; and Burkina Faso's' President Compaore has assisted Savimbi in negotiating diamond deals and travel flights for UNITA officials. Others singled out in the report include government support from the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Morocco, Namibia, Republic of Congo, South Africa, and non-governmental support from parties in Belgium, France, Portugal, Switzerland, and the United States. Countries named in the report have steadfastly refuted the accusations but have promised to close loopholes and committed themselves to strengthening sanction compliance regimes.
The experts developed 39 recommendations for dealing with sanctions-busting nations. The measures include: imposing arms embargoes on countries that help UNITA procure weapons, banning UN meetings in sanctions-busting countries and blocking their citizens from holding senior UN positions, criminalizing UN sanctions violations, monitoring fuel shipments to neighboring countries, offering bounties to those who identify hidden UNITA assets, confiscating uncut diamonds and making their trade a criminal offense, and barring the culprits from the international diamond market.
As a follow-up to the report, Ambassador Fowler has announced that when Canada takes over the Security Council Presidency in April, he will ask for the development of a permanent body to monitor sanctions violations.
The Report is UN document S/2000/203 dated March 10, 2000.
GAO Recommends Delay in JSF Program
Christopher Hellman, Senior Analyst, chellman@cdi.org
In testimony before Congress last week, an official of the General Accounting Office (GAO) recommended that the Joint Strike Fighter (JSF) program be delayed in order to allow critical technologies to mature. The testimony by Louis Rodriques, GAO's Director for Defense Acquisitions Issues, summarized the results of a draft report being prepared by the agency on the JSF program.
In the effort to control the costs of the JSF program, the Pentagon's acquisition strategy is designed to reduce program risks in its initial phases in part by allowing key technologies to mature sufficiently so that they match the aircraft's performance requirements. According to the GAO, "a technology is considered to be mature when it has been developed to a point that it can be readily integrated into a new product and counted on to meet product requirements." Ensuring that key technologies are mature early in a program avoids having to make major changes later. As in all development programs, the later changes are made, the more costly they become.
Currently the JSF is scheduled to move into the engineering and manufacturing development (EMD) phase in the spring of 2001. EMD is the phase in which huge expenditures are made to purchase production equipment, train the work force, and buy materials. It is important to have eliminated as much technical risk as possible by this time in order to avoid costly changes. Yet in his prepared testimony, Mr. Rodriques states that "on its current schedule, the program will enter the engineering and manufacturing and development phase without having reduced to an acceptable level the technical risk of technologies that the program office has identified as critical to meeting the program's cost and performance objectives."
The GAO looked at eight critical technologies which are not specified because Boeing and Lockheed Martin are still competing to be the program's prime contractor. The GAO graded the status of the various technologies on a scale of 1 to 9, where technologies that have been fully integrated and operate within a product are rated nine. On this scale, a rating of seven is considered necessary for a given technology to be included in a development program with acceptable risk.
The GAO looked at the readiness levels of the eight technologies when the JSF program began in 1996 and projected where they would be in March 2001. These reviews showed that in 1996 most of the technologies were below level 6, the minimum level normally considered necessary by the Air Force to begin a program. Further, the GAO found that in March 2001, "all of the critical technology levels are expected to be [below level 7] and six of the technologies will still be below [level 6] which is considered acceptable risk for program start "even though the program will be over four years old at the time.
How important is it that the Pentagon allow such critical technologies to mature before going forward? According to the GAO, "should any of these technologies be delayed, or worse still, not available for incorporation into the final JSF design, the impact on the program would be dramatic ...DoD could expect an increase of several billion dollars in production and operation and support costs."
For additional information, see the GAO report "Joint Strike Fighter Acquisition: Development Schedule Should Be Changed to Reduce Risks," T-NSIAD-00-132, March 16, 2000, or visit CDI's TACAIR website.
New Zealand Passes on F-16s -- The government of New Zealand has announced that it is canceling a $340 million contract signed by the previous administration for 28 F-16 fighter aircraft. The main reason cited by the government was that New Zealand is currently debating whether the country should retain an air combat defense force. The Lockheed Martin-made aircraft had originally been intended for Pakistan, but sanctions due to Pakistan's nuclear weapons program prohibited their export.
Hundreds of Deployed Patriots Replaced -- The Army has acknowledged that hundreds of Patriot missiles deployed with U.S. batteries in the Middle East and South Korea have been replaced over the last two weeks due to mechanical failures. Systems that are on full alert have been experiencing failures in electronic components, particularly the radio frequency downlink, which transfers data between the missile and the ground station's tracking radar during intercepts.
U.S. Considers Cutting Troops in Cuba -- The Pentagon is currently reviewing its security needs at Guantanamo Bay Naval Base and is considering reducing the number of U.S. military personnel stationed at the facility. The review comes after an intelligence report from the Navy's Atlantic Fleet headquarters, which downplays the threat of a quick attack on the base by Cuban forces. The U.S. currently has 1,300 troops stationed at Guantanamo.
U.S. Used DU in Kosovo -- A U.N. task force has reported that NATO has confirmed the use of depleted Uranium (DU) ammunition by U.S. fighter aircraft during Operation Allied Force in Kosovo. First used during the 1991 Persian Gulf War, DU ammunition has been the center of controversy because of possibly harmful environmental and health effects. According the the U.S. Environmental Program's Balkans Task Force, approximately 31,000 DU rounds were used in Kosovo -- roughly 10 tons of ammunition.
F-22 Schedule Problems Worsen -- According to Philip Coyle, the Pentagon's director of Test and Evaluation, problems with the F-22 testing schedule are even more severe than was reported by the GAO last week. Testifying before Congress, Mr. Coyle attributed the increasing delays in the testing program to the cost cap placed by Congress on the engineering and manufacturing and development phase. For more information, see "F-22 Slips Further Behind Schedule," Weekly Defense Monitor, March 16, 2000.
This week on America's Defense Monitor: "Isolating America"
Against the tide of globalization, America is becoming increasingly isolationist. Congress's rejection of the Nuclear Weapons Test Ban Treaty was but the latest episode in a trend toward "Fortress America" that includes rejection of treaties on landmines and child soldiers, and a perennial failure to pay U.S. dues to the United Nations. The public is right to ask whether major increases in military spending for programs like ballistic missile defense and hi-tech fighter planes are a better investment in the long run than fostering regional peace initiatives, helping our former enemies become democratic friends, and using diplomacy to help prevent conflicts.
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Saturday, April 1 at 7:00 a.m. on Channel 13.
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