More Woes for Star Wars

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The Pentagon's missile defense program may have already cost $100 billion and have sent the Russians into a lather, but its real world value remains unproven. Hitting a bullet with a bullet — the heart of the system — was never going to be easy, but nobody thought it would be so difficult to launch the practice targets needed to test the system. Until now, the military has relied on relics to launch its test targets, some of them fired into the heavens atop 40-year old rockets. And that has led to a growing number of failed tests. After all, the Pentagon can't shoot a fake warhead out of the sky if the rocket designed to put it there fails to do its job. Even more distressing, the Pentagon's Missile Defense Agency is bungling a $1 billion program to develop what the Pentagon calls its "Flexible Target Family."

The Government Accountability Office, in a study released late last Friday, reports that the rate of target failure rose from 7 percent between 2002 and 2005 (3 out of 42), to 16 percent (6 of 38) between 2006 and 2007. To improve that performance, the Pentagon hired the Lockheed Martin Corp. in 2003 to build several kinds of new test-target missiles to help perfect the system. The GAO says that while the test-incoming missiles used between 2002 to 2006 cost an average of $6.5 million each, those slated for use over the next two years sport an average price tag of $48.5 million apiece.

Some of the cost increase results from the fact that the Pentagon wants its tests "to better reflect an evolving threat" — particularly the use of balloons and other decoys that would be used by a real incoming missile to evade interception. But the GAO says much of the cost growth is due to unstable designs, and the decision to build the new missiles without a formal cost analysis. The Pentagon, for example, paid hourly labor rates 32 percent higher once Lockheed took control of the program. "The magnitude of the increase," the GAO notes, "exceeded expectations."

The GAO found that the Pentagon's "difficulty in supplying targets is driven by diminishing sources for components, unanticipated costs, problems incorporating requirements into contracts and establishing program baselines, and the lack of a sound business case for its current approach to supplying targets." Many of the rocket builders who had been selling their wares directly to the Pentagon "are leaving the market due to a lack of business," the GAO says. Two recent tests have gone astray due to what the GAO calls "target anomalies," including a September shot that failed "because the target missile malfunctioned and did not have enough momentum to reach the intercept area."

Yet the new test-missile program designed to eliminate such snafus has its own woes. "Developmental problems have risen in the new family of targets," the congressional audit agency reports, "leading to cost growth, delayed flight tests, and deferral of several key capabilities." The first launch of one of the new test "enemy" missiles has slipped from July 2008 to April 2009. "Rush to meet urgent need caused more delays," the GAO says in a wry aside.

Bottom line: the test targets' spotty performance has led to reduced testing, which weakens the Pentagon's claim that despite the massive financial and geopolitical cost of the program, it has given the U.S. a functioning missile a shield. It also raises a more fundamental question: If the world's lone superpower can't reliably launch faux warheads aloft, how much sense does it make to keep pumping $10 billion a year into efforts to thwart the far more rudimentary efforts of nations like Iran and North Korea to launch real ones?