ALASKA MISSILE DEFENSE EARLY BIRD WEEKLY

MISSILE DEFENSE WORK TAKES A HIT, News-Miner Washington Bureau, Saturday, June 22, 2002 - WASHINGTON--Senate Democrats have lopped $800 million off the amount President Bush wants Congress to authorize for missile defense work in the coming year, but Sen. Ted Stevens said he and other senators will try to restore the president's number when debate on a defense bill resumes on Monday. The Senate Armed Services Committee, led by Democratic Sen. Carl Levin of Michigan, said in a report last month that Bush's $7.6 billion request for missile defense contained duplicated and poorly documented items. The committee cut the authorization to $6.8 billion before passing the bill. In a news release last month announcing its decision, the committee quoted Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's assertion that his department was not always spending taxpayer money wisely. "The committee approved a number of provisions to address this problem," the news release said. "These include a reallocation of $812 million from not adequately justified and duplicative missile defense expenditures to higher priority areas." The higher priorities included a new submarine, amphibious transport

docks, and new destroyers, the committee said. The full Senate began debating the defense authorization legislation this past week. The bill essentially approves government expenditures in various military programs, including missile defense. A second bill is necessary to actually appropriate the money. On Monday, the Senate will take up an amendment to restore the missile defense authorization to the amount Bush requested, Stevens said. He said the proposed cut doesn't specifically target the money being spent on a testing facility at Fort Greely.

"It is part of the overall research base, however, that would affect Greely," Stevens said. The system to be tested at Fort Greely is the largest of several Missile Defense Agency programs. Of the $7.6 billion the administration wants, $3.2 billion would be spent on the ground-based, mid-course system. It's called ground-based, mid-course because interceptors would rise from silos on U.S. soil to intercept incoming ballistic missiles in the mid-section of their trajectory, while still in space. Other systems under development would try to shoot down an enemy missile nearer to the beginning or end of its trajectory, and some systems are based on ships or airplanes. A similar showdown over missile defense developed last year. Democrats initially cut $1 billion out of missile defense spending authority. It was restored following the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, along with language that gave the president flexibility to spend the money on homeland defense if he deemed it a higher priority. In the end, much of the money did go to anti-terrorism work, Stevens said. The Alaska senator said he's looking for a similar resolution of the conflict this year. Stevens said he understands the desire of some senators to move the money to the Navy. "They want to put it basically in the procurement accounts, and basically procurement for ships, which is a tough decision because we need that money, too," he said.

Stevens doesn't share Levin's overall view of the system, though. Levin, on his Web page, criticizes the logic behind the Bush administration's push to spend billions on missile defense. "An attack against the United States using a ballistic missile is considered by the U.S. intelligence community to be highly unlikely," Levin says. "And an attack with chemical, biological or nuclear weapons by non-missile means of delivery, such as a truck or ship or plane, is far more likely. Tragically, the events of September 11, 2001 underscored this assessment." Stevens sees the system as a defense against blackmail by a rogue nation that might launch a missile. "We couldn't stop it, and if they then said, 'Look, if you don't do A, B and C, we're going to do it again and again and again,' we'd have no defense against that," Stevens said. "We must have that defense." In addition to cutting Bush's request, Levin's committee also wants to require the Missile Defense Agency to submit several reports on its activities. Rumsfeld in January exempted the agency from those report requirements to speed development. "These reports are critical to congressional understanding and oversight for missile defense programs and are required for all other major defense acquisition programs," Levin's committee said in explanatory notes accompanying its bill. Stevens said he thinks some efforts to publicize the missile defense work are going too far, though.

"As a practical matter, I don't have people in my constituency saying 'We want to know all the secrets that are in this system,'" Stevens said. "They want to know 'Does the system work, and how much would it cost?'" Just what the system will cost, however, remains unknown. A plan developed under the Clinton administration, which called for putting 100 interceptors at Fort Greely, would have cost up to $64 billion, according to the Congressional Budget Office. However, President Clinton declined to sign off on that plan and Bush moved the program back into the research and development stage. The agency projects that testing the ground-based system will cost $8.9 billion through 2007. An additional $1.4 billion will be needed during that time to finish the North Pacific "test bed." That test bed includes the five storage silos and one test silo being built at Greely, although no test launches are expected there. The bed also includes an upgrade of the state's launch site on Kodiak Island, as well as new equipment on Shemya Island in the Aleutians, at Cheyenne Mountain in Colorado and at Beale Air Force Base in California. Although the Greely missiles would be part of the ground-based system, elements of the test bed could reportedly be used for the sea- and air-based systems as well. Including all the sea-, air- and ground-based systems, the research bill could top $40 billion over the next five years, Levin said. Building the systems could "easily cost well beyond $150 billion," Levin said.

