A General Accounting Office (GAO) report, "Missile Defense: Additional Knowledge Needed in Developing System for Intercepting Long-Range Missiles" (GAO-03-600)(www.gao.gov) requested by U.S. Senator Daniel K. Akaka (D-Hawaii) identified ten critical Ground-based Midcourse Defense (GMD) technologies and assessed the readiness level of each. The GAO report found that President George W. Bush's decision to field a ballistic missile defense system in October 2004 means that the Missile Defense Agency (MDA) had to take a higher risk approach to development, integrating systems before their maturity was proven.

A key component to the system is the Cobra Dane and other associated radars that are essential to tracking enemy missiles. Those technologies are at the lowest level of maturity and will not be used in integrated flight tests until after fiscal year 2007. GAO notes that "MDA does not plan to demonstrate through its own integrated flight tests the maturity of a technology resident in the Cobra Dane radar located in Alaska, which will serve as the element's primary radar when GMD is first fielded."

"If the radar does not work, the system will not be able to intercept incoming missiles," Akaka said. "MDA has no plans to use the radar in an intercept test. Instead MDA hopes that it will get advance notice of a foreign missile test - presumably by North Korea or Russia - and then has time to turn on its hopefully installed software. Even that type of test will not demonstrate Cobra Dane's capability under stressful, operational conditions. Relying on North Korea or Russian missile development to test our defense is a new approach to operational testing."

GAO also concludes that the on-board discrimination technology has not yet reached a technology readiness level (TRL) of 7, the performance level required before beginning product development. GAO assessed the "on-board discrimination" as achieving TRL 7 by the second quarter of FY04 but MDA still has no plans to test against realistic warhead decoys. MDA plans to build in additional discrimination capability in the out-years but that will take more time and more money.

"Without proven and well-tested discrimination, the whole GMD system could well fail in the face of very simple and inexpensive balloon decoys," Akaka noted.

In 2001, as chairman of the Senate Governmental Affairs Subcommittee on International Security, Proliferation, and Federal Services, Senator Akaka held hearings into missile threats. This is the second report completed for him on missile defense issues.

"The United States needs a national missile defense system that is effective," said Akaka. "We should not be funding an expensive rush to failure in order to meet an artificial deadline set by the President for October 2004. The Missile Defense Agency has done its best to achieve a goal it did not originally set at a cost of almost $8 billion."