WASHINGTON — With the Bush administration only several months away from fielding a national anti-missile defense, the Pentagon’s chief weapons evaluator told Congress Thursday he couldn’t be sure the system will be able to knock down North Korean missiles launched at the United States, the system’s main initial purpose.
Under sharp questioning from Democratic senators troubled by soaring costs and a shortage of realistic testing so far, Thomas Christie said the system is not yet sufficiently developed to validate Pentagon computer models showing it would be effective.
"So at this time, we cannot be sure that the actual system would work against a real North Korean missile threat?" asked Sen. Jack Reed, D-R.I. "I would say that’s true," replied Christie, the Pentagon’s director of Operational Test and Evaluation.
Nonetheless, Adm. James Ellis, who heads U.S. Strategic Command, which will control the system, said he was "comfortable" with the test data he has seen and declared the system would have definite — if rudimentary — military usefulness.
The disparate assessments at a contentious hearing of the Senate Armed Services Committee underscored the extent to which the Bush administration is departing from traditional procedures for developing new weapons to get some kind of anti-missile system in place.
Normally, a new weapon would undergo extensive operational testing before being fielded. Instead, the Pentagon plans to start deploying interceptor missiles in Alaska and California this summer, declare the system operational by September and progress toward increasingly realistic flight tests.
The system, designed to knock down warheads by launching ground-based missile interceptors into space, has flown eight intercept attempts since 1999, scoring five hits. But the tests have involved surrogate elements and other artificial conditions.
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