Faith-Based Missile Defense
In an oversight hearing on the US missile defense program last month, Philip Coyle III, a former Assistant Secretary of Defense and Director of Operational Test and Evaluation in the Department of Defense from 1994-2001, spoke to the House Subcommittee on National Security and Foreign Affairs about the almost impossible position it’s in when it comes to oversight of this $150 billion - and counting - weapons program: “Congress does not have the information it needs to do oversight. If you don’t have the information, and the Pentagon just says ‘trust me’, you can’t really do oversight.”
Yesterday on Capitol Hill, Lieutenant General Henry A. “Trey” Obering III, Director of the Missile Defense Agency (MDA), appeared before the subcommittee for the third in this series of hearings: “Oversight of Missile Defense (Part 3): Questions for the Missile Defense Agency.” It seemed the General was there to illustrate Coyle’s very point, as evident when Chairman John Tierney tried to gauge how realistic the testing has been for the system which purports to defend the US and Europe from ICBMs. Has the system been tested against even the most basic countermeasures and decoys that we would anticipate from a nation capable of developing such missiles?
“What I can say is we have flown against countermeasures in the past… we will continue to expand that in our future program,” Gen. Obering said. “To have this conversation in a genuine fashion I need to go closed.”
“I gotta tell you, General, how the American public is supposed to decide on something with this kind of enormity of expense and speculation [about] some of the capabilities is mind-boggling,” Rep. Tierney said. “We over-classify so much in this country. Back when the President made the decision that he wanted to try to deploy this inoperable system in 2004, we asked for a General Accountability Office study on this - it was done. There were 50 questions addressed in the study. It came back, and the minute it came back it was classified all of a sudden. And… they don’t classify stuff when it’s good news around here these days…. I don’t think it does a service to the American people at all or to this Congress to keep classifying everything on that basis.”
“…. I’m sure, Mr. Chairman, you would not want us to transmit in an open hearing to enemies around the world - Iran and North Korea - any kind of data that they could take advantage of in trying to overcome the system for the future,” Gen. Obering replied. “I know you wouldn’t want to do that.”
“Of course not,” Rep. Tierney fired back. “That’s a tremendous red herring that we’re not even talking about here. What we’re talking about is the capacity of the people of this country [who are] spending hundreds of billions of dollars on this system - they ought to know against what it will work and against what it won’t work. And I’m not sure that information is going to affect any other country’s capacity… but it should affect our decision-making process of how we spend the taxpayers money.”
Indeed, in his opening statement Chairman Tierney framed the hearing as necessary for three reasons: 1) because the MDA operates the largest research and development program in the Department of Defense at a current cost of $10 billion per year, and a total cost of approximately $150 billion since the 1980’s; 2) as the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service described the missile defense regime, “Numerous programs were begun, and only a very few saw completion to deployment. Technical obstacles have proven to be tenacious, and systems integration challenges have been more the norm, rather than the exception”; and 3) many preeminent experts such as Coyle “have raised very serious concerns about the effectiveness, efficiency, and even the need for our country’s current missile defense efforts.”
Rather than dispelling concerns over such matters as the scheduled purchase of 1200 new missile interceptors that have never demonstrated any capability against a realistic threat under realistic operational conditions, Gen. Obering intensified those concerns by simply repeating his refrain that everything is “on course.” (It was as if Gen. Obering were channeling former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and offering his own version of “I don’t recall.”) Representative Betty McCollum was so irked that she suggested the program be housed in the Office of Faith-based Initiatives.
Coyle testified after Gen. Obering and was asked by Rep. Tierney if anything surprised him in the General’s testimony. “… I was surprised at how many statements - including new statements that he made - that were certainly incomplete, misleading, or even untrue,” Coyle said. “There were quite a few of them. I don’t quite know where to begin. Perhaps it would be best if I provided that for the record. I was just surprised that he made a number of statements that I think are at best misleading.” (Coyle is indeed furnishing the subcommittee with his account of Gen. Obering’s testimony, and TheNation.com plans on obtaining that information for our readers.)
Coyle pointed specifically to Obering’s claims of successful “tests,” noting that the General fails to mention that the tests didn’t actually involve shooting down a target. “It’s a little misleading to imply that we’ve got the matter in hand because of such tests when they don’t actually involve shooting down a target,” Coyle said.
Joseph Cirincione, president of the Ploughshares Fund and author of Bomb Scare: The History and Future of Nuclear Weapons, also testified before the subcommittee for the second time in the series of hearings.
“A lot of this boils down to what your definition of test is…. We have never done a realistic test against the kind of missile and the kind of countermeasures we could expect from even an Iran or a North Korea. And the reason we haven’t done that is because we would miss,” Cirincione said.
