Stars and Stripes:
The United States’ $36 billion system of ground-based interceptors can’t yet be counted on to shoot down a nuclear-armed missile aimed at the West Coast by the likes of North Korea or Iran, the Pentagon’s weapons testing office says.
The network of radar and communications combined with missiles based in California and Alaska has demonstrated only a “limited capability to defend the U.S. homeland from small numbers of simple” intercontinental ballistic missiles, the testing office said in its latest annual report.
Despite international sanctions, North Korea has continued to test nuclear bombs and the missiles that might eventually carry a miniaturized warhead to the continental U.S. Meanwhile, the U.S. has criticized Iran for conducting ballistic missile tests, although the Islamic Republic has said its program is defensive and isn’t designed to carry nuclear warheads.
The probability that the U.S. would succeed in intercepting an incoming missile can’t be quantified with any precision “due to a lack of ground tests” supported by verified “modeling and simulation,” according to an advance copy of the assessment provided late Monday to congressional defense committees and Pentagon officials.
The testing office’s assessment is the same as its 2016 report because too few new results were generated to warrant a change, even as the threat from North Korea in particular has grown.
The office said the “reliability and availability of the operational” interceptors is also low, as the Missile Defense Agency continues to discover new flaws and “failure modes” during testing.
In response, Vice Admiral James Syring, director of the missile defense agency, said in an interview Monday he retains “high confidence” in the system. He said the next attempt to intercept a dummy missile is tentatively scheduled for the period of April to June.
With North Korean ruler Kim Jong Un saying his country is in the “last stage” of preparations to test-fire an ICBM, incoming U.S. President Donald Trump may face a more urgent challenge than predecessor Barack Obama in dealing with the regime. Christopher Hill, a former senior U.S. diplomat for talks with North Korea, said on Saturday he believed Pyongyang would be able to claim with credibility within four years that it can hit the U.S. with a nuclear weapon.
“It won’t happen!” Trump wrote recently on Twitter of North Korea’s potential test.
Success in the next U.S. missile-defense test might bolster Trump’s vow that North Korea can be stopped. A test failure would deal him a public relations embarrassment.
The next test will attempt to shoot down a target that replicates for the first time the speed, trajectory and closing velocity of an actual ICBM, Syring said. The U.S. will test avionics updates to the booster rocket built by Orbital ATK Inc. that carries an improved version of a hit-to-kill conventional warhead built by Raytheon Co.
Interceptors are located at Fort Greely in Alaska and Vandenberg Air Force Base in California. The system is managed by Boeing Co.
The next interception attempt will be the first since a successful test in June 2014. Before that, though, two tests that failed in 2010 prompted an extensive effort to fix flaws with the interceptor’s warhead that Syring said have now been fixed and verified….
