A Senate panel sounded alarms recently about test failures with the Ground-Based Midcourse Defense (GMD) system, as a senior Pentagon official sought to assure it the national- missile-defense effort is on track.
Army Lt. Gen. Patrick O’Reilly, director of the Pentagon’s Missile Defense Agency (MDA), said at a Capitol Hill hearing he is satisfied the causes of two ground-based interceptor (GBI) test failures last year have been identified and are being addressed.
A failure in January 2010 resulted from a quality-control problem that has been fixed related to the assembly of a component of the latest version of the GBI’s exo-atmospheric kill vehicle (EKV). The second test failure, from last December, has been investigated by a team of experts. O’Reilly said MDA is near completing ground testing to confirm the problem, which is tied to the new version of the EKV and not the GBI boosters.
“The second problem was of a nature that made it extremely difficult to uncover on the ground, because of the sensitivity of the instruments that are onboard this system,” O’Reilly told the Senate Appropriations Defense subcommittee (SAC-D).
“We needed to be in space. We have uncovered the problem. I believe because we know that, we will be able to correct that problem.” O’Reilly wants an added flight test for the GMD system to verify the identified problem in space. After that and other final tests, he told the SAC-D he is “confident” the problem will be fixed.
“It’s MDA’s top priority to verify the resolution of the problem by conducting extensive ground testing this summer, conducting a non-intercept test with an upgraded EKV, and repeating the previous failed intercept test in 2012,” the MDA director testified.
The two failed tests have not been cheap, with the Pentagon requesting $281 million in fiscal year 2012 to finish fixing the problems. SAC-D Chairman Daniel Inouye (D-Hawaii) Inouye cited concerns about the failures.
“From an operational perspective, this is obvious cause for concern,” he said. “From the taxpayers’ standpoint, these tests cost over $200 million apiece, so we can no longer afford to fail.”
O’Reilly acknowledged the cost, and said funding is vital to put the GMD program on track. He disputed a finding from the Government Accountability Office (GAO) that the GMD budget could be cut in FY ’12 by $400 million with no significant impact to the program.
“If we received a $400 million cut as they proposed, it would delay our recovery of the program by a minimum of a year,” he said. “What I don’t believe they took into account is the additional activity that we’re doing right now …(aimed at) fixing the problem.”
“This work is very precise,” O’Reilly added. “When you’re hitting a missile at 20,000 miles an hour, and we have shown over and over again we can hit it within inches of a point on an object, it requires extreme precision…There is over 2,000 components in a GBI and so as we have seen it’s very unforgiving…if there is a problem.”
He maintained that MDA has “adjusted our processes so that we can reliably produce these.”
O’Reilly reiterated that the Pentagon may seek in the FY ’13 budget to increase the number of GBIs above the currently planned 52, because of the two test failures and two makeup tests.
“My personal assessment is, yes, we need to procure additional GBIs,” he told Sen. Richard Shelby (R-Ala.)
O’Reilly added: “We continually monitor intelligence assessments and, to address the possibility that our current GMB capability is determined to be insufficient in the future, we are developing options to increase the number of operational GBIs and accelerate the delivery of new sensor and interceptor capabilities.”
The version of the FY ’12 defense authorization bill the full House is debating this week seeks to increase the Pentagon’s proposed GMD funding by $100 million, in part to speed up work on the EKV fixes.
The House Armed Services Committee (HASC) report on the defense authorization bill raises concerns with President Barack Obama’s proposal to cut GMD funding by $185.2 million in FY’ 12, and to allot $1 billion less for it in the Future Years Defense Plan than was pegged last year.
“The committee is troubled by (the) back-to-back (GBI) flight test failures and, when viewed in the context of the entire GMD flight test history, questions whether there are more systemic issues within the GMD program,” the HASC report says. “The committee remains concerned about the reliability of the GMD system and its overall operational effectiveness. The committee notes that the GMD system is currently the only missile defense system that protects the United States homeland from long-range ballistic missile attacks. The committee believes the (Defense) Department must prioritize the GMD system and allocate sufficient resources to sustain, test, and evolve it.”