Missile Defense Program Changes Course
Officials Blame Bad Luck For Testing Mishaps but Put Off Full Production

By Bradley Graham
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, August 5, 2002; Page A06

This was to have been a big year for the Pentagon's new PAC-3 missile defense weapon, a forerunner of the nationwide anti-missile system that the Bush administration is pursuing. Flight tests from February through May were supposed to confirm that the missile interception system worked and result in a decision this fall to proceed with full production.

But the testing went awry. In several cases, interceptors failed to fire out of launchers. When they did, they missed nearly as often as they hit. Unable to certify that the PAC-3 interceptor was ready for stepped-up production, Pentagon officials have put off the decision for at least a year and plan instead on further testing once fixes are in place.

Speaking at length for the first time about the test results, military officials insisted many of the problems were attributable to bad luck, citing Murphy's Law that if anything can go wrong, it will. Nevertheless, the results proved embarrassing to the administration, which is spending billions of dollars on missile defense development and has made the invention of workable anti-missile systems a priority.

Some critics of the administration's missile defense effort say the PAC-3 experience calls into question President Bush's intention to begin deploying longer-range missile defense systems that are much further behind in development.

"It's a hard thing to compress," said Philip E. Coyle III, the Pentagon's chief weapons test evaluator during the Clinton administration. "It's not just a matter of the number of tests; it's trying to capture all the conditions that a weapons system is likely to confront."

Coyle said the testing setback, coming so late in the development process, suggests that earlier flight tests -- in which the PAC-3 performed well -- were too simple and should have included more realistic, combatlike conditions.

After eight years of development, the PAC-3 system had been widely viewed as having largely surmounted a history of scheduling delays and cost overruns. Its antecedent, the Patriot, was rushed into service in the 1991 Persian Gulf War to combat Iraqi Scud missiles. But that system, designed to be used against aircraft, had trouble locating the warheads amid the debris of the poorly made Scuds, which often broke up in flight.

Military officials made quick fixes after the war, upgrading the ability of the system's radar to detect targets and improving communication links between the radar, the interceptor and its operators. The range and accuracy of the interceptor also were boosted.

But the PAC-3 (Patriot Advanced Capability-3) represents a quantum leap over those improvements. Unlike previous Patriots, which operate by getting close to targets and blasting them out of the sky, PAC-3 interceptors have no explosives, relying instead on obliterating warheads by the force of collision. This approach, known as "hit to kill," is considered a surer way of eliminating nuclear, biological or chemical warheads.

In tandem with the upgraded radar and ground control station, PAC-3 interceptors can protect an area about seven times greater than the original Patriot system. Pentagon planners envision the PAC-3 system providing lower-tier defense in a multitiered anti-missile network, with other systems intercepting targets at higher altitudes and longer ranges.

The hit-to-kill concept is being applied in some of the Pentagon's longer-range anti-missile programs. Lockheed Martin demonstrated this approach in 1993 and 1994 using a prototype known as the Extended Range Interceptor, or ERINT.

But transforming the ERINT into a PAC-3 missile and integrating it with Patriot ground systems designed by Raytheon proved a greater challenge than anticipated.

By early 2000, after nearly six years of development, the estimated cost per PAC-3 missile had soared from $1.9 million to more than $4 million, and the overall program cost had risen from $3.9 billion to $6.9 billion. Design and manufacturing modifications were ordered to cut costs. Since then, the projected cost per missile has fallen to about $3 million, and program officials expect to reduce it an additional $1 million, but the latest production delay and need for more testing will boost total program costs.

The system scored well in developmental flight tests from 1999 through last year, missing only one in 11 intercept attempts against targets that included aircraft and cruise missiles as well as ballistic missiles. Expectations ran high that the system would perform equally well when it moved this year into a set of four more challenging tests, which for the first time would be led by Army troops rather than contractors.

But in every scenario that was tried, something went wrong -- whether because an interceptor failed to fire, a ground computer misdirected an interceptor, a radar suffered an electronic glitch or an interceptor's homing system proved inadequate.

Program officials contended that many of the problems resulted from rare anomalies. In combat, they said, the system would have succeeded by simply firing more interceptors.

Officials acknowledged finding some technical shortcomings as a result of the tests but voiced confidence that they could be fixed. "Nothing that we've encountered so far would indicate that we've got some sort of a systemic problem, either in hardware or in software, on the missile," said Army Col. Tom Newberry, the PAC-3 program manager.

The Army received the first 16 PAC-3s -- a full launcher load -- last September, and the Pentagon is authorized to produce 72 a year. Program officials are hoping Congress will authorize an increase to 96 in fiscal 2003. Ultimately, the plan is to produce 144 a year, up to a total of 1,159.