SHEMYA PROJECT IS OUT, Fairbanks Daily News-Miner, June 27, 2002. Gen. Ronald Kadish, director of the Missile Defense Agency, said he believes the military still needs an X-band radar in the Pacific to conduct its tests of missile defense technology. However, he said it won't necessarily be built on Shemya. "We're trying to decide whether that should be land-based or sea-based if we can figure out how to do it," Kadish said. "And I think over the coming weeks and months, that will become clear to all of us, how we intend to pursue that. But we do, I believe, need an X-band radar in our test bed. And then we can decide whether we build them as a part of a deployed architecture," Kadish said. The Cobra Dane radar "looks" only in one direction--Russia. That means it has limited value when tracking missiles from the direction of North Korea, according to David Wright, senior scientist with the Union of Concerned Scientists in Cambridge, Mass. Wright said the Bush administration may be de-emphasizing the X-band for political reasons. The administration has vowed to have a rudimentary missile defense system in place by 2004, he said. So, since the X-band radar can't be done by then, any admission that it is essential to a working system will prevent the administration from claiming to have met the 2004 goal, Wright said. Lt. Col. Rick Lehner, spokesman for the Missile Defense Agency, said Wright's analysis misinterprets administration statements. "What we've said is we would have the test bed up and running by the end of September 2004, which may give us a rudimentary capability," Lehner said. The MDA has made no promises, he said.

GLOBAL NEWS BREAKS #17

MONDAY, JUNE 24, 2002

MISSILE DEFENSE TEST COMPLEXITY TO INCREASE, Aviation Week & Space Technology, June 24, 2002. After being pummeled for the slow pace and relative simplicity in testing U.S. missile defenses, the Pentagon is poised to evaluate those systems more aggressively. Two developments are responsible for the increasing test rigor: the fact that military officials feel confident they have validated the underlying technology, and the demise of the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, which allows new elements to be added to the missile defense architecture. But expansion of anti-missile projects faces a major hurdle in the shape of an $812-million Senate-proposed funding cut. It would cause "a major, major delay in our efforts," said USAF Lt. Gen. Ronald Kadish, director of the Missile Defense Agency (MDA). "It is not only the magnitude of the reductions, it is where the reductions are" that would lead to a "major restructuring of the program," he added. If the MDA receives its full budget, it plans a "very aggressive program from a technical point of view," Kadish said. The past months have demonstrated the basic technical performance of the land- and sea-based systems, he contends. "Now the question is how reliable is it going to be [and] can we do hit-to-kill reliably in the presence of robust countermeasures." He added, "I'm confident that over the next two years especially we will be able to satisfactorily answer those questions to ourselves as well as to our critics." However, he also cautioned that, "even with the progress we've had, we have a long way to go."

U.S. NAVY’S MISSILE DEFENSE GETS MORE RESPECT, Defense News, June 24, 2002. The Pentagon’s decision to speed up the deployment of a sea-based missile defense system vindicates the U.S. Navy’s belief in its technology, but more money and faster testing will be vital to hitting its new target date of 2004, sources say. The Sea based Midcourse Missile Defense System apparently has gained new favor at the Pentagon’s Missile Defense Agency (MDA) in the wake of two successful tests in recent months and the removal of international treaty obstacles to such a system. The Wall Street Journal reported the MDA’s views in an interview with U.S. Air Force Lt. Gen. Ronald Kadish, the agency’s director, on June 18. Faster development of sea-based anti-missile systems became possible with the removal of the restrictions imposed by the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) treaty, Kadish said June 19 at a meeting organized by the National Defense University in Washington.

