"In Anti-missile Test, Target Signaled Its Location"
Defense Week - July 30, 2001 - by John M. Donnelly
In this month's high-profile anti-ICBM test, a prototype interceptor was
able to find a target warhead partly because the target signaled its
location to the interceptor for much of the flight, and the transmissions
formed the basis of the targeting orders, according to officials and
documents.
The presence of the beacon, or "C-band transponder," on the target warhead
didn't guarantee that the interceptor would find and kill the target in the
July 14 test of President Bush's proposed missile shield. But the
target-location data gave the interceptor rocket a precise point in space
at which to aim and made its job much easier than would be the case if it
had relied on a ground radar's natural receptors, a Pentagon official
confirmed. What's more, a decoy that flew in the exercise to test the
interceptor's ability to distinguish a fake warhead from a real one had no
such beacon on it.
The transponder's use in earlier tests was brought up at a couple of press
briefings and congressional hearings last year. But it has received little
attention. In particular, its vital targeting role in the tests, including
this month's internationally controversial one, has not previously been
disclosed. It raises new questions about the realism of the exercises. Yet
the Pentagon will use the beacon for the foreseeable future.
In a candid interview, the missile-defense program's technical director,
Keith Englander, for the first time confirmed that the transponder data was
used to generate the "weapons task plan," the targeting program for the
booster that lifted the kill vehicle. He stressed, though, that the hardest
work was done by other sensors, including those on the kill vehicle itself.
Englander said the transponder had to be used because existing Pacific
radars are located in less than ideal places for testing. The program's
spokesman, Air Force Lt. Col. Richard Lehner, also downplayed the role of
the transponder. He added that its use is one of several aspects of current
testing the Pentagon plans eventually to dispense with.
"What it points to is the need for an expanded test infrastructure, too, so
we can make these tests more operationally realistic ... using the type of
sensors we need," Lehner said.
However, Englander said that the administration has not requested funding
to build a new X-band radar that would obviate the need for the beacon-even
though the White House has asked for $800 million to start building a
missile-defense "test bed" in Alaska that could become an operational
defense as soon as 2004.
Notwithstanding the use of the beacon, in the final seconds of the July 14
test, the kill vehicle ultimately found and destroyed the mock enemy
warhead without outside help by using its own infrared seeker and steering
mechanism, experts agree.
However, they also agree that the interceptor was able to get to the
end-game only because the target transmitted its location during critical
minutes of the flight to an FPQ-14 C-band radar on Oahu, Hawaii, and from
there to the battle-management system in Colorado Springs, Colo.
Significantly, the C-band beacon's transmission then generated the computer
program that tells the interceptor when and where to aim in space.
The July 14 test boosted President Bush's hopes of deploying a missile
shield for the United States. That night, a target missile took off from
Vandenberg AFB, Calif., while, 4,800 miles away, a rocket carrying the kill
vehicle launched from Kwajalein Atoll in the Pacific's Marshall Islands.
The kill vehicle found and obliterated the target 144 miles above the
ocean, the second intercept in four attempts. The beacon and a set of
Global Positioning System, or GPS, instruments were used in previous tests
as well as this one, officials said. The GPS equipment was only used in a
backup mode on July 14.
The beacon was never mentioned, or included in briefing documents, in a
detailed preview of the flight test given to reporters the day before this
month's exercise by Ballistic Missile Defense Organization Director Air
Force Lt. Gen. Ronald Kadish. Last summer, though, top officials and the
Pentagon spokesman described the beacon as mainly a range-safety and
data-gathering tool.
On July 6, 2000, Pentagon spokesman Rear Adm. Craig Quigley told reporters
the beacon "provides no information to the [kill vehicle] as it navigates
its way to the target." On June 20, 2000, Kadish told the press that "the
beacon does not help the kill vehicle in the acquisition phase of that
requirement."
The same month, Kadish told a Senate panel, in reference to the C-band
transponder and GPS instruments: "None-I repeat, none-of this equipment in
any way aids the kill vehicle in finding, discriminating or intercepting
the target during the final stages of the flight test."
'Here I am'
Philip Coyle, who until earlier this year oversaw testing of the
missile-shield system and other major military programs, said in an
interview that Kadish's words were true in a strict sense. The key terms,
however, Coyle said, are "final stages."
