Testimony: The Value of the Fort Greely Test Bed
Testimony at a Special Investigations Briefing on "Rushing to Failure in 2004: Is Missile Defense Testing Adequate?" held by John F. Tierney, US House of Representatives Committee on Government Reform, Subcommittee on National Security, Veterans Affairs, and International Relations
June 11, 2002
Statement of Dr. Lisbeth Gronlund
Senior Staff Scientist, Union of Concerned Scientists and
Research Fellow, Security Studies Program, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)
Mr. Tierney, other distinguished members of the House of Representatives, I appreciate the opportunity to take part in the briefing today.
I have been asked to comment on several issues related to the ground-based, midcourse (GMC) element of the missile defense system currently under development by the United States. These include:
- the value to the test program of the silos and interceptors scheduled to begin construction at Fort Greely, Alaska, later this week.
- the potential utility of the Fort Greely facilities and other test assets for use as a rudimentary missile defense system as early as 2004.
- the implications of MDA's recent decision to classify information on the targets and countermeasures used in future intercept tests for the ability of my organization-the Union of Concerned Scientists-and other independent researchers to continue to assess what capabilities have been demonstrated in these tests.
Before I turn to these issues, I would like to make a comment inspired by the timing of this hearing. On Thursday, July 13, President Bush's decision to withdraw from the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty will become effective, and the treaty will no longer be in force. The Bush administration's rationale for withdrawing at this time is that the treaty was impeding the US missile defense test program. This is not true1. The ABM treaty in no way constrained testing of the ground-based midcourse (GMC) system that is the centerpiece of the Bush administration's missile defense plans, and the only system against long-range missiles currently undergoing testing. In fact, the treaty actually permits deployment of such a system in North Dakota to defend a region of the United States, but not the entire country.
It is true that the treaty would have prohibited the testing of other types of sea-based and space-based missile defense systems-but these prohibitions would have been felt only several years from now when those technologies were ready for testing.
Moreover, while both governmental and nongovernmental analysts have identified numerous problems with the testing program for the GMC system, none of those problems were a consequence of the ABM treaty being in force. Nor should we expect that any of those problems will be addressed by the end of the ABM treaty.
Let me now turn to the issue of Fort Greely.
The Utility of Fort Greely for Testing
The Missile Defense Agency (MDA) itself has acknowledged that it needs to increase the realism of the tests, and is beginning to build a "2004 Test Bed" that it says is needed to allow more realistic tests and could also serve as an emergency defense by 2004. A key component of that Test Bed is a set of five silos and interceptors to be based at Fort Greely, Alaska. In fact, the first step that the MDA will take when the ABM Treaty is no longer in force on Thursday, July 13, is to begin construction of interceptor silos for the GMC system in Fort Greely.
However, despite the fact that the five interceptors and silos at Fort Greely are included as a major part of the new Test Bed, these silos would not be used to launch either interceptor or target missiles. Therefore, Fort Greely has no utility to the flight-testing program of the ground-based mid-course missile defense system.
For safety reasons, the United States does not launch long-range missiles from an inland site. Indeed, MDA's predecessor, the Ballistic Missile Defense Organization (BMDO), has stated that test launches cannot be conducted from Fort Greely since it is too near populated areas. According to testimony given 31 July 2001 by Dr. Patricia Sanders, BMDO Deputy Director for Test, Simulation and Evaluation, "At present, BMDO does not intend to launch any GBI [ground-based interceptor] from Fort Greely during the testing process because these missiles would fly over land in violation of current flight test safety restrictions." 2 Therefore, interceptor missiles would instead be launched from the missile launch facility on Kodiak Island off the southern Alaskan coast, which is some 500 miles away from Fort Greely. The interceptor missiles could then be launched over the ocean and, according to BMDO, would "act as a representation of launched GBIs from the Fort Greely site."3
In response to questions about the testing utility of silos that could not be used to test-launch interceptors, BMDO stated that it might try to change the regulations so interceptors could be launched from Fort Greely. However, there is no compelling reason to launch interceptor missiles from Fort Greely rather than from Kodiak for a research and development test program.
