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Build It and It Will WorkThe Bush administration's missile defense fantasy.

By Fred KaplanPosted Thursday, May 22, 2003, at 4:48 PM ET

Illustration by Robert Neubecker The Bush administration seems to be no longer even pretending that its missile defense system will work. More than that, it no longer seems to care. The administration still displays extraordinary support for the program. Its military budget, now before Congress, authorizes $9.1 billion for missile defense next year, with plans for hefty increases each year for long after. The first stages of a system—10 anti-missile interceptors and their launch gear—are scheduled to be deployed in Alaska and California by October 2004.

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But look at the Bush's new National Security Presidential Directive, "National Policy on Ballistic Missile Defense," an unclassified version of which was released by the White House on May 20. Buried within the five-page statement—the usual litany of prospective threats and strategic rationales—are these two sentences:

The United States will not have a final, fixed missile defense architecture. Rather, we will deploy an initial set of capabilities that will evolve to meet the changing threat and to take advantage of technological developments.

"Architecture," in this context, means pretty much what it means in its colloquial sense: a detailed blueprint with measurements, an underlying design, a notion of how a structure's materials fit together, all rooted in basic principles of physics and engineering.

For the administration to start deploying a missile defense system before devising an architecture is no different from a construction firm starting to hammer nails, put up joists, and lay out a roof before knowing the style or size of a house.

Another sign of unreality is the news—revealed this week by Sen. Carl Levin of Michigan, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Armed Services Committee—that the Pentagon has, without explanation, canceled nine of the 20 missile defense tests it had planned to conduct between now and 2009. One of the canceled tests—which was to have taken place between April and June 2004 (that is, before deployment begins the following October)—might have marked a major step toward realism-in-testing. For the first time, an interceptor was to have been fired at a missile along the same flight path as that of a missile launched from North Korea. Incidentally, it's not as if the program's test record has been so smashing that its managers can afford to relax their standards—five hits out of eight tries, none of them involving multiple targets, decoys, or realistic trajectories.

A May 19 article on Bloomberg.com—one of the very few pieces about the canceled tests (alas, the piece is no longer online except to the service's subscribers)—quoted Maj. Gen. Peter Franklin, the Pentagon missile defense agency's deputy director, as justifying the cancellations. "To focus just on the interceptor test alone," he said, "does not take into consideration everything else that has been built up to get to the point where we are—numerous ground tests, simulations, and war games."

Franklin surely knows better. Any American officer who has advanced to the rank of general must have learned, at some point in his career, that ground tests, simulators, and war games are unreliable predictors of what will happen in a flight test of real hardware.

Sen. Levin, who is oddly the only Democrat who has made a serious go at challenging Bush's rush to deploy this thing, put the matter in better perspective: "The decision to field an as-yet-unproven system has been accompanied by a decision to eliminate or delay the very testing that must be conducted to show whether the system is effective."

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Fred Kaplan is Slate's "War Stories" correspondent and author of 1959: The Year Everything Changed. He can be reached through his Web site, http://1959thebook.com.

Illustration by Robert Neubecker.

COMMENTS

Remarks from the Fray:

As an operational tester of military equipment it was hard for me to read this article without a certain amount of bias. Of course I'm in favor of testing the bejeesus out of any new system; it's how I justify my paycheck. However, there is a reason that operational testing exists in the first place. Operational testing takes a piece of military hardware, puts it in the hands of the soldier, sailor or airmen who will use it and requires that individual to train on it just like it was really in the inventory. This allows the armed forces to learn as much about what will happen when the item is used in an uncontrolled environment. The Program Manager will argue all sorts of things about what the computer models said; it's bunk. I used to study atmospheric chemistry and saw several computer models that predicted that the polar ice caps would be melted by 2010. The proof is in the pudding. The only test that I think should even be modified is one that replicates a North Korean launch azimuth. Let's not give them any new intel as to how we would counter a launch from Pyongyang. But let's still do a good realistic test. Let's pretend it's a Russian or Chinese missile instead. I'm not Ted Postal. I'd never stake my whole reputation and credibility on whether a program succeeds or fails. Nor would I use additional testing as a political excuse to stop the deployment of an effective system that could save soldiers' lives. But let's be realistic about this. Untested equipment performs in unpredictable ways. Successful combat leaders manage risk based on good intelligence. Unpredictability loses wars. Test now or be sorry later.

--SDH-3

(To reply, click here)

it's a good thing fred kaplan didn't live 100 years ago. instead of carping about the imperfections in the missle defense system, he'd be sitting on a sand dune in kitty hawk north carolina jeering at the wright brothers: "who do you think will ever want to ride on that thing? it doesn't even have proper seats, and it only goes 100 yards. you guys suck!" it's a source of constant amazement to me how otherwise intelligent people can leave their air conditioned homes each morning, drive to work in a modern automobile, log onto the internet . . . then tell us about the impossibility of an upcoming piece of technology they don't particularly care for. i think they're called luddites?

--baltimore-aureole

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Kaplan refers to the atmosphere surrounding the Bush Administration's missile defense plans as "unreality" but perhaps a better term is "hyper-reality"... that is, the effort to construct a fictional representation of reality that is ultimately more compelling than the truth. Voters want to feel safer? Bush serves them up a fantasy of security. From this perspective, it really doesn't matter if the system works (since, God help us, it isn't likely to be called into service.) In fact, a public test of the system under realistic conditions would only distract from the ultimate goal-- if the system fails the test, people won't feel safe and Bush might have to answer tough questions in the election campaign…

--ShriekingViolet

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(5/23)

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