Nevertheless, The MDA continues to move forward with the funding and deployment of an unproven weapons system, and to Coyle that’s a striking anomaly. “For all other US military systems we don’t go into… large quantities of production until the system has been shown to be operationally effective…. It’s a good policy. It helps the Congress know when it’s time and when it’s ready. I think the same policy ought to apply to missile defense procurement but so far it hasn’t,” he said.
Cirincione suggested that the MDA be disbanded and that the Joint Chiefs and commanders make a “first approximation” of the allocation of resources to missile defense as compared to other defense priorities. “If you do [this], Congress will then get recommendations… that are more complete and more balanced… than you will if you continue to have an agency that’s only to promote anti-missile programs. An agency that now has a budget of some $10 billion a year - you create a very formidable advocate for these programs. If you’re gonna try to get to the truth of what works and what’s necessary, I think you have to take that advocate apart, and allow the influence of the rest of the services into these decisions. [The MDA] is a self-perpetuating money machine….”
Cirincione also recommended that Congress commission an independent organization such as the American Physical Society or the National Academy of Sciences to assess the anti-missile technologies.
After the hearing I spoke with Cirincione and he offered an even more pointed assessment of the anti-missile program and its advocates: “The way General Obering constantly tried to fool the Members with his test claims - unless you had been closely following the program you would have no idea that most of his claims of test successes relied on computer simulations, ground tests and flight experiments. There is something fundamentally dishonest in the way this program is spun to the Congress. It is sad that so many Members buy it.”
With reporting from Capitol Hill by Greg Kaufmann, a freelance writer residing in his disenfranchised hometown of Washington, DC.
Katrina Vanden Heuvel is editor of The Nation.
© 2008 The Nation
“you would not want us to transmit in an open hearing to enemies around the world…”
The US government cannot tell the truth. In this age of instant global communication, doing so would aid the ‘enemies’.
Nothing the US government says is the truth. Nobody should expect otherwise.
You could pay me $10 billion a year to stand on a hill pointing a stretched rubber band at the sky and it would be just as effective as this system. Calling it “bullshit” is an insult to bullshit.
But then the true goal of missile defense, like everything else war-related, is not to defend a country’s citizens, but to redistribute wealth from the poor to the rich. In that sense, it has been very effective indeed.
“War is a racket. It always has been. It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious…. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few, at the expense of the very many. Out of war a few people make huge fortunes.” - Major General Smedley Butler, 1935
Its totally clear we now have a bunch of capitalist-criminals and murderers intent on using our military and weapons to expand their shake-down to every corner of the globe. Thats all it is.
To the rest of the world: enjoy your peaceful ways and (free) health care now, because when these guys finally get you, and Americanize it, it’ll all be history.
I’m of the opinion that changing parties at The White House will help all this. Having McCain follow Bush for 4 or 8 years, possibly with another 8 by Condi Rice (if she were to go in now as V.P.) is not going to de-escalate anything military or reverse the trend of over-classification.
We need a break, a breather, a pentagon reacting to a differently-toned Commander in Chief. Since neither Ralph Nader nor Cynthia McKinney are leading the polls past say 5% or so (if that), you’ll have to settle for a mere Democrat. Maybe Barack. Maybe Hillary. With luck, both, for minimum 16 years.
Anti-missile systems were on their way out in early 2000. Russia was no longer a credible threat, China’s launch vehicles take three days to fuel, in open launch gantries, and North Korea’s program was a joke.
Then we had 9/11.
And all the old defense contractors KNEW the good old days of unaccountable military spending were back. Almost as if they knew what was going to happen.
But they couldn’t know that common airliners would be used as guided missiles against a major military landmark, like say… the PENTAGON? They couldn’t have KNOWN in advance. Could they?
(And if you believe that the defense contractors and the US military were not in collusion with a criminal Bush coup, then you have not been paying attention…)
U.S. Missile Defenses in Europe will be Unsuccessful (Opinion)
According to CDI Senior Advisor Philip Coyle and CDI Research Analyst Victoria Samson, “The U.S. proposal to establish missile defense sites in Poland and the Czech Republic has exacerbated relations with Russia to a degree not seen since the height of the Cold War, and has done so despite the fact that the system has no demonstrated capability to defend the United States, let alone Europe, under realistic operational conditions.” Coyle and Samson explain this assertion in their latest piece, “Missile Defense Malfunction: Why the Proposed U.S. Missile Defenses in Europe Will Not Work,” published in the Spring 2008 issue of Ethics & International Affairs.
It’ time for these Star Warriors to feel a brief moment of weightlessness - when the trap door opens. Everyone’s life depends on it.
On 9-11, I turned the TV at about 1000 CST. I watched for about an hour. Then a talking head that I did not recognize said “This happened because the United States is too free. We are going to change that”. I turned off the TV in disgust.
Now I want to know who that was. And yeah, Galen, how did he know? How did he know at 10am that the USA was no longer going to be free? It’s as if the whole thing was planned.
