New report slams US missile defense, mothballed radar systems

For decades, the Pentagon has attempted to create a ground-based missile defense system that would allow for midcourse interception of hostile ICBMs. In theory, this makes sense — an ICBM loaded with nuclear warheads can inflict massive devastation on the United States’ civilian population. And while the doctrine of mutually assured destruction may have kept the peace with the Soviet Union, 9/11 stoked fears that an irrational actor or terrorist rogue state might use nuclear weapons to attack the US.

As a recent report in the LA Times makes clear, however, the programs that came after 9/11 have been long on promise, but critically short on results. The YAL-1 airborne flying laser concept was scrapped and canceled after 16 years in development and more than $5 billion spent.

YAL-1

Despite proving theoretical kill capability, the YAL-1 (a converted 747-400) would have had to operate within the borders of enemy airspace on a continuous basis in order to intercept an ICBM during its boost phase. The only way to operate the laser at a safe distance would be to increase its power output by 20-30x — a feat not deemed feasible given the constraints of the aircraft platform.

The Kinetic Energy Interceptor was a ground-based missile designed to use its own kinetic energy to destroy ICBMs rather than relying on a warhead. It was canceled in 2009 at a cost of $1.7B due to “fiscal and technological reasons.”

The only remaining component of the nearly 20-year debacle still in limited use is the Sea-based X-band radar, or SBX. This electronic installation was supposed to offer superior radar imaging compared with any previous ground-based station, while its oceangoing capability would afford it a degree of mobility that no ground radar could match. Lt. General Trey Obering once memorably described the SBX as being able to track an object the size of a baseball over San Francisco while located in Chesapeake Bay, VA. (The general neglected to mention that the baseball in question would need to be 870 miles high and traveling in a precisely known arc.) Given that ICBMs typically travel 200 miles lower than that, the SBX had no greater tracking capability at that distance than a conventional ground-based radar.

The problem with the SBX isn’t the radar’s intrinsic capability as such, but its narrow field of view (just 24 degrees), high operational costs, and limited reliability. A comprehensive review of the United States Ground Based Missile Defense program, published in 2012, concluded that the GMD program had failed to incorporate “fundamental features long known to maximize the effectiveness of a midcourse hit-to-kill defense capability against even limited threats,” and that the Missile Defense Agency, which runs the GMD program, had “given up trying and terminated most of the optical signature analysis of flight data taken over the past 40 years.”

The tyranny of cost

One major problem with any proposed missile defense system is that the intrinsic cost of developing a kill vehicle may be orders of magnitude greater than the cost of launching an ICBM. Whether an interceptor attempts to strike during the initial boost phase or during midcourse, it’s going to be supported by cutting-edge ground radar, and require sophisticated electronics to properly manage an intercept. Different vehicles may fall at different points on the cost/complexity curve, but hitting a missile with another missile is an intrinsically difficult task.

Therein lies the problem: The only way to truly secure the United States from a missile terrorist attack is to build multiple interceptors per potential ICBM. But the more interceptors we build, the more the program costs. All of this assumes that the interceptor craft can actually strike their targets, and the Pentagon’s own tests are decidedly lackluster in this regard.

Other forms of missile defense that focus on the terminal phase, when the ICBM re-enters the atmosphere, have proven more successful. The problem with terminal phase designs is that the interceptor is striking the warhead as the latter nears its target. Unsuccessful intercepts leave no time for secondary attempts, and incomplete kills could still leave live nuclear warheads falling into crowded population centers. Furthermore, terminal defense systems have very small ranges — each city would have to maintain its own terminal defense missile launchers.

Speaking to the LA Times, general Obering defended the mothballed radar and billions spent on killed projects, claiming “If we can stop one missile from destroying one American city,” said Obering, a former Air Force lieutenant general, “we will have justified the entire program many times over from its initiation in terms of cost.”

The problem is, the US military has not demonstrated that it can stop one missile from destroying one American city. Every evaluation of the program to date has concluded, at best, that it offers “an early, but fragile US homeland defense capability in response primarily to a potential North Korean threat.” The same report notes that the existing system “has limited ability to defend the eastern United States against threats from the Middle East.”

In the grand scheme of things, $2.2B for a single limited radar dish may seem like a pittance compared to the tremendous expense of, say, the F-35 or the Navy’s Littoral Combat Ship. All these problems, however, actually speak to the same underlying issue: We’ve set priorities and allowed expenses based on pie-in-the-sky thinking that reflects wishful rhetoric far more than practical concerns.