By David Willman
December 24, 2017
Citing North Korea’s growing nuclear and ballistic missile threat, the Trump administration is moving to vastly expand the problem-plagued homeland missile defense system despite warnings that the planned upgrades may not succeed. Immediate plans call for building two $1-billion radar installations and adding 20 rocket interceptors to the 44 already deployed in underground silos at Ft. Greely in Alaska and at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California. The Pentagon also is taking steps to launch new satellites to help each interceptor’s “kill vehicle” find, crash into and destroy incoming ballistic missiles high above the atmosphere. The expected cost is about $10.2 billion over five years, on top of more than $40 billion already spent for the system. On Thursday, Congress passed a short-term government funding bill that includes $200 million to start preparing construction of additional missile silos in Alaska. But government reports and interviews with technical experts suggest the planned upgrades, including a redesigned kill vehicle, are unlikely to protect the United States from a limited-scale ballistic missile attack, the system’s stated mission.
One concern is the administration’s rush to expand the system. The first new radar is scheduled to be made operational in 2020 before any flight testing is conducted. And the first set of redesigned kill vehicles will be installed in late 2021 — following just one flight test of a prototype. All the new interceptors and kill vehicles are supposed to be in place by the end of 2023. “There’s no way to prove out the design — let alone its reliability — without more flight tests,” said L. David Montague, a former aerospace executive who co-chaired a National Academy of Sciences panel of 16 experts that recommended ways to improve U.S. missile defenses in 2012. “It’s stupid.” Some experts fear that U.S. overconfidence in the missile defense system could lead to miscalculations in the standoff with Pyongyang. “The response to North Korea is, ‘Let’s spend billions of dollars more on missile defense,’ ” said Laura Grego, a physicist who led a 2016 study of the anti-missile system for the nonpartisan Union of Concerned Scientists. “But we ought to be very careful that we’re not fooling ourselves.” The Missile Defense Agency, the Pentagon division responsible for protecting the nation from a limited ballistic missile attack, did not respond to questions for this article.