“REACHING OUT, ” Defense Watch, June 24, 2002. The prospects for increasing international participation on ballistic missile defense are "very good," says Air Force Lt. Gen. Ronald Kadish, director of the Missile Defense Agency (MDA) program. The ABM treaty had prevented the United States from discussing cooperation in-depth and sharing technical data, says Kadish. Now that the treaty is gone, MDA is laying a framework to initiate expanded discussions with U.S. friends and allies to bolster cooperation, he notes. "Soon we'll be reaching out beyond our borders," he says. MDA may opt to make incremental production decisions on the systems like the Patriot Advanced Capability-3, says Kadish. "We want to buy configurations in blocks at a reasonable rate...we may not foresee how many of these will buy or afford," he says. Kadish recommends an overhaul in the traditional thinking about full-rate production, in which large blocks of weapons are not committed to upfront in a program. "I think we've got to start thinking of full-rate production differently for missile defense systems than we have in the past," he says.

CAMBONE SNAGS KEY PENTAGON ANALYSIS POST, Aviation Week & Space Technology. June 24, 2002. One of the Pentagon's major sources of officially sanctioned internal criticism, the program analysis and evaluation office, got a new boss last week. Stephen Cambone, was shifted last week from his job as principal deputy undersecretary for policy to that of director of PA&E--effective "within a few days." PA&E's newly focused role is to promote joint service cooperation, which would mean downplaying service-specific needs, and expediting transformation of the military with breakthrough technologies, he said. The shift in role and focus of PA&E is needed now because the 2004 budget will make some of the major commitments to transitional technologies, Cambone told defense reporters. The office's analysts will be asked to predict how those investments will pan out by 2009-10. Of particular interest will be investments in command and control, improved communications and intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance. Another concern will be balancing investments in future capabilities like the Army's Future Combat System with near-term capabilities.

U.S. SAYS PATRIOT SYSTEM TAIWAN SEEKS IS FLAWED, Taipei Times, June 22, 2002. The Pentagon has revealed that it has encountered new, unexpected problems with a defense system Taiwan has been seeking to buy from the US to serve as one of its main defenses against a Chinese missile attack. Washington has refused to sell Taiwan the PAC-3 several times, and President Bush's decision to follow the Clinton administration in rejecting Taiwan's PAC-3 purchase request in April last year was a major disappointment for Taipei. In operational testing of the PAC-3, the system did not work as expected, the director of the Missile Defense Agency, Lt Gen Ronald Kadish said. As a result, production of the PAC-3 has slowed, and plans for full-scale production of the system have been put on hold, Kadish said. But the problems are not so bad that deployment of the system may be killed, he said.

MISSILE DEFENSE AGENCY MULLS CHANGES TO PRODUCTION STRATEGY, Defense Week, June 24, 2002. The Pentagon is weighing a more flexible way to acquire missile-defense systems that sometimes could involve doing away with the traditional phase of full-rate production, says a top Pentagon officer. An incremental approach might be better than the current process of making major decisions for full-rate production, said Missile Defense Agency Director Air Force Lt. Gen. Ronald Kadish last week. "I think we've got to start talking about and thinking about this idea of full-rate production," he said Wednesday at a National Defense University Foundation-sponsored breakfast. "We may not be able to foresee exactly how many of these systems we would want to buy over time or could afford," Kadish said. "And we ought to make incremental decisions for that to get the best buy for the taxpayer that we could possibly get and move as rapidly as we can, but not necessarily say we're going to buy full inventory objectives or [go into full rate production]."Discussions are in the very early stages and no decisions have been made, he said. "This idea of having a major inventory objective, where we make big decisions to buy as a result of a full-rate decision process may not be the right way to approach this problem," Kadish said. "What we want to do, however, across our programs, is to buy configurations in the blocks that we're talking about at reasonable rates when they're ready to be bought." Within the missile agency, a working group is examining all the issues and possibilities, said Air Force Lt. Col. Richard Lehner, agency spokesman.

COSUMANO: SEA-BASED X-BAND RADAR WOULD ENHANCE MISSILE DEFENSE COVERAGE, Defense Watch, June 21, 2002. An X-band radar on a sea-based platform would enhance coverage of the globe to shoot down ballistic missiles, a senior Army official told Defense Daily. "I think that would be helpful to the architecture for discrimination," Army Lt. Gen. Joseph Cosumano, the commander of Army Space and Missile Defense Command and Army Space Command, said in an interview here last week at a Space and Information Operations symposium sponsored by t