Alaska's Fort Greely near Delta Junction is a key element in the nation's missile defense system, and the budget cuts threatened to halt new development there. The reductions fueled fears -- so far unfounded -- that Fort Greely itself might be endangered again, as it was during the base-closing frenzy of the 1990s.
Alaska's senators serve on key military committees and they rushed to oppose the cuts. But were they just engaging in home-state politics, preserving the only significant economic engine in the Delta area? Or is the ground-based missile defense system based in Fort Greely an effective, strategic force capable of counteracting the growing threats of "rogue nations" like North Korea and Iran?
Sens. Mark Begich, on the Armed Services Committee, and Lisa Murkowski, on Appropriations, say they are thinking about Alaska and the nation, and that Fort Greely makes sense for both.
"I want to protect Alaska's interest but I also want to protect United States interests in doing the right thing in how we develop our missile defense system," Begich said in a recent interview.
Less clear is whether the 16 missiles in place at Fort Greely and 10 more on the way could shoot down a long-range ballistic weapon -- or even whether North Korea or Iran can launch such a threat in the foreseeable future.
"The bottom line is that the system deployed in Alaska and in California will not work in the real world," said Stephen Young, a Washington-based analyst for the Union of Concerned Scientists.
Not so, says Riki Ellison, chairman of the Missile Defense Advocacy Alliance in Alexandria, Va. "The combat commanders have high confidence in being able to handle anything from North Korea," Ellison said.
LIGHTWEIGHT KILLER
The heart of the Fort Greely missile is an odd-looking, 140-pound weapon built for a suicide mission in space. Despite its remarkable mission, the device's name is purely techno-descriptive -- exoatmospheric kill vehicle.
The same is true for the speedy, three-stage, solid-fuel missile that propels it above the atmosphere -- the Orbital boost vehicle.
The whole package is called a ground-based interceptor. Without proper names like its more famous short-range cousin, the Patriot missile, everyone uses initials: EKV, OBV and GBI.
The EKV is built by Raytheon and is just under 5 feet long. Its front end is dominated by a brass-colored tube and optics for sighting its target, the warhead of an incoming missile in the upper reaches of its arc -- hence the Pentagon term for the system as "midcourse defense." Other systems like the Patriot are designed to hit missiles as they approach Earth in their "terminal" phase.
Around the EKV's frame are containers holding 3.5 gallons of liquid fuel and oxidizer and small rockets for steering. Because it does its work above the atmosphere, it doesn't need to be streamlined. Aside from rocket fuel, it carries no explosives -- it's meant to be a bullet that pulverizes its target in a high-speed collision.
The OBV is built by Orbital Sciences Co. of Dulles, Va., and the Missile Defense Agency has bought 44, with some still to be delivered. Each one costs about $65 million.
The GBIs are housed in underground silos. Four are at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California, which is also where test launches are conducted. Fort Greely has 26 silos, six in the original 5-year-old field and 20 in a newer one, designated Missile Field 3. Missile Field 2 is under construction and designed for 14 silos.
When President Obama revealed his defense budget this spring, it showed cuts of about $1.4 billion from the $9 billion-plus in missile defense spending that the Bush administration had planned. The cuts were strongly backed by his secretary of defense, Robert Gates, the sole Cabinet secretary held over from the Bush administration.
Some programs gained money, such as defenses against short- and medium-range missiles that could strike our overseas bases or U.S. allies in Asia and the Middle East. There were cuts in projects of questionable merit, like a laser fitted into an airplane or the multiple kill vehicle program, something like the system in Alaska but with several kill vehicles on each missile.
The cut that agitated advocates in Alaska and elsewhere was the proposal to scrap construction of Missile Field 2 at Fort Greely and hold its 14 missiles in storage or use them for tests. That would downsize the program to just 26 interceptors in Alaska and four at Vandenberg in California.
HAS THREAT CHANGED?
"Under the Bush administration the plan was 40 intercepters there at Greely, and it had been stated that that was what really was required," Sen. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, said in a telephone interview last week. "Yes, you have a new administration, but you still have the same secretary of defense who said in the Bush administration that 40 was the magic number, and now the operational number is 26 or 27. It begs the question, what has changed? This threat, we would all agree, has not changed -- in fact, North Korea is even being more threatening than they have been in the past."
Baker Spring, a missile defense expert with the Heritage Foundation, a conservative Washington think tank, praised the increases in the short- and medium-range defenses but said the cuts, including the one at Fort Greely, put "America at risk."
"I don't see an argument why we shouldn't go to the 44" implaced missiles, Spring said in an interview. Earlier defense doctrine said 30 missiles were needed to defend against North Korea, and another 14 against Iran, Spring said.
"It's reasonable for an outside observer to say that what they're doing is saying the Iranian threat just isn't emerging. I don't find a reasonable basis for making that assumption or assertion," Spring said.
But experts who say the money is better spent elsewhere insist the threats from North Korea and Iran are overblown.
One is Frederick Lamb, a physics professor at the University of Illinois who co-chaired a review of a proposed missile defense system in 2004 for the American Physical Society.
"It's important to keep in mind that there are two components to a threat: intent and capability," he said in an e-mail message. "Even though North Korea is making threatening statements, the U.S. intelligence community's assessment is that a ballistic missile launch from North Korea against the United States is one of the least likely nuclear threats to the United States, far down the list compared to an attack by nuclear terrorists, for example."