And, in reference to the favorite tactic of the ruling class and their military thugs of refusing to answer questions because it might “help the enemy” (that would be the American people), the most mind-blowing to me was Mitt Rommey, when asked whether he would follow the law of the land forbidding torture. He replied that he wouldn’t say whether the US would follow the law, because then our enemies would know!!
I have a little problem understandng why a measley ten billion a year is so horribly important to Congress?
I understand the war in Iraq is costing nore than a billion every five days and Congress approved it and will approve another $70 billion to continue the “mighty” SURGE in a few days.
Did Romney actually say that ~Greenerthanthou~???? Holy shit. That’s not funny, ___ so why did it crack me up????
Yeah, but Kem, even the slightest sign of resistance in the congress towards a very theoretical solution (missle defense) is a positive sign for me - however weak it may be.
I’ve got to have hope that this whole load of crap will “come un-done” someday soon.
The accuracy and explosive power needed for supposed missile interceptions, is more than adequate for offensive purposes. Anything that could intercept a missile, can also pinpoint and explode a military or civilian target. All of the missiles are truly offense missiles dressed up in name only as interceptors.
The missile defense tag is political and PR media dressing to obtain money and enable deployment of batteries of killing power aimed at Russia, Iran, China and any organization or individual who wants to think independent thoughts with non-US approved content and manner. The defense intercept role is largely ineffective. Such few unconvincing publicized tests that have been conducted have been staged to help obtain funds from congress. The phony defense label is to hide their very real war capabilities from the gullible public.
Imagine what the US spends through the Pentagon—and THEN add what it spends on NASA projects, for NASA is nothing but another “blind” with a lot of pretty-picture PR for the Pentagon as well….NOTHING we got from the “space program” could not have been done another way…..A country that invests the best of its resources in DEATH is going to reap exactly what it sows…
I really like XixXag’s idea of paying him/her $10 billion to “point a rubber band at the sky and it would be just as effective,” but, if I remember right, sadly, XixXag is incorrect. Assuming that XixXag had access to an umbrella or raincoat while holding the rubber band, s/he would be impervious to rain, whereas, a year or two back, I read something about how rainwater had gotten into some of the missile defense equipment and disabled it (not that it was really “enabled” in the first place, in the sense of being able to shoot down an enemy missile, but you get my drift).
So, keeping in mind that rain is a formidable adversary for the Missile Defense System, we must conclude that XixXag’s proposal to pay $10 billion for someone to hold a rubber band up to the sky is the better proposal, cost-benefit-wise, and should award them the contract ASAP.
“Representative Betty McCollum was so irked that she suggested the program be housed in the Office of Faith-based Initiatives.”
May I humbly suggest it would fit even better in the Orifice of Faith-based Initiatives?
What is it????? More ‘Star Wars’ nonsense that Reagan wasted tillions on and still didn’t work????? Almost bankrupted us in trying. And did bankrupt the Soviet Union because they believed all the Reagan hype about it! But, Reagan had that to his credit in the end he bankrupted the Soviet Union with his grandiose ideas! Now we are going this same route with Bush II! Wasting trillions on some useless weapons system that no one will admit doesn’t work!
The system tracks the target by radar and infrared. To defeat this, the attacking warhead need only deploy several large mylar balloons. These balloons would be 100 feet or more in diameter, and coated with a thin metal film, like those shiny little party balloons. To further confuse the tracking systems, the balloons are not fully inflated, resulting in a surface of creases and folds. This will give an irregular heat and radar signature that will hide the location of the warhead, about the size of a trash can, somewhere in this 200 foot cloud of metalized plastic. The intercept missile cannot be effective if it doesn’t collide directly with the target or pass within a few feet.
I have no access to any classified information about the system, and I’m sure a North Korean rocket scientist could come up with an even better plan.
The ways to defeat the system are so simple and obvious that it seems pretty clear the only reason to keep test results secret is to keep the program alive.
Well they have succeeded in pissing off Putin. Is that a good or bad thing? Or just fun!? If hedology is right about the dual purpose, he should be pissed.
It might not ever work, but really we don’t need it - unless we plan on doing first strikes. The missile defense would be for anything that survived long enough to get fired back at us. The US has really lost its way.
Yes I know you are correct ~Hybridoma~. I was making the point of how much of our resources we waste on the Iraq occupation also.
It is not just our Federal government who acts with utter stupidity, greed, slothfulness and corruption, state and local governments often are just as bad.
In Atlanta, GA. for example, they just spent $300,000 apeace for high tech, push button flush, stainless steel outdoor toilets. The entire shit house costs over a million. Meanwhile, they are laying off hundreds of city workers due to a lack of funds. Wonder if those are Halliburton or KBR manufactured toilets? Maybe Lockheed, Marietta division?