By Marina Malenic
The Missile Defense Agency (MDA) will postpone a long-range intercept test scheduled for this week until December due to receipt of faulty components from a data chip- manufacturing arm of L-3 Communications [LLL], agency director Air Force Lt. Gen. Henry Obering said yesterday.
The exercise, scheduled for July 18, was to have been the first operational Ground-based Midcourse Defense (GMD) intercept test to include complex countermeasures.
GMD has yet to meet testing criteria against complex countermeasures as required by the Office of the Secretary of Defense, Operational Test and Evaluation Directorate (DOT&E). MDA has conducted two GMD intercepts since testing began in 2001–one in 2006 and one last fall.
Asked whether there would be financial consequences for telemetry test system manufacturer L-3, chosen by Boeing [BA] as its subcontractor in 2002, Obering said he was still examining the exact nature of the parts defects and consequent costs.
“It was a bad technique for soldering that caused the problems on the card–that was across the board” on all the System 550 telemetry ground system data cards received from L- 3, Obering said during a Pentagon briefing.
“There will be steps taken to address the delays in the test program and the causes of those delays,” he added.
The card is manufactured by the Telemetry & Instrumentation enterprise of the L-3 Communications Telemetry-West in San Diego.
The component “pulls all of the telemetry, all of the data from the interceptor, and tells us how well it’s performing,” according to Obering. The data card is only used in the test program; it is not an operational element of the interceptor.
“I could have elected to go ahead and fire on Friday, but we had at least a 20 percent chance we would lose all data in the test,” he added. However, “these tests are expensive, and we want to be able to get all the data that we can.”
In place of the intercept test, Obering directed the agency to instead conduct a computer simulation using sensor data. He said the simulation would closely mimic the intercept that was to have taken place, including complex countermeasures.
“We’re going to launch the target–it will have countermeasures,” he said. “And we will be able to… determine whether we would have been successful with respect to our intercept.”
Obering said the original intercept test is now scheduled to take place in December.
“By then we’ll have the card fixed, we can fly the interceptor in the test,” he said.
“I wish we could have flown the interceptor this Friday, but I will not take the chance of losing that data.”
Obering also said the Defense Department is examining how his agency will balance the needs expressed by combatant commanders for additional Aegis Standard Missile-3 (SM-3) and Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) interceptors.
“They did ask for more THAAD and more Aegis interceptors,” he said. “We are taking that into account and working that up through the building, in terms of prioritizing this and then [asking], where can we take risk?”
He said no decisions have been made on which elements of MDA’s portfolio would be cut to pay for the additional interceptors.
Last month, Obering had said his agency was examining its budget to locate funds needed to double the number of SM-3 and THAAD interceptors in the coming years. He said MDA’s Program Objective Memorandum 10 (POM ’10) request–its five-year budget outlook–would indeed double those numbers (Defense Daily, June 24).
A study led by U.S. Strategic Command recommended the increase.
Meanwhile, Democratic members of Congress have recently been more receptive to funding national missile defense programs–though longer-term development efforts still tend to garner less support than riper technologies. A provision in the FY ’07 Defense Authorization Bill states that the United States will “accord a priority to near-term missile defense systems,” such as Aegis, THAAD and even GMD. Sources have said there is less support for programs with long-lead times to fielding, such as the Airborne Laser (ABL), the Kinetic Energy Interceptor (KEI) and the Space Tracking and Surveillance System (STSS) (Defense Daily, June 25).