Missile Defense: The Pentagon Steps Back


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	Missile Defense: The Pentagon Steps Back By Randy Barrett Space News Correspondent posted: 07:00 am ET 11 July 2003

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The Pentagon is putting the brakes on plans to launch a cluster of developmental space-based missile interceptors by 2005. A senior Missile Defense Agency (MDA) official told SPACE.com a combination of lagging technology and pressure from Capitol Hill has caused a rethinking of the original schedule. Now the plan is to continue basic research on the interceptors until at least 2008.

“We went out with a request for information [to industry] to determine whether or not the technology was essentially here to be able to execute the type of program we had talked about by 2005,” said Terry Little, director of the Kinetic Energy Interceptor program at the MDA. “We didn’t think so.”

The space-based interceptors were under consideration by the MDA as a complement to ground based-modes of killing enemy missiles in flight. In theory, the mini satellites would home in and destroy enemy missiles in space by force of impact. But technical problems with miniaturization and weight proved severely limiting, Little said.

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Brilliant Pebbles was a space-based, kinetic-energy weapon concept under development in the United States where 4,600 small interceptors would be deployed in orbit, each capable of homing in on and destroying incoming hostile warheads. IMAGE CREDIT: John Bretschneider

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“If you enter development with major technical issues, you’re going to end up in trouble,” Little said. “It’s a rule of nature.” Limited funding also presented problems. The Pentagon has requested $14 million for the space interceptor test bed in 2004. “You need a lot of satellites and they need to be affordable to buy and launch — they’re not there,” Little said. Officials from several defense satellite manufacturing companies declined to comment for this story.

Little also said the program was encountering some resistance from Congress. He noted, for example, that during debate on the 2004 Defense Authorization bill, Sen. Jeff Bingaman (D-N.M.) introduced an amendment to kill all funding for space-based weapons.

Bingaman’s amendment ultimately failed. But Phil Coyle, an analyst with the Center for Defense Information here, said the fact that it was introduced is a sign that the anti-proliferation movement in the United States still has teeth.

“There’s no sense preheating the opposition when the [Pentagon] doesn’t have anything to deliver,” Coyle, a former chief weapons tester at the Pentagon, said.

Proponents of space-based missile defense were disappointed by the MDA’s change of heart on the program. Hank Cooper, who was director of the Ballistic Missile Defense Organization in the early 1990s, said there are “fully exploitable” technologies left over from the original Star Wars missile defense program that are applicable to a constellation of space-based interceptors.

Much of the technology was developed under a program dubbed Brilliant Pebbles, which was abandoned in 1993. “These guys that run the Missile Defense Agency don’t have much of a clue about what the technology can accomplish,” Cooper said.

Baker Spring, a missile defense analyst with Heritage Foundation, a think tank here, agreed: “I find it surprising there couldn’t be any [technologies] salvaged from the 1992 timeframe.”

Little said there is still strong support for space-based interceptors in some quarters of the White House and that the latest plan could change again in the future.

Meanwhile, the Pentagon is moving ahead with plans to develop a ground-based interceptor that would knock out enemy missiles as they launch. An award of design study contracts for that program, called KE Boost, is due in December.