Pentagon to delay missile intercept testing until fall

The Pentagon's Missile Defense Agency is planning to skip the next two scheduled flight tests of its top program-the Ground-based Midcourse Defense interceptor-and will not attempt any test interceptions until this autumn, a missile defense official said Tuesday.

The agency might conduct up to five intercept tests before the system is scheduled for deployment at the end of fiscal year 2004, he said.

Integrated flight tests 11 and 12 have been cancelled and the following two scheduled tests, which will examine new booster models, will not include intercept tests, Missile Defense Agency spokesman Lt. Col. Richard Lehner told Global Security Newswire.

The next intercept test, Lehner said, would then occur in "the fall of 2003," near the beginning of fiscal 2004, which begins Oct. 1.

The decision comes as the Bush administration announced a plan last month to deploy an initial ground-based interceptor capability by the end of fiscal 2004.

"The missiles will probably go into silos in the late summer of '04," said Lehner.

The decision to skip the tests also coincides with a failed intercept test last month-attributed to a booster separation failure-bringing the program's high-profile intercept record to five successes in eight attempts.

Those attempts launched a missile interceptor with a rocket booster that the Missile Defense Agency has planned to replace and the agency has cancelled the last two tests using the existing booster.

"We won't be flying IFT-11 or IFT-12 since we want to concentrate on the booster this year," wrote Lehner, who explained the schedule in an e-mail message.

Two follow-on booster models, developed by Lockheed Martin and Orbital Sciences, are in competition to win the final contract and are scheduled for testing in May and June or July, Lehner said.

Integrated flight tests scheduled for this autumn, would include actual target intercept attempts, using one or both of the new boosters, Lehner said.

Pentagon officials also are expected to begin including the future operators of the system in the flight-testing sometime in early fiscal 2004, according to Lehner.

Decisions on operational testing specifics, including schedules, remain to be worked out by the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the U.S. Space Command and the Army, he said. The Space Command, the Army and the Army National Guard are expected to operate the system.

Under a previous schedule described by the administration, operational testing was expected to occur much later in the research and development phase, in 2007, following more than a dozen additional flight tests, according to David Wright, a missile defense analyst with the Union of Concerned Scientists and critic of the deployment decision.

An additional eight operational tests were scheduled through the end of 2010, he wrote in an article last summer.

"It makes no sense to make a deployment decision before initial operational testing has been completed; under a reasonable yet best-case scenario, deployment of the ground-based midcourse system would not take place until some time after 2008," he wrote.