Prior to the end-game, in the "mid-course" of flight, Coyle said, "the
C-band beacon does aid the kill vehicle in finding, discriminating, and
intercepting the target." Use of the beacon, he said, "is how they know
where [the target warhead] is ... and to go after that object rather than
other objects that in the mid-course you wouldn't want to go after by
mistake," such as the bus, decoy or debris.
The beacon on the target "does provide discrimination in the mid-course,
because that's the only object being tracked," said Coyle, now a consultant
with the Center for Defense Information, a research group that is often
critical of military spending.
"There is absolutely nothing wrong with [using the beacon] this early in
the program," Coyle added. "It's just one of many things that have to be
changed so the flights can be more realistic in the future." Coyle compared
the beacon's role in the tests to looking in the dark with a flashlight for
someone who has his own pencil flashlight showing you where to look.
"Perhaps the most unrealistic part of the C-band beacon is the fact that it
is an active beacon-as opposed to simply being something passive that is
seen by a radar," he said. "What's different is that it's ... like a pinger
saying, 'Here I am.' "
'Weapons task plan'
By contrast to official desciptions of the beacon's role, an August 2000
"for official use only" report by Coyle's office on the strategic-defense
testing program said the transponder generates the targeting plan. Although
that plan is clarified based on other data, the intercept aim-point is
derived directly from information fed from the target beacon to ground
computers, said Coyle in the interview and in his report.
The beacon and, in earlier tests, the GPS instruments are "the sources of
information for weapons task planning," the report said.
The document says the weapons task plan created by the beacon's data
comprises "pre-launch instructions that are used by the weapon system for
generating a flyout solution that places the EKV [exoatmospheric kill
vehicle] on an intercept path with the target RV [re-entry vehicle]."
The beacon or GPS instrument must be used for this weapons plan, the report
said, because a ground-based prototype X-band radar on Kwajalein "alone is
not capable of supporting the weapon task plan generation, since the target
RV cannot be discriminated early enough."
"Use of the FPQ-14 range radar as the source of weapon task plan data needs
to be phased out," the report said in a recommendation under the category
of "Testing Artificiality."
Not a 'dead-on shot'
Englander, the program's technical director, acknowledged that the target's
transponder generated the weapons task plan and gave the interceptor a box
in space (of unspecified size) at which to aim. But subsequently in the
test, he said, the Kwajalein radar gave the interceptor three "in flight
target updates" on the missile's flight trajectory that refined the box to
half the original size, and then the kill vehicle did the rest, firing its
divert thrusters 28 times to do so.
"It wasn't a dead-on shot from the weapons task plan," he said.
The transponder, he said, "points to the segment in the sky that the target
complex should end up in once the EKV [exoatmospheric kill vehicle] gets up
there." However, he said, "The majority of [the data] we're getting to put
the EKV [there] is the refined track you get from the GBR-P [ground based
radar prototype on Kwajalein] and what the EKV does on its own."
The whole exercise lasted a half an hour. The battle-management system used
data from about seven minutes worth of transponder transmissions followed
by about eight minutes of data from the Kwajalein radar, he disclosed.
By contrast, a depiction of the test "geometry" in Coyle's report
shows the beacon working overtime, transmitting data for 23 minutes of
the 30-minute flight. Englander said the graphic is "generic."
Englander also rejected any suggestion that using the beacon on the
target-but not on the decoy-rigged the test. He said the transponder only
sent data on the location of the entire target "cluster"-the combination of
warhead, decoy and bus-and didn't need to make any distinctions at the
early point in the flight when the beacon was responsible for tracking.
Coyle, though, said that in a real-world setting, an early-warning radar
would pick up all the objects and would have to sort among them.
The existing radars are not sufficiently realistic for testing because an
upgraded early-warning model at Beale AFB, near Sacramento, Calif., is too
close to the target launch-point of Vandenberg AFB, near Los Angeles. The
Kwajalein radar is too close to the interceptor launch-point to obtain
targeting data-except for late in the flight.
Moreover, the FPQ-14 radar on Oahu is just not strong enough to do the job
without getting data beamed straight from the target, officials said.
