WASHINGTON, Sept. 1 (UPI) -- A long-awaited U.S. anti-ballistic missile test was delayed by fog in Alaska Thursday, but the deeper fog lies over the uncertain status of the entire Ground-Based Midcourse Interceptor system.
U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld admitted during his visit to the Ground-Based Interceptors, or GBIs', main deployment field at Fort Greeley, Alaska, Sunday that the interceptors needed far more testing. Despite an outlay of at least $43 billion -- many estimates put it far higher -- on the entire U.S. ballistic missile defense system since President George W. Bush took office, only five out of 10 tests of the Alaska interceptors -- the most important part of the program, designed to destroy incoming intercontinental ballistic missiles in mid-flight -- have succeeded.
And the U.S. Missile Defense Agency, at least up to the test that was delayed Thursday, had not achieved a successful test interception in four years. In two of those tests, in December 2004 and on Feb. 14, 2005, the GBIs never launched at all.
Rumsfeld Sunday belatedly expressed a certain realism that the program was still a long way from reliable operational deployment.
"I want to see it happen," he said. "A full end-to-end (comprehensive test) ... where we actually put all the pieces (together)." But, Rumsfeld, added, "that just hasn't happened (yet)."
Rumsfeld's U.S. Department of Defense spin-masters presented the septuagenarian secretary's comments as proof of his skeptical, realistic attitude towards the program that has been his pride, joy and obsession since he entered office. The widely reprinted wire service reports of his comments faithfully echoed this direction.
However, the real reason so much uncertainty still exists over the operational reliability of the interceptors is the highly controversial production policies that Rumsfeld personally insisted upon.
Rumsfeld and his two hand-chosen top lieutenants in the Pentagon during President Bush's first term of office -- Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz and Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas Feith, drove the U.S. Missile Defense Agency and the prime U.S. industrial contractors on the interceptors so hard that they forced the assembly and deployment of the interceptors without any of the meticulous individual component testing that Pentagon protocols on ballistic missile production have demanded for more than four-and-a-half decades.
Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz and Feith, in their hard-charging passion, revealed a blind faith in the reliability of technology and an ignorance of the nuts and bolts reality of high-tech engineering in which the United States has excelled for so long.
For the building of rockets that can fly at 18,000 miles per hour to intercept ICBMs that are incoming at almost that speed is arguably far harder than hitting a speeding bullet with another bullet. The combined speeds of both missiles can be more than 15 times greater than the speed of a bullet. Therefore, the reliability of each component of the interceptors, however tiny, needs to be flawless. As the failure of the three most recent tests prior to this week showed, they were not.
Indeed, the U.S. Government Accountability Office, the watchdog of Congress on U.S. government departments and how effectively they fulfill their responsibilities, recommended in a recent report that the existing deployed interceptors may need to be disassembled and component checked.
The GAO concluded in a report published in March that the DOD "has not established operational criteria or fully completed training, security and personnel plans." Further, "DOD has not established formal criteria for what needs to be accomplished before declaring that limited defensive operations or subsequent bocks of capability are optional."
The GAO report confirmed that the program's "development has been unique in several aspects, including the pace of the system's development and the secretary of defense's decision to exempt it from some DOD requirements guidance."
The report frankly warns that without these criteria being applied, Rumsfeld, the driving force behind the breakneck -- and, according to its critics, reckless -- system deployment "may not have a transparent basis for declaring BMDS operational."
"Without adequate planning, clear criteria and identification of responsibility for ensuring necessary actions, it may be difficult for DOD to identify and prioritize (in order to) ensure itself or Congress that the necessary pieces are in place before declaring the system operational," the report presciently warned.
The Department of Defense "does not even have any comprehensive plan laying out steps that need to be taken and criteria that should be met before declaring that either the limited defensive operations or subsequent system blocks are operational," the report said.
Further, "no organization is clearly in charge of developing such criteria and ensuring they are met," it said.
Five months after the GAO made these criticisms, they remain essentially unaddressed, critics claim. Rumsfeld, usually the most upbeat and relentlessly optimistic of senior U.S. officials, refused in his comments Sunday to give any date when the Alaska interceptor system would be fully operational, even though nine interceptors are already deployed there, along with two more at Vandenberg Air Force Base, Calif.
Wolfowitz and Feith have long since left the Pentagon, but the chaos and lasting uncertainty they inflicted on the U.S. ballistic missile defense program endures. Thousands of engineers and technicians in America's prime defense contractors and within the MDA are laboring to try and repair the damage. As BMD Focus noted June 23, the recent GAO report documented "a state of what appears to be administrative chaos at the top civilian echelon levels of the Pentagon in developing and deploying the BMD defenses, whose failure in a war situation could cost millions of lives."
Rumsfeld's caution and skepticism Sunday were well founded. But the person most responsible for the problems that led to them was Rumsfeld himself.
