Top generals have been insisting for years that if North Korea launched a missile at the United States, the U.S military would be able to shoot it down.
But that is a highly questionable assertion, according to independent scientists and government investigators.
In making it, the generals fail to acknowledge huge questions about the effectiveness of the $40 billion missile defense system they rely on to stop a potential nuclear-armed ballistic missile fired by North Korean or Iran, according to a series of outside reviews.
"They are leading political leaders to believe that they have a military capability that they don't, in fact, have," says physicist David Wright, who has studied the program for years as co-director of the Global Security Program at the Union of Concerned Scientists.
Chris Johnson, a spokesman for the Pentagon's Missile Defense Agency, said the Pentagon "is confident in our ability to defend the homeland against ballistic missile threats." While the program had reliability challenges early in its development, "we have made significant improvements over the last several years to ensure the system is able to operate as designed," he added.
The missile defense system relies on 60-foot-tall, three-stage rockets of its own to knock the enemy projectiles out of space, a task that has been compared to shooting a bullet with a bullet. The system is known as the Ground-based Midcourse Defense system, or GMD.
There are 36 interceptors in operation, according to the Missile Defense Agency — four at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California and 32 at Ft. Greely, Alaska. Eight more are due online by year's end. In contrast to the Iron Dome system in Israel, which is designed to counter shorter range missiles and artillery, the GMD is made to hit missiles above the earth's atmosphere — a more difficult proposition. It is among the heirs to the Strategic Defense Initiative, the so-called Star Wars program launched under Ronald Reagan.
The missiles are based in Alaska and California because the West Coast is the best place from which to intercept missiles that would travel the shortest routes from both Iran and North Korea. Congress has pushed for a third site on the East Coast.
Intelligence agencies don't assess that North Korea is yet capable of firing a nuclear-armed missile at the U.S., but analysts believe it is on course to reach that goal.
But even through the system has been fielded, it hasn't been proven to work.
Last year, the Government Accountability Office, the investigative arm of Congress, concluded that the agency that runs the missile defense system "has not demonstrated through flight testing that it can defend the U.S. homeland."
In nine simulated attacks since the system was deployed in 2004, interceptors have failed to take out their targets six times, even though the flight tests were far less challenging than an actual attack, according to The Los Angeles Times, which published an investigation of the missile defense system last year that uncovered a previously unknown test failure.
"Despite years of tinkering and vows to fix technical shortcomings, the system's performance has gotten worse, not better," The Times concluded.
Last July, the highly regarded Union of Concerned Scientists, which is often skeptical of military programs, weighed in with a 47-page report calling the U.S. approach to missile defense "disastrous." Of the GMD, it concluded: "Its test record is poor and it has no demonstrated ability to stop an incoming missile under real-world conditions."
A 2012 National Academy of Sciences study called the GMD "deficient" and recommended a complete overhaul of the interceptors, sensors, and concept of operations. No such overhaul has happened.
A senior Congressional aide who regularly receives classified briefings on the system told NBC News Tuesday: "None of this stuff works reliably. Nothing. Their interceptor programs are not working. They shoot down targets some of the time, but it's not reliable enough that we would want to risk the catastrophic failure of a miss."
The Pentagon and its Missile Defense Agency strongly disagree. Officials have repeatedly assured lawmakers and the public that the system, despite its testing failures, is up to the task of protecting the United States.
"Today we have exactly what we need to defend the United States of America against North Korea," Air Force Gen. Lori Robinson, commander of the U.S. Northern Command, told the Senate Armed Services Committee on April 6.
Sen Lindsey Graham asked: "So if a missile were launched from North Korea in the next year we could knock it down?"
"Yes sir," Robinson replied.
There is no basis for such certainty, Wright and other experts say.
The Pentagon has spent more than $40 billion to field a system that has not been proven in a real world scenario.
Credit to MSN
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