Though North Korea has been trying for more than 10 years to develop a missile capable of reaching Alaska or Hawaii, its tests so far "were catastrophic failures," Lamb said. Even if it can solve those problems, it then has to make a nuclear warhead that could fit on a missile and withstand the rigors of launch and re-entry into the atmosphere at hypersonic speeds, no easy feat, he said.
TESTING QUESTIONED
And there's another question: Could the Alaska-based system reliably smash an incoming missile?
When he visited Alaska in June, Defense Secretary Gates said he was "confident" it would knock out a missile fired by North Korea. In its last test, on Dec. 5, the kill vehicle smashed into a target fired from Kodiak at nearly the precise point on the fake warhead where the nuclear cargo would be located -- all that at closing speeds of more than 15,000 mph.
Yet that test was considered a partial failure. It was to have been the first test in which an operational intercept missile was fired at a target that released decoys to confuse the missile. But the decoys failed to deploy.
"The Missile Defense Agency has not been able to explore the various issues that the system faces," said Philip Coyle III, a former director of testing and evaluation at the Pentagon and now a senior adviser to the Washington-based World Security Institute.
"They've never done a test at night," Coyle said. "If the sun isn't shining on the targets, they're cooler." Would the infrared sensors on the interceptor pick out the target when it's cold? Nobody knows, said Coyle.
Before he left the Pentagon in 2001, an interceptor picked out the warhead from balloons flying near it, but the balloons were round and the warhead was shaped like an ice-cream cone. "You could call them decoys but they weren't designed to fool the defense," he said. "If they'd been made so they resembled the target, then it makes it much tougher."
The record since testing of ground-based midcourse missile defense began in 1999 is eight intercepts out of 14 attempts. Coyle agrees that's impressive, but does it mean it would work in real combat?
"It's not something you'd want to have to rely on," he said. "These tests are scripted, they're planned so that everything that can be done is done to make sure they're successful. If so far you've only done eight of 14 under fairly idealized conditions, what would it be under the fog of war? Obviously it would be worse."
Advocates like Ellison agree more testing and modifications are needed but insist the results to date more than justify deployment.
The next test is tentatively scheduled for September or October, said Lehner, the Missile Defense Agency spokesman.
DEFENSE POLITICS
Begich, D-Alaska, got a spot on the Armed Services Committee this year after he defeated Sen. Ted Stevens, who used his 40 years of seniority and skillful use of Senate rules to preserve Alaska's military roles, including missile defense. The Democratic chairman of the committee, Carl Levin of Michigan, has been skeptical of the Alaska-based system and critical of the Pentagon for not testing it more fully.
In an interview, Begich said he knows he can't use raw power like Stevens but has to be persuasive. He found an opening while preparing for the markup of the defense authorization bill, he said. He and his aides discovered from talking to Missile Defense Agency officials that the facilities in Missile Field 1 were aging fast -- they had chemical leaks, mold, bad plumbing and other issues.
He proposed a compromise that would keep the Fort Greely development moving ahead. With all 14 metal tubes for the silos in Missile Field 2 already built, they could finish the first seven silos for about $81 million, he said. For another $40 million, they could complete the rest. As it was, the government was going to pay $500,000 a year just to store the 14 missiles -- why not put them in real silos, he said.
The argument -- at least for the first seven -- convinced a skeptic like Levin, Begich said. Construction of the remaining seven might be added to the bill on the Senate floor this week.
But Begich's compromise brought a laugh from Joseph Cirincione, president of the Ploughshares Fund and a former House Armed Services Committee aide.
"This is digging holes and then filling them in, literally," Cirincione said in an interview. "That move all by itself makes clear that this is primarily a make-work project. There is not a real threat from North Korea that requires this system. The technology doesn't work, so there's no justification for deploying it at this time; we don't have the money to pay for this at this time -- this is pork and politics, not threat and technology."
The economic impact of missile defense is considerable. It saved Fort Greely from closing. Some 200 Alaska National Guard soldiers are assigned to run the system as the 49th Missile Defense Battalion, according to Alaska-based MDA spokesman Ralph Scott. Boeing, the main contractor, has another 280 employees there. Chugach Alaska Corp. has about 160 employees there supporting the garrison, he said. Tanadgusix Corp., the village corporation from St. Paul, has about 120 people building a power plant there, while the Bechtel Corp. has another 120 people working on Missile Field 2.
When tests of the system are performed, target missiles are launched from the state rocket facility in Kodiak. One of the key radar components, the Sea-Based X-Band radar, is supposed to be based in Adak, though it's been absent longer than it's been home. Known everywhere as the "Golf Ball" -- the huge white radome sits atop a converted oil platform -- it's spent most of the last year at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii for maintenance and repairs of its electronics and ship components, and it will remain far south of Adak for other missile tests.
Cirincione said he favors the Obama administration choices of investing in short- and mid-range defenses, where missile defense technology has been proven. He also would like to see continued testing of the ground-based, midcourse system at Fort Greely, but is skeptical that it will ever prove its value.
"You have a constituency for this system in Alaska that you didn't have five years ago but it is a very narrow constituency," Cirincione said. "It can't prevail in times like these, where deficits are ballooning and budgets are going to be cut. I believe that the missile site in Alaska is a frozen white elephant that can't long survive. We are going to close that site -- it's just a question of when it's politically viable to do so."
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