BMDO also argued that building these facilities at Fort Greely would be useful-even without flight testing-because doing so would allow it to conduct other kinds of testing. According to Dr. Sanders' testimony, "The GBIs at Fort Greely will allow BMDO to prove out the design and siting of a GBI field that would be required to fire in a salvo without having the GBI interfering with each other GBI, to test the communication between all component parts, and to test for fuels degradation in the artic environment, as well as to develop and rehearse maintenance and upkeep processes and procedures."
First, and most fundamental, these activities have no place in an R&D testing program of a system for which fundamental questions of system effectiveness have not yet been addressed, but rather are the kinds of activities needed to get a deployment site up and running.
Moreover, even if such assessments were needed or justified at this stage in the testing process, MDA would not need to build five interceptor silos to test how fuel degrades in the arctic or to develop maintenance procedures. In fact, if there is a potential problem with fuel degradation at Fort Greely, it would be premature and a potential waste of money to build five silos there before this issue is adequately understood.
Finally, the argument that the United States needs to build five silos at Fort Greely to "prove out" the design and siting of an interceptor site where GBIs fired in a salvo would not interfere with each other makes no sense. MDA is not proposing to test launch five GBIs in a salvo to demonstrate that they do not interfere with each other, but rather to prove that it can build a site with five silos of the proper design. If the United States knows how to design and build silos so missiles can be salvo-launched, there is no need to prove this capability at Fort Greely as part of an R&D program. If, on the other hand, the United States does not know how to design and build such silo sites, then building the silos at Fort Greely is not the way to demonstrate this capability because the interceptors could not be fired from these silos. Moreover, MDA is already planning to build multiple interceptor silos at Kwajalein and Kodiak to test the system with simultaneous interceptor launches.
For all of these reasons, the pending construction of missile silos at Fort Greely cannot be justified for testing purposes.
Instead of building silos with no testing utility, MDA should focus more of its resources on the countermeasures problem. Everything appears to be on a fast track except the MDA countermeasures program, which is charged with gaining a better understanding of the countermeasure capability of emerging missile states, developing prototype countermeasures to use in the intercept test program, and assessing the effectiveness of the defense in the face of such countermeasures. It will apparently be years before new prototype countermeasures are ready to be used in the test program.
Block 2004: The potential value of Fort Greely and other tests assets as an operational missile defense system in 2004
The other argument for a crash program to build the proposed missile defense facilities in Alaska is to create a near-term "emergency defense" that might offer some capability in the event of a missile attack on the United States from North Korea. However, such an "emergency defense" system would have very limited utility, for two reasons.
First, the United States will have little or no basis by 2004 to be confident in the performance of the Fort Greely interceptors under realistic operating conditions. The interceptors will not have begun operational testing by that time-such testing for the ground-based midcourse system is currently scheduled to begin in 2007, and this schedule may slip. Until 2007, all the intercept tests conducted will be research and development (R&D) tests, which are intended to provide information to allow design modifications to the system but not to assess the system effectiveness.
In fact, the R&D intercept tests that have taken place to date have been carefully scripted. There has been no variation in target or interceptor trajectory, intercept point, closing angle, or time of day; the defense has relied on a priori information about the appearance of the mock warhead and decoys to discriminate one from the other; and the closing speeds have been artificially low because the interceptor has used a two-stage rather than a three-stage booster, as planned for the deployed system.4
While future R&D tests will presumably begin to vary the test conditions, the defense will continue to rely on a priori information about the targets. It also appears that a three-stage booster will not be used in the intercept tests until late 2003, at the earliest. As the independent panel headed by General Larry Welch pointed out in their November 1999 review of the program, it is unclear whether the kill vehicle can tolerate the additional stresses it will experience with a faster, higher-acceleration three-stage booster.