Bush's plan to test missiles from Kodiak renews controversy
SKEPTICAL: Some residents say silos already crowd popular recreation area.
By Zaz Hollander
Anchorage Daily News
(Published: August 5, 2001)
Kodiak -- U.S. military plans to launch test missiles for the nation's
defense systems from Kodiak's rocket range have some locals up in arms.
President Bush announced in mid-July that he wants to base two test missile
silos on Kodiak Island, reviving a local controversy that started in 1996
when a rocket launch complex went up near Fossil Beach, a popular hiking,
fishing and whale-watching spot about 40 miles of bad road south of town.
At the time, protesters -- including one wearing a Miss Piggy costume --
held a barbecue to slam "Space Pork Kodiak."
Now some people worry that Bush wants to permanently house armed missiles on
Kodiak Island and beef up military operations at what was supposed to be a
strictly commercial rocket range with concrete launch pads for rent.
Military officials say that's not the case and that the silos will launch
test missiles loaded only with solid fuel. They're holding a town hall
meeting later this month to set the record straight.
"We want to try to correct some inaccurate information," said U.S. Air Force
Lt. Col. Rick Lehner, spokesman for the Ballistic Missile Defense
Organization in Washington, D.C. "There's a perception we plan to deploy
(armed) missiles, nuclear warheads, take over the island.
"We just wanted to look at the possibility of using Kodiak and maybe launch
one, two, three (test) missiles a year."
The new launch plans have detractors, but they also have many supporters on
the island, site of the largest U.S. Coast Guard base in the world. Phone
lines hummed with heated calls from both sides on a call-in show on local
radio station KMXT on Friday morning.
Some Kodiak residents say the controversy is a lot of noise over nothing.
The test launches would be "a minor thing," Tom Sweeney, a retired insurance
agent, said in an interview later in the day. "I'm all for it. Since Kodiak
was settled, it's the military that's done the settling."
Critics don't have all the facts, said Ed Allen, technical director of the
Kodiak Launch Complex.
"In my opinion, the reason there's a controversy is when people talk silos,
they think about wars," Allen said. "What we do here is testing."
Here's the government's proposal:
Once or twice a year, a test missile would shoot from a buried steel and
concrete silo on Kodiak Island, aimed at an incoming missile that is
supposed to act like it came from North Korea or other potential enemies.
Really, it will come from Vandenburg Air Force Base in California or a site
in the Pacific. If the mission succeeds, the missiles would meet over open
water about 3,000 miles southwest of Kodiak.
In the mid-1990s, the $40 million rocket range was sold as a rarity: a
moneymaking government operation that essentially would rent out launch pads
to fire polar satellites into space. Then satellites evolved into military
launches. So far, the facility isn't showing a profit, the state's
coordinator for national missile defense has said. Several launches are
schedule in the coming year, including the Athena launch at the end of this
month, sending four satellites up.
Opponents seize on the facility's trouble making good on its promise."A silo
is a good metaphor because they're like drains," said Mike Sirofchuck, a
spokesman for the ad-hoc Kodiak Rocket Launch Information Group, formed in
1995. "There's that giant sucking sound."
Under Bush's new proposal, defense missiles would be tested at Kodiak but
actually located at Fort Greely, when and if the system is ever deployed.
Testing isn't possible at Fort Greely because falling debris from booster
rockets could injure people. The proposal still needs to gain approval from
Congress and go through a public review process.
Critics of the Bush plan say they oppose the proposed silos for the same
reasons they didn't want the Kodiak Launch Complex built five years ago.
They fear lost access at the Narrow Cape, since the range is on the only
public land in the area, Sirofchuck said. Environmental damage from silo
construction and missile launches is another factor, he said, and the fact
that the Kodiak announcement came as a surprise makes critics wonder what
else the government isn't telling them.
Even Allen, the director of the launch complex, said he's heard little from
headquarters in D.C.
"There's been very little communication," he said.
U.S. Air Force officials acknowledge that the silo announcement in mid-July
happened too fast to give people in Kodiak a heads-up. The president's
military budget was on a fast track to Congress, they say.
