May 4, 1999

by Dr. David C. Wright
Union of Concerned Scientists

Mr. Chairman, distinguished Senators,

It is a pleasure to appear before the Committee today.

Both the administration and the Senate have singled out technical readiness as a key criteria that will affect the decision next year on whether or not to begin deployment of a national missile defense (NMD) system.

Is the technology ready to deploy? In this testimony, I will argue the answer is no. Will it be ready to deploy by next summer, when the Deployment Readiness Review (DRR) is scheduled? Again, I will argue the answer is no. I will then discuss what the United States needs to do to find out if the technology is ready to deploy at some point in the future.

Thus, I will consider three questions in turn. First, does the United States now know enough about the capability of the technology to make a commitment to deploy a national missile defense? Second, will the United States know enough by next summer? And finally, what will it take for the United States to know at any point beyond next summer? That is, what does the United States have to do to understand enough about the capability of the technology to be able to make a commitment to deploy an NMD system that it can expect to be effective?

"Fly before you buy" is an oft-heard dictum regarding the Pentagon's acquisition policy. It is important to be clear about what kind of flying the United States needs to do before buying NMD.

When you develop a technology -- any technology -- and want to know if it is ready for production, you need to do three things:

• You need to build a prototype and test it on the test range or in the lab under controlled conditions to determine if the basic technology is in hand and whether it will work in a benign environment.
  
  
• Once you have demonstrated that the technology works under controlled conditions, you need to test it under conditions that approximate as closely as possible those you expect to find in the real world. This is necessary to assess the operational effectiveness of the technology in the real world, which will not be a benign environment.
  
  
• You need to do enough testing to assess the reliability of the technology.
  
  

Satisfying the first of these criteria is clearly important and necessary, but does not demonstrate technical readiness to deploy. It is necessary but not sufficient; the other two criteria must be satisfied as well. In fact, satisfying the first condition and demonstrating the basic technology may tell you essentially nothing about whether the second criterion will be met and how well the technology will do in the real world.

It should go without saying that it is especially important to test for operational effectiveness if the technology you are developing is a military technology, which an adversary will be trying to defeat. Thus, for an NMD system, satisfying the second criterion would in part require making a best guess about the types of warheads that North Korea, Iran and Iraq would be likely to use on their ballistic missiles, and then conducting tests against targets of those types. After all, one of the key things an NMD system is supposed to do is to defend the United States from long-range missiles launched by one of these countries.

Since the NMD system is intended to counter ballistic missiles carrying weapons of mass destruction, satisfying the third condition and demonstrating reliability is extremely important. If the United States is going to -- in any sense of the word -- count on its NMD system, it has to know that the system is reliable.

Some have argued that it is important that the United States deploy an NMD system as soon as possible, and that the United States should therefore be willing to take high risks by developing subsystems concurrently and using surrogate components in tests. But experience shows that this rarely works. In fact, by taking such risks, you are more likely to delay deployment than speed it up. As the Welch Report (1) stated "The virtually universal experience of the study group members has been that high technical risk is not likely to accelerate fielded capability. It is far more likely to cause program slips, increased costs, and even program failure." Similarly, in discussing the sense of urgency behind the THAAD program, the FY 1998 Report (2) of the Director, Operational Testing & Evaluation (DOT&E) stated that "The ultimate result, ironically, is a schedule slip of seven years."

No matter what development strategy is adopted, it is essential that the United States not cut corners on testing, because testing is the only way to find out if the technology is ready. The more urgent one believes NMD deployment is, the more one should support and insist on an adequate and complete test program that satisfies the three criteria outlined above.

Where is the program now?

What is the current situation? First, let's look at whether the United States has satisfied the first criteria.

There have been no intercept tests of the NMD system, but since 1982 the United States has conducted 16 intercept tests of exo-atmospheric hit-to-kill interceptors, which operate in a similar manner to the planned NMD interceptor. To date, the test record of such interceptors has been abysmal. Only 2 of these 16 intercept tests scored hits, for a 13 percent success rate. And the test record is not getting better with time: the most recent successful high-altitude test occurred in January 1991 and the last 11 such intercept tests have been failures.