Second, the proposed emergency defense system would provide very little protection should an attack from North Korea occur. Even if the interceptor and kill vehicle technology worked perfectly by that time, the system performance would be very limited by its sensors.
Had President Clinton decided to begin deployment of his NMD system, the first step the Pentagon would have taken was to begin construction of an X-band ground-based radar on Shemya. BMDO stated that building the radar there would take longer than deploying the interceptors or any other part of the system, so that construction of the radar needed to start first. Plans for this X-band radar have been shelved by the Bush administration. Thus, while BMDO has stated that the X-band radar is a key sensor needed to discriminate the warhead from other objects, including debris or simple decoys, there would be no such radar that could observe trajectories from North Korea fired toward the United States.
Instead of building the Shemya X-band radar, the Bush Pentagon intends to upgrade the Cobra Dane radar on the island. This radar was built in the mid-1970s to observe Soviet missile tests and has a fixed orientation appropriate to this mission, looking in a fan northwest from Shemya over Russia (see Figure 1). Because of its orientation, it has a very marginal capability to observe missiles launched by North Korea against Hawaii. While it can observe missiles on trajectories from North Korea to many other parts of the United States, trajectories to the West Coast will not lie in the part of the radar beam that provides high-quality tracking.5
Moreover, because the Cobra Dane radar has a longer wavelength than an X-band radar, it will be much less capable of accurately tracking objects in space and of discriminating warheads from decoys.6 According to testimony by Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz before the Senate Armed Services Committee on 17 July 2001, an "upgraded Cobra Dane radar will provide enhanced early warning and may have some ABM radar capability," but "in any operational system, we anticipate that the X-band radar at Shemya would be required to provide needed discrimination, even with all possible upgrades to Cobra Dane." Without an ability to discriminate, even simple decoys would overwhelm the defense since it would require that an interceptor be fired at each decoy.
| This figure shows the fan of the Cobra Dane radar, and the ground track of missile trajectories from North Korea to Los Angeles and to Honolulu. BMDO has given the following parameters for the radar fan: Original field-of-view: 259 to 19 degrees in azimuth, 0 to 80 degrees in elevation; Extended field-of-view: 251 to 27 degrees in azimuth, 0 to 30 degrees in elevation. The edges of the azimuthal coverage are plotted in the figure, with the original shown in solid lines and the extended shown in dotted lines. Richelson's book The U.S. Intelligence Community (2nd edition) states that the highest quality tracking capability is only available in a 44 degree fan in the center of the field-of-view, and that it is only in this smaller fan that the radar is able "to provide information on the size and shape" of the object it is tracking. That fan is also shown in the figure. |
Thus, a missile defense system consisting of the Cobra Dane radar and five inadequately tested interceptors in Fort Greely will provide no real defense. Rather, the decision to build the Fort Greely silos and upgrade the Cobra Dane radar appears to reflect a desire on the part of the Bush administration to deploy something quickly, even if it is only symbolic.
I will now briefly discuss the role that independent analysts have played in providing both policy-makers and the public with accurate, timely information about countermeasures and the testing program. I will then consider MDA's plans to classify information about future intercept tests, and the effect this will have on public oversight of the ground-based midcourse missile defense system.
Classification of Future Test Information
When the first flight tests of the ground-based midcourse system took place-in October 1999 and January 2000-the issue of countermeasures was largely absent from the policy debate. Even the term "countermeasures" was itself not widely known, and in writing about these issues we always defined the term whenever we used it by adding something like "measures an attacker could take to confuse, overwhelm or otherwise defeat the defense."
