According to Israel's leading missile defense expert Uzi Rubin, Iran's recent advances in multi-staged, solid-fueled missiles will put most of Europe within their reach --- much, much sooner than any US intelligence estimate:
HUNTSVILLE, Ala., Aug 20 (Reuters) - Iran could have the ability to strike most of Europe with a ballistic missile within three or four years if it made an all-out push, the former head of Israel's missile defense program said on Thursday.
If correct, the timeline cited by Uzi Rubin, a leading authority on Iran's program, puts a fresh note of urgency into a diplomatically thorny debate over building a multibillion-dollar anti-missile shield in Europe.
U.S. officials have cast the timeline further out, leaving longer to sort out defenses.
"If they push it -- put all the budget, put all the engineers -- three or four years" is all it would take to give Iran's existing ballistic missile a range of 3,900 kilometers (2,438 miles), enough to hit London, Rubin told a U.S. Army-sponsored missile-defense conference in Huntsville, Alabama. "Will they do it? I'm not sure."
Why is Rubin's timeline so much more accelerated than his American peers'? As has occurred with most militaries throughout history, the Iranians simply had a breakthrough --- it happens:
The Breakthrough: Iran's Sejjil-2
Rubin said Iran had achieved "a technological and strategic breakthrough" with its Sejjil, a two-stage, solid propellant missile. On May 20, Iran test-fired the Sejjil 2, which is said by Tehran to have a range of about 2,000 kilometers.
"Based on its demonstrated achievement in solid propulsion and staging, Iran will face no technological challenges" in close to doubling its range with a one-ton warhead, said Rubin, who oversaw development of Israel's Arrow anti-missile system while running the Jewish state's missile defense effort from 1991 to 1999.
"The predictions (about Iran's growing missile reach) are coming true, perhaps sooner than anyone thought," he added in reply to a question after a presentation. "I think there was an underestimation of Iranian capability."
As I reported after the Sejjil-2's unexpected success in May, over 20 European capitals are already within range. As Rubin correctly observes, they've achieved the breakthrough (solid fuel & staging) --- now it's just a matter of perfecting it in order to reach the rest of Europe.
Facing cuts at its US Ground-based Interceptor (GBI) field at Ft. Greely, Alaska and political uncertainty surrounding the planned GBI deployment in Poland, Boeing sees the writing on the wall and moves to secure its spot as the go-to midcourse missile defender. Introducing the mobile, 2-stage GBI:
Boeing, which manages the hub of a layered U.S. anti-missile shield deployed in 2004, is eyeing a 47,500-pound interceptor that could be flown to NATO bases as needed on Boeing-built C-17 cargo planes, erected quickly on a 60-foot trailer stand and taken home when judged safe to do so.
"If a fixed site is going to be just too hard to get implemented politically or otherwise, we didn't want people to think that the only way you needed to use a GBI was in a fixed silo," Greg Hyslop, Boeing's vice president and general manager for missile defense, told Reuters at a U.S. Army-sponsored missile-defense conference in Huntsville, Alabama.
A scale model showed a two-stage interceptor designed to be globally deployable within 24 hours at designated launch sites that would provide coverage for the United States and Europe.
Ironically, this announcement comes on the one year anniversary of the US-Poland agreement to silo GBIs in Poland. But since the election of President Obama, this agreement between NATO allies has been gathering dust as his new Pentagon re-evaluates the whole concept of European-based missile defense.
As long-time readers here already know, the primary mission of European-based GBIs is to better protect the eastern seaboard of the United States against ICBMs coming out of the Middle East which must overfly Europe on the way to their American targets. As a bonus, these Polish-based GBIs would also protect Europe. While extraordinarily successful, other missile defense assets such as THAAD and Aegis simply cannot perform this specific mission.
Unfortunately, the volatile combination of resurgent Russian nationalism and a concilliatory Obama Administration has seriously compromised this orginal European GBI plan.
So, assuming the Polish silos will never be filled, Boeing is front-running the issue with this introduction of the mobile GBI concept. Not only would they bypass the (unfounded) Russian complaints of interceptors permanently stationed on their doorstep, these mobile GBIs may also be stationed in the eastern US:
Once developed, a mobile GBI could also be deployed in the United States or elsewhere against threats posed by Iran and North Korea. As the White House reviews its options, one that has surfaced is basing GBIs mobile or fixed sites at Ft. Drum, N.Y. This would require the three-stage variant and would protect the U.S. homeland, but not Europe.
The dirty little secret of US missile defense is our lack of an east coast GBI base, hence the original plan to put one in Europe. It's quite encouraging to see the Pentagon publicly addressing this gap. And while NIMBY forces may keep us from digging silos in the east, the mobile GBI concept elegantly gets around that obstacle as well.
In other news from the Space & Missile Defense Conference here in Huntsville, building on the wild success of its naval ballistic missile interceptor, the Standard Missile 3 (SM-3), Raytheon is also preparing for a scrapping of Polish GBI silos:
Raytheon is also actively proposing an alternative. It says a land-based SM-3 could achieve initial operational capability in 2013; $50 million for this program is included in the Missile Defense Agency’s Fiscal 2010 budget request. MDA is also planning to establish a land-based SM-3 program office at Redstone Arsenal, Ala., where the agency has many of its program offices, according to Raytheon.
The land-based SM-3 would be fired from a vertical launch system optimized for ship operation outfitted for use on the ground. And, it would operate with the Terminal High-Altitude Area Defense (Thaad) systems AN/TPY-2 radar and fire control system, says Pete Franklin, Raytheon’s vice president of national and theater security programs. These are being procured by MDA already as part of the Thaad program.
Again, a welcome addition to our layered defense, but until larger SM-3s and THAADs are developed, GBIs will remain the only interceptors that can reach ICBMs in the midcourse phase of flight.
EDWARDS AIR FORCE BASE, Calif., 20 Aug. 2009. Missile defense experts fired the high power laser aboard the Airborne Laser (ABL) aircraft in flight for the first time Aug. 18, to move the airborne military laser closer to an actual missile shoot-down demonstration.
The laser weapon test, which was a step toward developing an ABL high energy laser for ballistic missile defense, involved the Boeing Co. (BA) industry teammates and the U.S. Missile Defense Agency. During the test, the ABL modified Boeing 747-400F aircraft fired its military laser weapons system while flying over the California high desert into an onboard calorimeter, which captured the beam and measured its power.
Next steps: lasing & measuring against some atmospheric targets. Then ... the Big Shot against a boosting ballistic missile sometime before yearend. ABL gets three chances to successfully pass an interception flight test ... or the program is immediately killed.
Because a silo needs to be refurbished after its hot-burning interceptor is fired, having two underground test silos will allow one to support testing while the other is being refurbished, Boeing said. It said the new silo can be configured for testing or tactical operations. Vandenberg's first test silo has been used in tests since 2006.
Routinely trumpeted by missile defense critics as proof positive that missile defense only works in the sandbox of "highly scripted" tests against "gamed" targets, the lack of "Operational Realism" is the most common charge against our nascent ballistic missile defense system (BMDS). While it keeps racking up successful intercepts like clockwork, missile defense will never work in the real world, critics crow, therefore we should scrap it ASAP.
That all changes today.
With a bombshell article in Aviation Week, the stool is kicked out from under this perennial argument against missile defense. AW's Amy Butler reveals stunning new information about a recent missile defense test and just how operationally realistic it was.
On March 18, 2009, the Missile Defense Agency (MDA; full disclosure: I'm an MDA contractor) conducted a landmark test of the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) system.
Lurking less than 1,000 km off the coast of Hawaii, MDA's mobile sea launch platform, the former amphibious assault ship USS Tripoli*, launched a medium range ballistic missile (MRBM) without warning. Seconds later, an unnamed Aegis BMD ship in the area was first to detect the launch with its SPY-1 radar and passed its tracking data to a THAAD interceptor battery on Kauai. Using the Navy's cue, the Army soldiers then directed their own THAAD radar onto the hostile missile, developed a firing solution, and loosed two interceptors seconds apart.
Meanwhile at the edge of space, the inbound threat missile released its warhead.
The first THAAD interceptor identified the warhead and smashed into it. As for the second interceptor, well, that's where things get interesting:
Two different Thaad interceptors were launched against a single target, simulating an Army operational concept of dispatching a salvo of weapons to ensure a threat is destroyed. The U.S. Missile Defense Agency (MDA) and industry officials declared the flight test a success shortly after it was executed.
However, they disclosed to Aviation Week only recently that the results exceeded their expectations. Early reports from the Pentagon said the second interceptor was intentionally destroyed in flight after the first disabled the target in a hit-to-kill engagement.
“Actually, what happened on the flight test was that the first interceptor hit just as it was supposed to and the second interceptor looked at all of this debris and said, ‘OK, I’ve got another something that looks interesting,’ picked out another threat, and went out and killed it,” says Tom McGrath, Thaad vice president for prime contractor Lockheed Martin. “The second intercept hit another piece of hardware. We can’t talk about what that was, but it picked out what logically you would expect it to pick out and killed it.”
Like McGrath, I'm forbidden from saying what exactly the second interceptor killed, but according to Agence France Presse:
In the test, the warhead on the target missile was separated from the rocket motor, requiring the interceptors to distinguish between the two.
The two missiles were launched 12 sec. apart. The successful intercept of a fragment from the remaining debris is notable because the second interceptor was faced with what is called a “complex target scene.” This included the wreckage of the target shortly after the first high-speed collision. “We had it timed [so] that the second kill vehicle would see the intercept of the first and see the target scene,” says U.S. Army Col. William Lamb, the MDA’s Thaad project manager.
The engagement also demonstrates the ability of the mission computer on board the Thaad interceptor to adapt to a rapidly changing threat scene. “In real short time, it said, ‘Uh oh, that doesn’t look like what the radar told me it was going to be’—because now, of course, it was looking at a debris field instead of something that was not planned to be a debris field,” says McGrath.
So, back to the critics --- is missile defense testing operationally realistic enough for you yet? Let's address each gripe:
"Missile defense tests are highly scripted.": Set aside for a moment any considerations for the scientific method or range safety. While its nice to, you know, know what you're testing against, observing how a system performs against your hypotheses, all while refraining from dropping live missiles on Honolulu, critics remain unsatisfied --- "Shut up, scripter!" A hostile missile was launched without warning. Redirecting its radar to the correct area of the sky after getting a data hand-off from an Aegis ship, an Army THAAD unit took the shot. Its second interceptor made an ad hoc targeting adjustment and destroyed an entirely unpredictable secondary target after the first interceptor smashed the threat warhead into a billion pieces at the edge of space. Scripted.
"The target missiles don't represent actual threats.": While some other missile defense tests employ US-made target "emulators" that mimic the performance of our adversaries' missiles, most THAAD targets are actual enemy missiles:
Of the six flight tests and successful intercepts since a missile redesign, five of the targets have been “foreign-acquired targets, against the real thing,” not a U.S.-designed threat emulator, says Army Lt. Gen. Patrick O’Reilly.
"Yeah, but what about a SCUD launched from a freighter?": This dramatic Jack Bauer scenario is a favorite of missile defense skeptics. What good are a bunch of long-range interceptors in Alaska if an enemy can just sneak up to shore in a rusty freighter and lob a short-range missile into Manhattan, they ask. Well, as demonstrated in this and many other tests, we've been there, done that:
SCUD launch from decommissioned USS Tripoli - June 2008
Lt. Gen. O'Reilly again on Operation Rustbucket:
“Many of those targets were shot from an asymmetric threat point of view of putting the missile on a barge [and setting] it off at sea,” he says.
"It has not been tested against countermeasures.": While that's categorically true, this test illustrates an interceptor's ability to make the same on-the-spot adjustments to take out other objects in the threat complex ... just like it would in a bonafide countermeasure scenario (which is planned soon).
"It has never been tested at night or in bad weather.": While some tests have occurred on beautiful Hawaiian afternoons (like this), some have not. Go back up there and watch the FTT-10A video again --- quite cloudy, no? And then there's this test:
In conclusion, this remarkably operationally realistic THAAD test goes a long way in defanging missile defense skeptics. Combine it with other BMD test successes and it becomes extremely difficult for critics to utilize the stale, knee-jerk arguments they've lazily relied on for the past 20 years.
*This THAAD test was a do-over of a scrubbed test from Sept. 2008. Keeping with my policy of not sharing sensitive information, the Tripoli is publicly disclosed as the target launch platform in a news report from then.
PRAGUE (Reuters) - Russian spies are extremely active in the Czech Republic and are stirring public sentiment against a planned U.S. missile defense base, the Czech counter-intelligence agency said on Thursday.
...
"The intelligence services of the Russian Federation have attempted in the past year to contact, infiltrate and influence people and organizations that have influence on public opinion," the BIS report said.
"Russian espionage activities in the Czech Republic currently reach an exceptionally high intensity."
A Czech news website said earlier on Monday, citing an unnamed diplomatic source, that the deputy military attache from the Russian embassy to the Czech Republic was expelled from the country and yet another Russian diplomat was advised not to return after holiday.
Sources claim that the Czech military intelligence received information that both diplomats were apparently working for the Russian secret services, the statement said.
And of course, Russia petulantly reacts to having its spies ejected --- how dare the Czechs defend themselves?:
"This is another provocation," Lavrov told journalists.
It's to be determined whether the expulsions were related to the missile defense issue. At this moment, the Czechs are officially not commenting.
During the laser test, on Monday, a modified Boeing 747-400F aircraft took off from Edwards Air Force Base and used its infrared sensors to find a target missile launched from San Nicholas Island, Calif., Boeing said. It said the Boeing-developed battle-management system aboard the Airborne Laser then issued engagement and target location instructions to the beam control/fire control system, which acquired the target and fired its two solid-state illuminator lasers to track the target and measure atmospheric conditions; and the Airborne Laser then fired a surrogate high-energy laser at the target, simulating a missile intercept. Instrumentation on the target verified that the laser hit the target.
"This test demonstrates that the Airborne Laser can fully engage an in-flight missile with its battle management and beam control/fire control systems," Michael Rinn, Boeing vice president and Airborne Laser program director, said in a news release. "Pointing and focusing a laser beam on a target that is rocketing skyward at thousands of miles per hour is no easy task, but the Airborne Laser is uniquely able to do the job."
In the lead up to April's Taepodong-2 launch that overflew its territory, Japan had a hectic debate about what defensive measures it was legally allowed to take under its pacifist constitution to defend itself from an illegally-fired, UN-condemned North Korean ballistic missile (how's that for contrast?).
While it put it's forces on alert and deployed several missile defense assets (Patriot PAC-3 batteries and its entire fleet of Aegis BMD ships), Japan went to great lengths to describe its missile defense deployments as contingencies against ... accidental debris:
Japan took pains Friday to explain that it is preparing for a possible accident, not for an attack. Defense Minister Yasukazu Hamada said he issued orders "to prepare for an event in which a North Korean projectile falls onto our country in an accident."
With all of this up tempo North Korean missile testing, new revelations about its chemical weapons program, and Japan's previous last minute legal scrambling, the Japanese appear to have realized that perhaps it's a good idea to finally codify their official missile defense policy:
The prime minister, Taro Aso, has been advised by his defence advisers to review the constitution to allow Japan the right to exercise collective self- defence to protect the country amid rising security issues in the region.
The controversial proposal was among a number of steps relating to Japan's military position proposed as part of a five-year government defence plan which is scheduled for completion by the end of the year.
A review of the ban on the exercise of Japan's right to collective self-defence was recommended to enable the nation to shoot down ballistic missiles launched by North Korea and targeting the US.
The ship is the USS Benfold, the date was March 26, 2009, the place was the Pacific Ocean--not off the coast of either of the Koreas, and the attacking missiles, while real missiles, were not armed. This was the US Navy's exercise Stellar Dagger and it was the first time the fleet has successfully tested the Aegis shipboard system's ability to intercept both a short range ballistic missile in reentry phase and a low-altitude cruise missile target at the same time.
The Benfold will be open for weekend public visitation, with Saturday (8/1/09) tours given from 10:00 am to 2:30 p.m., and Sunday (8/2/09) tours provided from 10:00 am to 1:30 pm. Displays of other Navy, Marine Corps and Army equipment will also be available.
Man, I wish I was out there to see it!
Please, any SoCal readers who take advantage of this rare opportunity, shoot me some pics and observations. I know it's short notice (likely a security measure), but if anyone can make a Benfold tour this weekend, I'll jealously post your stuff pronto.
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