Agence France-Presse, The U.S. military is set to carry out another test of its controversial missile defense system, this time seeking to shoot down a long-range test missile launched in Alaska with interceptors from California.
Pentagon officials said the test could be carried out between 1500 GMT and 1900 GMT on May 25, but foul weather at the test site in Alaska’s Kodiak Island could postpone it to May 26, or even into next week.
Rick Lehner, a spokesman for the Pentagon’s Missile Defense Agency, said May 24 that it will be the second time that the system will be tested with all its operational components — a complex network of radars, command centers and an interceptor missile topped with a “kill vehicle.”
If it works, the kill vehicle will collide at high speed with a mock warhead in space over the Pacific, pulverizing it.
“It’s a continuing process of testing under what we call operationally realistic conditions,” Lehner said.
“We have an operationally configured interceptor, launched from an operational site, using operational crews, with an operational kill vehicles,” he said.
A test failure would be a blow to the program at a time when the U.S. is negotiating to install missile interceptors and a radar in Poland and the Czech Republic over vehement opposition from Moscow.
The last test on this segment of the multi-layered missile defense system was carried out in September 2006, but the program’s history is one of hits, misses and technical glitches. Critics say the tests are scripted to succeed.
Lehner said the test will essentially repeat the September test, except that this time an interception is the primary objective.
“The target is launched from Kodiak, Alaska, heads down the west coast of the U.S. and then we launch the interceptor from an operational [site] at Vandenberg Air Force Base [on California’s central coast],” he said.
An upgraded early warning radar at Beale Air Force Base in northern California will track the missile warhead and feed data to a command center in Colorado Springs, Colo. The command center then triggers the interceptor missile launch at Vandenberg.
“And then after the interceptor is launched it can get target updates through the command and control system based upon the Beale radar,” Lehner said.
Three other radars also will track the target missile “in shadow mode,” gathering data that will be analyzed later but not used to guide interceptor missile, he said.
They include a powerful X-band targeting radar mounted on a seagoing oil drilling platform, a smaller X-band radar at Vandenberg, and an air defense radar aboard an Aegis warship in the Pacific.
The crews manning the interceptor missile will be given a “general window” for the launch but will not know when the target missile has been launched until it is picked up by an early warning satellite, Lehner said.
Critics argue that the system is incapable of distinguishing a warhead from even simple decoys in space.
“Coming in the midst of a congressional funding debate, a hit or miss is likely to be taken as a sign of the health of the program,” said David Wright, with the Union of Concerned Scientists.
“But the test will tell little or nothing about whether the system will be able to intercept attacking warheads,” he said.
Pentagon officials say the system is designed to intercept a limited nuclear attack by a rogue state, and is not intended as defense against larger, more sophisticated Russian or Chinese arsenals.