In fact, the BMDO had essentially defined away the problem by requiring the first phase of the planned system-the C1 phase-to be effective only against threats that employed no or only "simple" countermeasures. But BMDO's definition of "simple" proved to be overly simple-it stated that the single balloon decoy used in the first two intercept tests, which had a significantly different infrared signature from that of the mock warhead, was "more than representative of the threat."7
In April 2000, the two organizations I work for-the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) and the MIT Security Studies Program-released a detailed report entitled "Countermeasures: A Technical Evaluation of the Operational Effectiveness of the Planned US National Missile Defense System," which I co-authored along with ten other physicists and engineers. It discussed the types of countermeasures that would be available to any country that could build a long-range missile armed with either biological agents or a nuclear weapon, and it provided a detailed analysis of three such countermeasures. The report concluded that any one of these three countermeasures would render the fully-deployed system-not just the first phase-ineffective.8
In the Countermeasures Report, we also looked at the issue of testing and the planned test program. We called on BMDO to demonstrate that the defense would be effective through a rigorous testing program that incorporated realistic countermeasures. We argued that the best-and perhaps only-way to assess what countermeasures were realistic was to establish a "Red Team" to develop countermeasures using technology available to emerging missile states. We called for the administration to establish both an independent Red Team-outside of BMDO-and a standing high-level independent review panel to oversee the countermeasures effort.
I think it is fair to say that this report raised the profile of the countermeasure issue and pushed the Pentagon and BMDO to take it more seriously. I have been told that this issue is one that had been raised by some analysts within the Pentagon, but that they had not found a receptive audience.
The June 2000 Welch Report echoed some of the concerns that we had previously raised in the report, namely the lack of attention to the countermeasures problem. And in his speech announcing his decision to not begin deployment of the NMD system, President Clinton cited the vulnerability of the system to countermeasures as one of the reasons for his decision.
Ultimately, the UCS/MIT report helped push BMDO to establish a new countermeasures program, which consists of a Red, Blue, and White Team. Unfortunately, the Red Team is not independent of the MDA, but rather part of MDA, which raises serious concerns about conflict of interest.
Thus, in conducting this study and releasing the Countermeasures Report, the Union of Concerned Scientists and MIT Security Studies Program performed a valuable public service that the government itself could-or would-not do.
But this is not an isolated incident.
The independent peer review of major public-funded projects of any sort is essential to the functioning of a democracy such as ours, as is a well-informed media and public. Because of the complexity and the technical nature of the issues involved in the missile defense debate, it is more difficult for both policy-makers and the public to understand than are many policy issues. Independent, technically-informed analysis of missile defense issues, such as that performed by researchers at the Union of Concerned Scientists and MIT, plays an important role in ensuring that the United States makes the best policy choices.
UCS has continued to provide an important public service through its assessments of the intercept tests as the testing program for the ground-based midcourse system has proceeded. These assessments are particularly valuable because they are the only ones available on a timely basis. While the Director of Operational Testing and Evaluation provides a report on the overall testing program at the end of each year, this is long after the tests have been conducted. And while MDA briefs reporters on upcoming tests and results, it does not point out the significance of-or clearly explain-the limitations of the tests.
In November 2001, UCS issued a report that reviewed intercept tests IFT-3 through IFT-6 and plans for IFT-7.9 In the report, we took care to note that it is to be expected that tests conducted at this early stage of development will have many limitations and artificialities. But it is important that members of Congress and the public have a clear understanding of these limitations so that they can understand what these tests do-and do not-imply about the maturity of the technology and its readiness for deployment.
In our report, we described the many artificialities of the first five intercept tests, noting that the tests had essentially been repeats of one another, conducted with identical test geometries, with the same objects in the target cluster, and at the same time of day. We also clearly explained the role of the C-band beacon on the mock warhead in these tests.
We found that all the intercept attempts were made under endgame conditions that were-in several ways-unrealistic for a defense against long-range missiles. Because the tests have used a two-stage rather than a three-stage surrogate booster, the closing speeds have been artificially low, thus giving the kill vehicle more time to home on the target and making the task of the kill vehicle easier. In addition, the tests were apparently designed so that the warhead, decoy, and bus would all remain simultaneously in the kill vehicle's field-of-view until very late in the homing process, thereby allowing the kill vehicle to collect data on all the objects without needing to maneuver to rotate its sensors from one object to the other. We also found that the C-band beacon on the mock warhead provided the defense with very high quality tracking information on the location of the warhead, allowing the interceptor to be launched on a trajectory that was aimed essentially directly at the warhead rather than at the larger target cluster. We concluded that while the test program has demonstrated hit-to-kill, it has not done so under realistic conditions and at realistic closing speeds.
