After Friday's successful missile defense test, the generals are now saying that "we have all of the pieces in place that, if the nation needed to, we could respond" to a missile attack. I have a hunch Jack Hitt might disagree. His new story in Rolling Stone is exhaustive, often-hilarious look at the interceptor world -- and isn't likely to win him many friends in the missile defense crowd. Especially not with passages like the one below.
Hitt's piece isn't the most balanced article you'll ever read on the subject; the program's technical breakthroughs get comparatively short shrift. But it's still informative and funny enough to make it very much worth a read. Here's a snip:
To justify the deployment of untested technologies, officials at the Missile Defense Agency changed the fundamental epistemology of weapons procurement. In bureaucratic-speak, they ceased following a
"knowledge-based" system and relied instead upon what they called a
"capability-based" standard. In simple terms, it's the difference between knowing that something works because you've tested it, and believing that something works because all the parts, when put together, should be capable of working. It's the difference between test-driving a car before mass-producing it, and building one from a schematic but deciding not to turn the key for the first time until there's an emergency. It's the difference between the old carpenter's advice of "measure twice, cut once," and the new,
Rumsfeldian directive: "Cut already."In the old knowledge-based days, procurement was based more or less on common sense: Contractors developed a weapons system that showed promise, gradually trying it out in more and more realistic situations. Once progress warranted it, the Pentagon took over and performed "realistic operational testing" under conditions that simulated battle -- rain, heat, sandstorms. But now, under
Rumsfeld's "capability-based" standard, entire weapons systems can be built without bothering to see if they will work in the real world.
"Capability means the opposite of what you think it means here,"
says Coyle, the Pentagon's former director of testing. "If someone said, 'I'm going to take a capability-based approach to deciding something,' you would think it would mean more capability rather than less. In fact, in many instances it means buying military equipment with little or no capability, not more. Capability means it's better than nothing." Better than nothing. That, in essence, is the new, capability-based approach to missile defense. And it's not just the critics harping. As Gen. Obering himself explained it in 2005, "We have a better-than-zero chance of successfully intercepting, I believe, an inbound warhead..."
This kind of thinking does wonders for the speed with which you can deploy weapons. Take the shield's interceptor missiles. In the old way of building things, a few missiles would have been built and tested repeatedly until it was clear they could reliably launch, sync up with central command, interact with radar, intercept a test missile that shrouded itself in decoys, make the necessary discriminations and blow the proper target from the sky.
But under the new way of building things, all you have to do is have the whole thing worked out on paper, in simulated computer run-throughs and a few limited real-world tests. That's why fields of interceptor missiles are already up and, in a capability-based way, running in both Alaska and California.Of course, the "deploy now, test later" approach has its drawbacks. During a 2005 run, the interceptor couldn't get out of the silo because the retraction arm -- which hadn't been tested properly in real-world conditions -- didn't fully retract, causing the entire system to shut down. In the old knowledge-based world, that probably would have been worked out before deployment. But in the capability-based world, each interceptor had to be removed, a new retractor system designed and installed, and the interceptors put back into the silos.
The Aegis system is arguably the most successful system in the system of systems, testing-wise. We currently have three Aegis cruisers at sea in the Pacific, and they routinely hit their targets in tests: In April, the Aegis scored a twofer, simultaneously knocking down both a cruise and a ballistic missile.
But even those tests aren't realistic. "Those engagements are quite scripted," says Coyle. "All the pieces are in the right places so the engagement can occur." The interceptors onboard the Aegis are currently half as fast as they need to be, so during the tests, the ships are located within a range that makes it possible for their missiles to reach their target.The Missile Defense Agency doesn't deny that it rigs its tests
-- it merely insists that such "scripting" is good science: Each test focuses on one aspect of a technology, such as whether the radar is tracking or the interceptor is launching. "We wanted to take it one step at a time," Gen. Obering tells me.The trouble is, missile defense is not like building a new jet, where the foundational technology -- flying an aircraft -- is well-known. Instead, much of missile defense depends on breakthrough technologies that require creative invention, not merely the gradual progress of making known hardware better. That means failures in tests are much more likely -- and too much failure might mean cuts in the budget. So instead of conducting realistic tests, contractors have an incentive to devise tightly scripted, narrowly defined, almost-certain-to-succeed tests. In the procurement business, it's called "kicking the can down the road"
-- slowly working your way to a goal without ever really getting there. Instead of building a missile defense shield, what gets constructed is a full-employment policy for defense contractors.