What can we learn from this test record? What it shows is that learning to do high-speed hit-to-kill -- commonly dubbed "hitting a bullet with a bullet" -- is very hard. Indeed, the Director of the Ballistic Missile Defense Organization, General Lyles, stated in his Senate testimony (3) in January 1999 that one thing that had changed in the previous year was an appreciation of "the reality of how difficult this job is... The reality of how tough it is to try to do missile defense and how tough it is to try to get hit-to-kill technology..."

It is clear that the technology has not satisfied even the first criteria listed above -- demonstrating a capability against cooperative targets. Thus, as of today the technology does not exist to justify making a decision to begin deployment. Anyone asserting otherwise is basing their assertion on something other than the demonstrated facts.

Indeed, a year ago, the Welch Report (4) stated that "After more than a dozen flight tests ... we are still on 'step one' in demonstrating and validating HTK [hit-to-kill] systems. ...And even when this first step is achieved, these programs will have to go through steps two and three: demonstrating reliable HTK at a weapon system level and demonstrating reliable HTK against likely real-world targets."

Since the Welch Report appeared, two more flight tests of exo-atmospheric hit-to-kill interceptors have taken place (5), and both failed to hit their target. Thus, the more recent tests only strengthen the Welch Panel's conclusion.

Where will the program be next summer?

What is the program status likely to be next summer, when the Deployment Readiness Review is scheduled? The United States is planning to conduct four NMD intercept tests between now and then. However, the date of the first intercept test has recently slipped by several months, and it is not clear how many of these tests will actually take place by June 2000.

Even if all four of these intercept tests take place between now and next June, and are successful, would that satisfy the first criteria? It would certainly help demonstrate the principle of hit-to-kill under test conditions, which would be a necessary first step for the testing program.

However, it would still not indicate that the technology had satisfied the first criteria because these tests will be performed using surrogate boosters and kill vehicles and not prototypes of the components that would actually be deployed. Prototypes of the interceptor technology that is intended for deployment will not be tested until FY2003. (The first tests of the prototype interceptor booster and kill vehicle are planned for FY2001 and FY2003, respectively.)

Thus, the tests planned for the next year will not assess the performance of two of the most important components of the system. Yet, as General Lyles testified in February of this year, "The ground-based interceptor (GBI) weapon is the least mature element of the system and entails the highest technological development risks" (6).

More importantly, the second criterion will not have been met since apparently none of these four planned tests will simulate real-world conditions. According to the FY 1998 DOT&E Report, "The NMD T&E [testing and evaluation] program is building a target suite that, while an adequate representation of one or two reentry vehicles, may not be representative of threat penetration aids, booster, or post-boost vehicles. Test targets of the current program do not represent the complete 'design-to' threat space and are not representative of the full sensor requirements spectrum" (7).

And it is quite possible for a technology to work well in tests and fail in the real world. For example, recall that the Patriot system used in the Gulf War did phenomenally well in tests against ballistic missiles -- it had a perfect 17 for 17 record in intercept tests prior to the Gulf War. Yet the Army claims only a 61% success rate for Patriot during the Gulf War, and independent assessments (8) of its performance (as well as statements by Israeli officials [9]) indicate that the success rate was actually much lower--and perhaps close to zero.

One reason for the failure of the Patriot to destroy the Iraqi al Huseyn missiles is that the Iraqi missiles broke up on reentry, creating multiple targets that maneuvered as they fell to the ground. These proved to be very effective countermeasures, albeit inadvertent ones. Future missiles must be expected to incorporate intentional countermeasures to confuse or overwhelm the defense.

Indeed, the US NMD system will succeed or fail based on its ability to deal with countermeasures. So before deciding to deploy, the US must understand whether the NMD system it is developing is likely to be able to work against plausible real-world threats.

Members of the Rumsfeld Commission have stressed that "absence of evidence in not evidence of absence" for ballistic missile development; this advice must also be heeded relative to countermeasure development for those missiles. Dr. William Graham and others have emphasized the importance of using "Try Intelligence" or "TRYINT" to assess potential ballistic missile threats. This would involve trying to build ballistic missiles using only the kind of information and technology assumed to be available to potential adversaries to see what is possible. The United States must also use TRYINT in assessing potential countermeasures and must test the NMD system against such countermeasures. While a countermeasure TRYINT program -- the Countermeasures Hands-On Program (CHOP) -- exists, the level of effort devoted to it is likely inadequate (10). Moreover, it is not clear at what level its results will be incorporated into intercept tests.