The report also looked at the issue of decoys and discrimination. In all the tests, the mock warhead and balloon decoy appeared very different from one another to both the X-band radar and the kill vehicle's infrared sensor, thus presenting the defense with an artificially simple discrimination task. Moreover, the methodology used by the defense to discriminate in these tests is based on a deeply flawed assumption that the United States will have detailed information about the appearance of an attacker's warheads and decoys. In fact, because emerging missile states will not extensively flight-test their ballistic missiles, the United States will likely have very little information about their appearance.
In March 2002 UCS issued another report analyzing intercept test IFT-8, which for the first time included more than one balloon decoy. We found that the two small decoys added to this test were as different in appearance from the warhead as was the large balloon decoy that has been used in the previous tests. Therefore, all three decoys would have been readily distinguishable from the mock warhead by the defense sensors. This would not have presented a more stressing discrimination task than in previous intercept tests.
After the test, Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz stated that this was the first test in which decoys had looked like the mock warhead. Our analysis allowed us to refute this claim, which was then later corrected by MDA Director Ron Kadish, who stated that the decoys did not look like the warhead.
Recently, MDA announced that it would classify information about decoys and countermeasures used in all future intercept tests. This would of course have a significant effect on the ability of UCS and independent analysts to continue to provide assessments of the intercept tests and what they have demonstrated. It appears that the purpose of this new policy is precisely to prevent such independent analysis.
The classification of information about countermeasures used in the tests might be reasonable for a program nearing operational status, but this program is nowhere near operational status. It is still very early in the development and testing phase, and the issue of its ability to deal with countermeasures is the subject of an important, ongoing debate. There are no legitimate security reasons for classifying decoy information at this stage of the program. It instead appears that MDA is using classification to hide the program from public scrutiny.
Notes
1. For a more detailed discussion, see Lisbeth Gronlund, David Wright, Stephen Young, and Eryn MacDonald,The ABM Treaty and Missile Defense Testing: Does the United States Need to Withdraw Now?
2. 31 July 2001, testimony before Senate Appropriations Committee, Subcommittee on Military Construction. >3.BMDO, "Background Paper on Missile Defense System Test Bed Facility Construction," 17 July 2001.
4. For more details, see Lisbeth Gronlund, David Wright, and Stephen Young,An Assessment of the Intercept Test Program of the Ground-Based Midcourse National Missile Defense System.
5. Because of its orientation, the Cobra Dane radar cannot observe any missiles in the Kodiak-Kwajalein-Vandenberg test area, and therefore will be of marginal utility to the flight test program. For more details, see Lisbeth Gronlund and David Wright, "The Alaska Test Bed Fallacy: Missile Defense Deployment Goes Stealth," Arms Control Today, September 2001, p.3, available at http://www.armscontrol.org/act/2001_09/gronlundwrightsept01.asp
6.Cobra Dane has a frequency intermediate to the early warning radars and the X-band Ground-Based Radar.
7. Michael Sirak, "BMDO: Only Three NMD Tests 'Likely' Before Next Year's NMD Review," Inside Missile Defense, August 25, 1999, pp. 13-14.
8. Andrew Sessler, et al, Countermeasures: A Technical Evaluation of the Operational Effectiveness of the Planned US National Missile Defense System.
9. Lisbeth Gronlund, David Wright, and Stephen Young, An Assessment of the Intercept Test Program of the Ground-Based Midcourse National Missile Defense System
10. David Wright and Lisbeth Gronlund,Decoys and Discrimination in Intercept Test IFT-8 (PDF)
