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January 9, 2000
After pledging to veto this year's Pentagon
budget, on October 25 Bill Clinton obediently put his name to
$267.7 billion worth of waste and theft. Included in this immense
sum is no less than $3.3027 billion for ballistic missile defense
research and development. Nothing so clearly summarises Bill
Clinton's abject surrender to the Pentagon and its congressional/industrial
partners throughout his tenure than his support of thes Star
Wars program. Launched amid frenzierd acclaim by arms profiteers
by Ronald Reagan in 1983, this baroque endeavor has to date consumed
some $55 billion with no discernible result. Clinton is now endeavoring
to persuade the Russians to "amend" the anti-ballistic
missile treaty, which explicitly forbids a star wars system of
the type currently under development, by invoking the putative
menace of North Korean and Iranian missiles raining down on North
America, or Russia. The Russians have rejected his proposal out
of hand.
It should go without saying that the U.S.
will never produce a workable anti-missile defense system, since
the technical obstacles are insuperable, but Clinton is too ignorant
or timid to acknowledge the fact. Hence, on October 14, the President
declared: " I do think it is the responsible thing to do
to continue to pursue what appears to be far more promising than
many had thought -- including me a few years ago -- in terms
of missile defense."
The "promising" features of Star
Wars are hard to find, unless Clinton, like many other credulous
souls, was taken in by the shrieks of triumph from the Pentagon
following a National Missile Defense test on October 2. In the
test, an "Exoatmospheric Kill Vehicle"  (EKV) fired from Kwajalein
Island in the South Pacific managed to hit a re-entry vehicle
launched on an ICBM from Vandenberg AFB in California. Deferential
press reports spoke of this supreme achievement in "hitting
a bullet with a bullet", and even professional quotewright
John Pike of the Federation of American Scientists, who has ridden
high on Star Wars critiques, agreed that the military had achieved
"the equivalent of shooting a hole-in-one".
An internal assessment from inside a Pentagon
agency, supplied by a Friend of CounterPunch, tells a very different
story. Short of roping the interceptor and its target together,
the architects of this $100 million exercise could hardly have
done more to ensure the success of the operation. As the assessment
(summarised by our friend as "how operationally meaningful
the test was not") notes: "Because the ICBM was
launched from California toward the mid-Pacific Ocean -- an outbound
trajectory instead of the inbound trajectory of an ICBM attack
-- the (beefed up early warning radar) in California acquired
the target at close range with high signal-to-noise. In a real
ICBM attack the radar would have had to detect the target at
long range with low signal-to-noise." In other words,
the radar had a much better opportunity to spot the target because
it was leaving from right next door instead of approaching from
far over the horizon. "The re-entry vehicle (RV -- ie
the target) was tracked by an on- board C-band beacon and GPS.
Ground track radars were neither needed nor used to guide the
EKV."
This means that the target was conveniently
broadcasting its position both via the radar beacon and the Global
Positioning System, enabling the testers to guide the interceptor,
as our friend puts it "into the basket". The Ballistic
Missile Defense Office (BMDO) swears blind that these useful
aids were not employed to steer the EKV interceptor right up
to its final collision with the target. Oh no! Most certainly
not! The target and its killer were merely steered "near"
to each other before the $20 million EKV made whatever final
adjustments were necessary using its own guidance system before
closing for a 15,000 mph impact, generating a deadly shower of
press releases across the northern hemisphere.
"The only penetration aid in the target
suite was a large balloon. Because the large balloon  had a significantly higher
infrared signature than the RV, it allowed the EKV to acquire
the target complex at long range and it was easy to discriminate
from the RV." A "penetration aid" is a decoy,
and Star Wars critics have long postulated that such decoys,
spewed out by ICBMs as they simultaneously lob off their real
and deadly payloads, would totally hornswoggle the national missile
defenders. Thus the fact that the October 2 test had actually
incorporated a penetration aid was an item of especial self-congratulation
in the post test victorygrams. However, as the internal Pentagon
assessment notes, a single large balloon actually had the (intended)
effect of rendering the interceptor's job much easier, since
it could spot the "target complex" -- target plus big,
highly visible, balloon-at long range and then, when it came
time to decide which to destroy, easily tell the real target
from the conveniently dissimilar decoy.
"The closing velocity was lower than
a typical ICBM engagement
would have been"-- That is, easier to hit something
if it is going slowly. "The ICBM apogee was higher than
most threat ICBM apogees would be. Lower apogees would be more
stressing because the NMD system would have less time to react".
This means that they shot the target high into space, making
it much easier to spot and track.
Such nit-picking doubts and caveats went unmentioned
in the public analyses and it is unlikely that anyone bothered
to divulge them to the Commander in Chief. Nor, in all likelihood,
has anyone bothered to tell Clinton about the grave problems
facing the linchpin of the entire missile defense system as presently
envisaged. In an artfully cosy phrase, the Pentagon describes
Star Wars, Clinton-era version, as a "family of systems,"
with successive layers of missile interceptors countering anything
the North Koreans or the Ayatollahs can throw at us. However,
the whole structure depends on a satellite warning and tracking
system known as the Space Based Infra Red Systems-SBIRS, or,
to the initiated, "Sibbers".
Sibbers, on paper at least, consists of 30
satellites, 6 in high orbit and 24 in low orbit. The six at high
altitude would have the function of spotting the enemy missile
as it is launched, while  those
lower down would have to decide whether an object is a threat
(after being alerted by its higher consort), track the missile,
discriminate a warhead from decoys, communicate with ground tracking
stations and more. Little wonder, as John Donnelly reported in
Defense Week a year ago, the $7.5 billion program is growing
in cost at the rate of $1 billion a year and that even the Pentagon's
official in charge of testing admits that it is "untestable".
Since the 1980s, the U.S. has tried and failed
to develop four different warning and tracking networks. The
Sibbers program is the fifth, and seasoned observers have no
doubt it will follow the fate of its forbears, to be joined by
the other components of ballistic missile defense on a costly
junkheap. In the meantime however the ABM treaty will probably
have been torn up as other prospects for global disarmament,
already dim, turned to a distant memory.
Next July, Clinton will be faced with what
should be an easy decision. He has promised to announce at that
time whether or not to proceed with full scale star wars deployment,
which a nervous Pentagon say they might be able to get underway
by 2005. The correct answer from the Oval Office should be a
resounding "No". But it would be folly to expect such
courage from the present incumbent. CP
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