It turns out that the type of interceptor the US NMD system will use -- a hit-to-kill interceptor that is designed to intercept outside the atmosphere in the vacuum of space -- is particularly vulnerable to certain kinds of simple countermeasures. I will not go into detail here, but countermeasures that are technically simple (such as lightweight balloon decoys with the warhead also enclosed in a balloon) can make the system fail catastrophically.

Will these types of simple countermeasures be available to developing countries such as North Korea? Yes. It is logically inconsistent to assert that developing countries will be able to build or otherwise acquire the technology for intercontinental ballistic missiles, and at the same time will not have access to the far simpler technology to equip these missiles with effective countermeasures. (If one assumes these countries are receiving technology and/or assistance for ballistic missiles from more advanced missile states, such as Russia, one must also assume they would receive assistance on countermeasures.)

Are ballistic missiles equipped with countermeasures merely a theoretical threat? Some people argue that developing countries may not bother to use countermeasures. But it is also logically inconsistent to assert that countries like North Korea or Iran will go to all the trouble to build or acquire intercontinental ballistic missiles -- largely to be able to target the United States -- and at the same time will not be motivated to use simple countermeasures to defeat a US NMD system deployed to counter their ballistic missiles.

While some see the Iraqi use of ballistic missiles in the 1991 Gulf War as a wake-up call to the United States about the future ballistic missile threat, it was also no doubt a wake-up call to other countries about the future deployment of US missile defenses. Thus, countermeasures should not be thought of as an optional add-on that a country might or might not decide to put on its long-range missile at the last minute. A country that is developing or trying to acquire intercontinental ballistic missiles would no doubt see the parallel development or purchase of countermeasures as an integral part of its missile program.

Thus, asserting that countries deploying intercontinental ballistic missiles either will not be able to or will not bother to use effective countermeasures amounts to wishful thinking and should not be the basis for military planning.

Two sensor fly-by tests have been done that have reportedly distinguished decoys from a mock warhead. What does this mean? From a technical point of view, there is no doubt that sensors can detect temperature differences between objects in space, or differences in wobbling motions. But this capability is only useful in discriminating between warhead and decoys if the attacker does not manipulate the heat or motion signals in a way to confuse the defense. Rather than using decoys that look and behave differently from the warhead, the attacker would disguise the warhead to make it look like a decoy, or make all the objects dissimilar in appearance.

The bottom line is that none of the three criteria outlined above will have been satisfied by next summer. At best, the first criteria may be partially satisfied. Thus, it is clear that by next summer the technology will not justify making a decision to begin deployment of an NMD system.

Recommendations for the future

What should the United States do to find out if the technology is ready in the longer term? In particular, what kind of a test program would the United States need to determine whether its NMD system is technically ready to deploy?

• First, the United States should not set an unrealistic time scale for its testing program. The testing schedule should not be predetermined, but should be set by the outcome of previous tests. There must be sufficient time between tests to assimilate the results of one test before conducting the next test.
  
  
• Second, the United States should set up a Red Team whose job it is to devise countermeasures using the kind of information and technology available to developing countries.
  
  
• Third, the NMD testing program should include flight tests of the interceptor against the best countermeasures potentially available to a threat nation, as devised by the Red Team. The United States should not decide to deploy an NMD system before it is proved effective against the Red Team countermeasures.
  
  
• Fourth, the United States should conduct enough tests to assess the reliability of the system. The number of tests required will depend both on the system reliability requirements and the test record.
  
  
• Finally, there should be independent oversight of the overall NMD testing program. In particular, there must be careful oversight to ensure that the Red Team is independent and adequately supported, and that its ideas are incorporated in tests.
  
  

Conclusion

National Missile Defense is a highly politicized issue and there is great political pressure on decision-makers to do something. But the political response must not get too far ahead of what the technology can deliver.

