Boeing wins new GBI program but program's future is in doubt

WASHINGTON, Jan. 7 (UPI) -- Boeing Integrated Defense Systems, based in Huntsville, Ala., has won a new $397.9 million contract to fund its work on Ground-based Mid-course Interceptor work for the next six months, Defense Industry Daily reported Sunday.

The contract will act as a bridging fund, financing Boeing IDS work on Ground-based Missile Defense Block 3 development and fielding activities from this month through to the end of June this year until a long-term Core Completion Contract for research, development, test and evaluation -- RDT and E -- funds can be approved for Fiscal Year 2009 by the incoming Obama administration and its Democrat-controlled 111th Congress, the report said.

However, Defense Industry Daily also expressed skepticism about how much money would be approved by incoming U.S. President-elect Barack Obama and his administration for the Ground-based Mid-course Interceptor program to defend the United States from the threat of nuclear-armed intercontinental ballistic missile attack from so-called rogue nations such as North Korea and Iran.

After a long, slow development program marked by major mistakes by the civilian echelon of the Department of Defense under

Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld in the early years of the Bush administration, when they abandoned rigorous individual component testing, the GBI program has improved greatly in both progress and reliability in recent years.

However, the GBI program is much more expensive and much more demanding and uncertain than the highly successful Army Patriot PAC-3 and Navy Standard Missile-3 systems, because ICBMs fly far higher and far faster than short- or intermediate-range ballistic missiles. Consequently, many incoming policymakers from liberal-leaning think tanks, arms control institutions and Democratic Senate and House staffs on Capitol Hill want to do away with it.

Russian general vows to keep backing Bulava

A senior Russian general this week vowed to stick with the much-troubled Bulava submarine-launched ballistic missile after its latest test failure on Dec. 23.

"The missile will be a success. We see what we started from and at which stage of development it is now. This is a big contrast," three-star Col. Gen. Anatoly Nogovitsyn, deputy chief of the Russian General Staff, stated Sunday, RIA Novosti reported.

As we have noted in previous columns, criticism of the Bulava has mounted in the pages of the Russian media, and some respected military analysts even have argued that it should be scrapped and replaced by the much older in design but still highly reliable liquid-fueled Sineva SLBM. A Sineva was successfully test-fired to a target more than 7,000 miles away last year.

The Sineva has a much longer range and can carry larger nuclear warheads than the Bulava, but it has a slower acceleration speed in its boost phase, making it at least theoretically more vulnerable to boost-phase interception by emerging U.S. ballistic missile defense technologies.

This move, however, would require significant adaptations to the firing tubes of the new "fifth generation" strategic nuclear submarines of the Yury Dolgoruky class that have been designed to carry the solid-fueled Bulava SLBM instead.

Such changes are certainly technically feasible. But Russian military shipyards have a fearsome reputation for taking vastly longer on their projects than their original contracts and commitments stipulated. So the Kremlin and the Russian Defense Ministry may well believe it is safer to push ahead with the Bulava SLBM and iron out its longstanding design flaws. The biggest of these appears to be maintaining the missile's stability as it exits the firing tube and passes through ocean saltwater before hitting the atmosphere.

The Dec. 23 unsuccessful test was precisely such an underwater launch in the White Sea off the Arctic Ocean toward an intended target in the Kura firing ground in Kamchatka in Russia's Far East, RIA Novosti said.

The news agency said it was the Bulava's 10th test launch and the fifth unsuccessful one -- an unacceptable failure rate of 50 percent.

However, Nogovitsyn claimed that the problems that caused the Dec. 23 failure were "on the verge of production and design solution."