They hope the town hall meeting, scheduled for 6 p.m. Aug. 20 at the Gerald
C. Wilson Auditorium, will clear things up.
Some Kodiak residents, however, say they'll always be skeptical.
Jack Bennett was teaching a high school current events class when news broke
about "that rocket thing" in the mid-1990s. Bennett thought at the time that
"this is a military process just being eased in the back door," he said last
week.
"I'm not only skeptical," he said. "They have just destroyed one of the most
beautiful places on the island."
Reporter Zaz Hollander can be reached at zhollander@adn.com or 907 257-4591.
Conservative Coalition Pushes Missile Shield on Capitol Hill
By JAMES DAO
New York Times
WASHINGTON, Aug. 5 A coalition of conservative
organizations, concerned that their top military priority is facing
a tough battle on Capitol Hill, has begun a national lobbying
campaign to pressure Congress into supporting President Bush's
plans for a missile shield.
The coalition, Americans for Missile Defense, intends to collect
more than one million signatures, inundate lawmakers with letters
and e-mail messages and raise money for a campaign in time for the
September budget debate, the organizers said.
"Missile defense, like very few other issues, has the capability
to immediately unite conservatives of all stripes," said David A.
Keene, the chairman of the American Conservative Union, which is
helping to spearhead the coalition.
One of the coalition's goals will be to bolster Congressional
Republicans who are being pressured by Democrats to trim the
missile defense budget in favor of increasing spending on
conventional weapons like jet fighters and warships.
Democrats have argued that President Bush's proposed $8.3 billion
missile defense budget, a $3 billion increase from last year, is
exorbitant when other basic needs, like maintaining ships and
buying ammunition, are being squeezed.
They have proposed transferring nearly $1 billion from the missile
defense plan to an array of other programs requested by senior
military commanders.
Another major challenge for the administration and its allies will
be to convince voters that the nation needs a large increase in
missile defense spending when the Soviet Union is gone and military
issues are generally considered a low priority, most polls show.
Those polls also indicate that while voters tend to support the
idea of building a missile shield, their support declines when they
are informed that more than $60 billion has been spent on the
program in the last two decades.
Still, the coalition's organizers said they were confident that
once Americans learned that the United States could not defend
itself against long- range missile attacks, they would clamor for a
shield.
"When you tell people we can't shoot a missile down," said Frank
Gaffney Jr., the president of the Center for Security Policy and a
founder of the coalition, "people start getting out of their chairs
and saying, `That's crazy'"
The coalition includes Americans for Tax Reform; United Seniors
Association, which ran a $2 million advertising campaign for
President Bush's tax cut last spring; High Frontier, a leading
advocate for missile defenses in the Reagan administration; and the
Eagle Forum.
The group also has a celebrity spokesman: Jeffrey Baxter, the
ponytailed former guitarist for the Doobie Brothers and Steely Dan.
"When I look at people in North Korea, Libya, Iraq and Iran,
understand folks, these folks don't sit around and watch `Seinfeld'
and eat Milky Way candy bars all day," Mr. Baxter said at a recent
news conference. "They have a different concept, a different
culture and a different way of looking at things."
Though not a member of the coalition, a Democratic union
representing defense industry workers has also begun urging its
750,000 active and retired members to push for missile defense.
"To my Democratic friends on Capitol Hill, I would urge them to
forgo the short-term, tactical, partisan advantage," R. Thomas
Buffenbarger, the president of the International Association of
Machinists and Aerospace Workers said recently. "Can our party
really afford to be seen as weak on the defense of America's
cities? I think not."
Mr. Keene declined to say how much money the coalition hoped to
raise for a media campaign, but he suggested that it would be a
relatively modest effort intended mainly to influence legislators.
A military industry official said that coalition leaders had begun
soliciting money from military contractors. But many companies are
wary of the effort lest the money come from other weapons programs.
The coalition's organizers said their first goal would be to
energize several million conservative activists through newsletters
and the Internet. The coalition's Web site, for instance, allows a
visitor to send a form letter to Congress.