General Lyles stated in January 1999 (11) about the newly revised NMD program, "You will find no programs at all [in the Department of Defense] that have the limited amount of testing and the aggressive schedule that we've embarked upon here even with this revised program...."

If the United States is serious about deploying a defense against ballistic missiles launched at its territory then it should be serious about finding out if the technology is ready. The only way to find out is by a rigorous and realistic testing program.

Notes

1. Report of the Panel on Reducing Risk In Ballistic Missile Defense Flight Test Programs, 27 February 1998.

2. FY98 Annual Report of the Director, Operational Test & Evaluation, submitted to Congress February 1999.

3. Lt. General Lester Lyles, testimony before the Subcommittee on Strategic Forces, Committee on Armed Services, United States Senate, February 24, 1999.

4. Report of the Panel on Reducing Risk In Ballistic Missile Defense Flight Test Programs.

5. Both of these tests were of THAAD interceptors.

6. Lt. General Lester Lyles, testimony before the Subcommittee on Strategic Forces, Committee on Armed Services, United States Senate, February 24, 1999.

7. FY98 Annual Report of the Director, Operational Test & Evaluation, submitted to Congress February 1999.

8. George N. Lewis and Theodore A. Postol, "Video Evidence on the Effectiveness of Patriot during the 1991 Gulf War," Science and Global Security, Vol. 4, pp.1-63, 1993. The Panel on Public Affairs of the American Physical Society appointed a panel to review the Lewis-Postol analysis and criticisms of it; the panel found that the Lewis-Postol methodology was sound and that none of the criticisms stood up to scrutiny. These findings are reported in Jeremiah D. Sullivan, Dan Fenstermacher, Daniel Fisher, Ruth Howes, O'Dean Judd, Roger Speed, "Technical Debate over Patriot Performance in the Gulf War," Science and Global Security, Vol. 8, pp.1-55, 1998.

9. Moshe Arens, former Israeli Minister of Defense, and General Dan Shomron, Chief of Staff of the Israeli Defense Force during the 1991 Gulf War, stated in interviews conducted by Reuven Pedatzur on an Israeli TV documentary (21 November 1993) that the Patriot successfully intercepted at most one Scud over Israel. Highlights of these interviews are reported in Tim Weiner, New York Times, 21 Novemner 1993, and Newsweek, November 1993.

10. According to Michael C. Sirak, "'Chop' shop helps create robust missile defenses," Inside Missile Defense, Vol. 5, No. 8, April 21, 1999, pp.1, 8-12, CHOP brings together teams of four engineers to work on developing countermeasures for nine to twelve months. Yet a country serious about developing countermeasures could work for many years on the problem.

11. Lt. Gen. Lester L. Lyles, Director, BMDO, DoD News Briefing, January 20, 1999.

Appendix A

Following are excerpts from the section on NMD of the FY 1998 Annual Report by the Director, Operational Testing and Evaluation (DOT&E), available at http://www.dote.osd.mil/reports/FY98/98JTETOC1.html#jte.

Test & Evaluation Assessment

The aggressive schedule established for the NMD Deployment Readiness Program presents a major challenge. For instance, if a deployment is required by 2003, the NMD program will have to compress the work of 10 to 12 years into 6 years. As a result, many of the design and T&E activities will be done concurrently. Program delays have already caused IFT-3 to move to June 1999. This represents almost an 18-month slip over the last year and a half. This clearly demonstrates an extremely high-risk schedule and DOT&E considers the probability of meeting the DRR on time with the currently planned T&E program as highly unlikely.

The complex operating characteristics and environments of the NMD T&E Program make it necessary to plan and conduct IFTs that are limited in scope. DRR information based on a few flight tests with immature elements will be limited. As a result, the T&E program will rely heavily on ground testing and the execution of simulations for assessing the maturity and performance of the NMD system concept. For example, the decision to downselect the EKV contract early eliminates the benefit of intercept flight data to support that decision. This warrants a rigorous ground hardware-in-the-loop simulator test program to assess competing seeker design. It does not appear, however, that the LSI will increase the scope of that ground testing in the absence of the flight test.

