Anti-missile system scrapped

The Washington Post

WASHINGTON — The Pentagon, in a serious setback for the Bush administration’s missile defense plans, Friday canceled a multibillion-dollar missile defense system being developed by the Navy, citing "poor performance" and 50 percent cost overruns.

The program, which was scheduled to be deployed in two years, was designed to protect Navy ships and ports from attacks by missiles or manned aircraft. Like the land-based Patriot anti-missile system, it was intended to provide a last-ditch defense of small, selected areas if other defenses failed.

The surprise move to cancel the program called into question whether the United States would be able to develop any missile defense programs on the timetable projected by the Bush administration.

It came one day after President Bush formally notified Russia that the United States would withdraw from the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty to clear the way for unrestricted tests of missile defense systems that he hopes ultimately will provide a protective shield over the continental United States.

Phil Coyle, former head of the Pentagon’s office of weapons testing and evaluation, said the Navy system was the most advanced of various "theater" missile defense systems, which in contrast to national systems are designed to protect battlefields and other relatively small areas. He said that theater defense systems were well ahead of the more complicated national missile defense schemes that intercept missiles in the boost phase and in mid-course.

"And so for one of the shortest-range systems to be canceled is not a good sign," he said.

The Navy program would also have been used to protect warships and amphibious landing forces overseas, such as the ships operating in the Indian Ocean supporting operations by U.S. forces in Afghanistan.

In January 1997, the program scored an initial success when it managed to hit a target missile during its first test, said Lt. Col. Rick Lehner, the spokesman for the Defense Department’s Ballistic Missile Defense Organization. But, he said, "after that, there were numerous problems of integration, and the test schedule kept slipping and slipping and slipping until it became untenable."

Coyle said the Navy program has been struggling with a range of technical issues, including the complexity of the computer program to be used on Aegis destroyers, discriminating between real and decoy missiles, search and tracking processors, and the cooling system on the infrared seekers that discern "hot" enemy missiles.

Because other missile defense programs face similar technical issues, the Navy cancellation did not augur well for missile defense in general, Coyle said.

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