The Missile Defense Agency, the Pentagon directorate charged with developing anti-missile technology, might want to consider a new line of defense: Intercepting articles by critic Theodore Postol before they land in reporters' inboxes.
Postol's record as a missile-defense skeptic is well established: The MIT professor famously -- and correctly -- questioned the Army's claims about the effectiveness of the Patriot air defense system, and he's punched holes in a lot of assumptions about how things like Ground-based Midcourse Defense would work. Now he and a colleague are taking aim at the Standard Missile-3 (SM-3), the centerpiece of the Obama administration's revamped missile defense plan.
Last week, Postol and George Lewis, a physicist who is the associate director of the Peace Studies program at Cornell, published a piece in Arms Control Today that questioned the effectiveness and the flight-test record of the SM-3. The pair suggesting that an adversary could easily thwart the interceptor with some simple countermeasures. The critique was picked up by reporters (including my wife) last week, but when the New York Times wrote it up today, it ended up as the top story in the Early Bird, the Pentagon's clipping service. Ouch!
Richard Lehner, MDA's chief spokesman, has now responded with a lengthy blog post that attempts to rebut Postol and Lewis. The main thrust of the argument? The physicists don't know what we know. "Postol and Lewis apparently based their assessment on publicly released photos gleaned from a sensor mounted aboard the SM-3 and postulated what they perceived to be the interceptor’s impact point although they had no access to classified telemetry data showing the complete destruction of the target missiles, or subsequent sensor views of the intercept that were not publicly released so as not to reveal to potential adversaries exactly where the target missile was struck," he wrote.
Lehner also pointed to the system's most famous success: the use of a modified SM-3 system to shoot down a malfunctioning U.S. satellite.
Timing is everything, however. Back when the administration of George W. Bush was trying to sell a scheme to station missile-defense interceptors in Europe, Postol issued a technical critique that suggested that the system could be used to knock down Russian missiles. MDA scrambled to rebut the physicists' claims. But the plan was eventually tabled. This latest article comes as the Obama administration rejiggers the whole approach to missile defense. MDA’s main focus is now on blocking short- and medium-range ballistic missiles, and it is pouring more money into SM-3 as well as the Army's Terminal High Altitude Area Defense.
It's worth pointing out here that Postol is not categorically opposed to missile defense. Last year, he proposed putting missile-defense interceptors on long-range, stealthy drones as part of a "boost-phase" defense.
[PHOTO: U.S. Navy]
See Also:
