ALASKA MISSILE DEFENSE EARLY BIRD WEEKLY

COST TRADES, IF NEEDED, WOULD BE MADE IN FAVOR OF FT. GREELY TEST BED, Inside Missile Defense, September 4, 2002. Because the Pentagon considers the missile defense test bed at Ft. Greely, AK, the No. 1 priority for the Ground-based Midcourse Defense system, program officials will put its completion ahead of GMD development efforts if cost trade-offs become necessary, the GMD deputy program manager said during a recent industry conference. “Clearly there's not enough money to do everything,” said Tom Devanney during an Aug. 20 speech at the fifth annual Space and Missile Defense Conference [in Huntsville, Ala.]. “But we've been given our priorities. Our priority is to build the test bed and then continue using the test bed in the upgrade development . . .The PM outlined the current priorities in the GMD program: Construct the test bed at Ft. Greely, AK; Continue the development program for technologies that will be used in the GMD system; and Propose “production alternatives” to the Bush administration that could speed the establishment of an initial U.S. missile defense capability in the Pacific . . .

DEFENSE WATCH, Defense Daily, September 3, 2002. Silo Dig. MDA’s initial construction work digging the ground for interceptor silos at Fort Greely, Alaska, is almost complete, MDA officials report. The fifth silo has been completed and the construction team has started digging for a sixth. MDA hopes to get the initial construction work completed by October when the change in weather will make work difficult. Next year, MDA intends to put actual equipment in place. MDA also has a barge ready at Shemya Island to offload equipment needed to upgrade the Cobra Dane radar at that site, officials say. Quality Control Questions. MDA officials say they are looking at “quality control and processes” to determine why problems cropped up with nozzles on the modified Minuteman II booster’s rocket motors. The review team is looking at every aspect of the problem, an official notes. MDA late last month decided to delay the next Ground-based Midcourse Defense program test flight, Integrated Flight Test-9, for 30 to 45 days to the nozzle glitch . . . Two new rocket motors will soon be shipped to Kwajalein Missile Range for replacement, an official notes.

GLOBAL NEWS BREAKS #27

MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 2, 2002

Labor Day

TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 3, 2002

MISSILE DEFENSE CHOICES SOUGHT: PANEL URGES FOCUS ON 2 APPROACHES, The Washington Post, September 3, 2002. An influential Pentagon advisory group has urged the Bush administration to narrow the focus of its missile defense program and concentrate on just two experimental approaches for guarding the nation against ballistic missile attack. The previously undisclosed recommendation, which came last month from a group of prominent defense experts under the auspices of the Defense Science Board, puts added pressure on the administration to begin defining an actual missile defense architecture. It reinforces complaints among some in Congress, the defense industry and elsewhere about the lack of specificity in an administration plan that involves as many as eight different approaches for knocking down long-range missiles. Since taking office, President Bush has made the deployment of antimissile defenses a top military priority, citing a mounting threat from the long-range missile development programs in such hostile nations as North Korea and Iran. Bush has boosted spending on missile defense by about 50 percent, to $7.7 billion a year, and has expanded research on a slew of technical approaches for firing interceptors or lasers from land, ships, aircraft or space platforms and for striking enemy warheads at every stage of flight, from just after launch to the final seconds before impact. Despite several successful flight tests and plans to have a rudimentary ground-based system in place in Alaska by 2004, parts of the Pentagon's development effort remain slowed by technical challenges, cost overruns and congressional budget trims. Defense officials have avoided presenting a plan for fitting any of the experimental systems together, saying time is needed to test which weapons will work, particularly now that the demise of the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty has removed testing constraints. The Defense Science Board panel concluded that enough is known to warrant some choices sooner rather than later, which in turn would increase the prospects for a timely deployment of a workable system. "The program needs to get away from the relative comfort of having a wide-open horizon with no defined architecture," said a source in summing up the group's findings. "It needs to focus on a much narrower set of initial capabilities in order to get something that's worth fielding."