The following risks can potentially impact the NMD T&E program's ability to test, analyze, and evaluate system performance:

• Limited system-level testing. Only two flight tests and one system-level flight test (IFT-5) are planned before the DRR. Should IFT-5 fail, the DRR would be left with limited IFT and IGT data on which to base a decision. Furthermore, the IFT-5 configuration differs from the Capability-1 system in that it uses prototype and surrogate sensors and a surrogate GBI booster stack.
  
  
• Limited engagement conditions. Flight test launches from California and interceptors from Kwajalein Missile Range, along with safety constraints, place significant limitations on achieving realistic geometry and closing velocities.
  
  
• GBI booster testing. The NMD T&E program makes use of a surrogate launch vehicle, the Payload Launch Vehicle, for all flight tests prior to the DRR. The objective booster contract was just awarded in July 1998 and first delivery will not occur until after the FY00 DRR. Lack of IFT data without the objective GBI capability (e.g., larger burnout velocity than the Payload Launch Vehicle) before the DRR will limit the GBI evaluation.
  
  
• Limitations of ground testing. The Integrated System Test Capability will be the major source of data generated from ground testing. However, test articles used to represent NMD elements in the testbed may not be verified or validated in time for the DRR. In addition, early tests like IGT-1A were very rudimentary and only tested the message exchange between the BMC3 and prototype X-Band Radar; a simulated interceptor was not even launched. Substantial upgrades must be performed on the Integrated System Test Capability before overall system performance can be thoroughly assessed.
  
  
• Target suite. The NMD T&E program is building a target suite that, while an adequate representation of one or two reentry vehicles, may not be representative of threat penetration aids, booster, or post-boost vehicles. Test targets of the current program do not represent the complete "design-to" threat space and are not representative of the full sensor requirements spectrum (e.g., discrimination requirements). Much of this limitation is attributable to the lack of information about the real threat. Multiple target testing: NMD system performance against multiple targets is not currently planned for demonstration in the flight test program. Validated simulations will be used to evaluate multiple simultaneous target engagement.
  
  
• BMC3 interoperability testing. The BMC3 to Commander-In-Chief interface inside Cheyenne Mountain will not be tested prior to the DRR. Spare test articles: The current TEMP identifies a lack of spare test articles due to a resource allocation trade-off. This may have a significant impact on schedule and data availability for the FY00 DRR, and ultimately an FY03 deployment, if there are any flight test failures.
  
  
• Limitations of ground lethality testing. There is no ground test facility capable of propelling EKVs or their full-scale replicas against targets at the closing velocities expected for NMD intercepts. These closing velocities will exceed 7 kilometers per second. Existing full-scale facilities cannot yet achieve 3 kilometers per second. The lethality test data to support DRR will be collected from light-gas-gun tests of reduced-scale replicas of EKV surrogates and targets at the lower-end (six kilometers per second or less) of the intercept velocity spectrum.
  
  
• Programmatic changes. The advent of the LSI contractor has resulted in the repeat of extensive planning and analysis already performed by the JPO. The System Evaluation Plan is being replaced by a LSI generated System Verification Plan; and there does not appear to be a strong desire on the part of the JPO to have any independent developmental evaluation. The High Fidelity System Simulation, which was to be the fast running, system performance, digital simulation for assessing many scenarios throughout the threat space, has been largely abandoned in favor of developing Boeing's LSI Integrated Distributed Simulation.
  

Lessons Learned

The NMD system shares an important functional attribute with theater missile defense systems like THAAD, Navy Theater Wide, and PAC-3--all are hit-to-kill systems. Recent THAAD flight test failures have provided us with the following important lessons: (1) hit-to-kill technology is extremely difficult; (2) pre-flight checkouts of reliability and performance need to be emphasized; and (3) strict quality control activities need to be implemented in the manufacturing of the GBI. In addition, the failure of IFT-1 underscored the need for a more robust program for targets and system spares, which will support the development of ballistic missile defense systems. This failure and its resultant impact on the test program highlights the very high level of schedule risk associated with the NMD program.

All of the above points were reemphasized in the findings of the Institute for Defense Analyses study, chaired by Retired General Larry Welch, on Reducing Risk in Ballistic Missile Defense Flight Test Programs. This study was co-sponsored by DOT&E, the Director, Systems, Engineering and Evaluation, and the Director, Ballistic Missile Defense Organization.