The money defense shield
By Paul Rogat Loeb
July 25, 2001
Christian Science Monitor
I once sat on a plane in front of two drunk arms traders,
on a flight from Dallas to Washington DC. They'd sold
helicopters to both sides during the Iran-Iraq war of the
1980s. When the helicopters got shot down, the countries
bought more, then more again, so the arms traders made
more money each round. They laughed wildly about the
story, considering it a perfect deal.
This incident came to mind when I heard the Bush
administration talk of kindly sharing their proposed
national missile defense system with their allies. Why
not? The more countries, the more orders. And the more
benefits to those truly protected and benefited by this
project-the weapons producers who've spent over $40
million in the past two years on campaign contributions
and lobbying.
A group of Lockheed Martin employees essentially
acknowledged this, when I gave a talk, a few years ago,
at their Missile & Space Division, in Sunnyvale,
California. The company had invited me to discuss a book
of mine on the values of current students-their future
employees. I hesitated, then decided to speak as honestly
as I could, even though it would mean raising
discomforting questions. Introduced by a former Air Force
General then serving as a Lockheed Martin Vice President,
I talked about the generation's complex worldview and
struggles to engage some of the critical issues of our
time. When students feel that the world is corrupt and
can't change, I said, they often point to the political
clout of weapons companies, citing corporate bailouts,
pork barrel contracts, and military systems that are
useless but still make millions. I mentioned how Boeing,
well before it acquired Rockwell and McDonnell Douglas,
had more staffers in its Washington DC lobbying office
than the entire DC staff of Washington State's
Congressional and Senatorial delegations combined. The
students were beginning to believe, I said, that
political access comes only when you give at the door.
After mentioning some respected critics of military
buildups, such as former Reagan assistant Secretary of
Defense Lawrence Korb, I cited the famed Eisenhower
quote: "Every gun that is made, every warship launched,
every rocket fired, signifies in a final sense a theft
from those who hunger and are not fed--those who are cold
and not clothed." Since the average American household
now pays over $200 each year to finance Lockheed Martin's
government contracts, I challenged the audience to
question their corporate culture and not assume that just
because a contract provided money and jobs, it
automatically served a greater common good. I
specifically questioned some of the company's missile
defense systems, which critics were calling politically
destabilizing and technologically problematic. A man in
the audience quickly jumped in to defend the company's
role in developing them. Then one of his colleagues spoke
up. "Let's get real," he said. "We all know that if
anyone ever attacks America, the bomb is going to be
delivered by a suitcase, a car or a truck, or in a boat.
It's not going to come from a missile, because you can
track where a missile comes from and retaliate. We all
know that we're lobbying for these programs because they
make us money. We don't care whether they'll ever work,
or even be useful. We care that the dollars come our
way."
The room was silent. The original questioner answered
briefly, but no one else jumped in. The conversation
moved on to my original topic of the students. It was as
if people were ashamed to respond. I'm not saying that
all who embrace the National Missile Defense proposals do
so for venal reasons. Some do believe in it. Building an
invincible technological shield has been a core dream of
the political right since Reagan's first Star Wars plans,
albeit a dream spearheaded by think tanks that companies
like Boeing, Raytheon, TRW, and Lockheed Martin have
lavishly supported. The engineers and designers who
support it want the chance to take on what J. Robert
Oppenheimer (who directed the creation of the first
atomic bomb), once called the "technically sweet"
challenge of building complex and challenging
technological systems, whatever their consequences. But
we've spent $45 billion on Star Wars systems and $95
billion on total missile defense efforts since Reagan
embraced the idea, with little beyond failed tests to
show for it.
Let's leave aside the endless reasons why National
Missile Defense will never work. Leave aside all the ways
that-even if it did-it would only undermine hard-won arms
control treaties, destabilize global politics, move us
back toward nuclear confrontation, and squander over $200
billion of resources that could otherwise provide health
care, hire teachers, rebuild our communities or protect
our environment. Do we have the political honesty, like
the Lockheed Martin employee who spoke out, to
acknowledge that this entire proposal may be largely
about political payback? The true shield it's designed to
create would not protect people and communities. But it
would protect the massive profits of the companies that
build it-whatever the costs to the rest of us.
Paul Loeb is the author of Soul of a Citizen: Living With
Conviction in a Cynical Time (St Martin's Press
www.soulofacitizen.org).
WAND
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