The Director of Operational Test & Evaluation (DOT&E) annual report gave a measured report of the Missile Defense Agency (MDA)’s accomplishments for the past fiscal year. DOT&E assessed the overall Ballistic Missile Defense System (BMDS)’s capabilities against theater missile threats as having increased over the past year, but its defense against strategic threats “remains very basic.” Overall, while there were some successes during flight tests and some progress in the various systems’ development, one can read between the lines to see that much more growth is required before the systems will yield a reliable and consistent defense under realistic circumstances.

MDA has three categories now for its systems as part of its spiral development program: Early Capability Delivery, Partial Capability Delivery, and Full Capability Delivery. The Ground-based Midcourse Defense (GMD) system’s interceptor is termed to deliver an “Early” capability. This is interesting because 24 of the interceptors have already been deployed, and MDA wants to use it as the model for the interceptor that would go in its proposed site in Europe. One would think that a weapon system that is being fielded while concurrently being used as a model for other weapon systems would be further along in its development process, as MDA defines Early Capability Delivery as providing “emergency, low confidence capability.” “Partial Capability Delivery, or “medium confidence capability that supports a warfighter partial mission capability decision,” is where the Aegis Ballistic Missile Defense (Aegis BMD) program falls. And the Patriot Advanced Capability (PAC)-3 is the only missile defense system determined to have Full Capability Delivery (“highest confidence capability that supports a warfighter full mission capability decision”).

Looking specifically at the various weapon systems, the GMD’s flight testing has shown the “least mature defense capability against its strategic threat set." While it has demonstrated, according to DOT&E, “a limited capability against a simple threat,” its testing has been so limited that that is "not sufficient to provide a high level of statistical confidence in its limited capabilities." The small amount of operational realism that has been added to the GMD system’s testing “has uncovered unanticipated deficiencies that will require additional development and testing.” DOT&E points out that “additional flight test data under realistic conditions is necessary to validate models and simulation. In fact, “limited” seems to be an optimistic way of rating GMD’s capabilities, as it has a barely 50 percent intercept success rate during highly scripted and unrealistic testing.
  
The PAC-3 is called MDA's most "mature" system, but DOT&E mentioned some vague "deficiencies" that were uncovered during testing that are being addressed. What those problems are is unclear, but it seems strange to talk about a mature system having deficiencies: presumably, if it were mature, it would have worked through whatever limitations it had. Same with the Aegis system. DOT&E calls it "promising," but notes that it has had less testing than the PAC-3 and few real-world operations; furthermore, there have also been some "issues" uncovered during testing that have to be addressed.

As for the command, control, and battle management command (C2BMC), DOT&E concludes that while it “continues to add new functionality,” it still “is not mature enough to provide an integrated, layered defensive capability against any range of threat missile.”
 
There appear to be MDA “system deficiencies which resulted in redesigns, testing, and modifications that delayed execution or changed content of test events." Specifically, the GMD test that was held in May 2007 was actually eight months later than originally planned. And MDA’s test targets fared poorly, with problems causing “target failures that have seriously impacted test schedules and accomplishment of test objectives.” As a result, MDA’s building what it’s calling a Flexible Target Family (FTF) to remedy these problems. However, DOT&E observes that FTF is not anywhere close to being ready, so “MDA will continue to suffer schedule delays, retests, and follow-up test requirements as the result of unreliable and inadequate targets.”

In general, there were some successful flight tests this past year, but there also were a lot of serious problems uncovered. It's important that the former don't overshadow the latter when trying to get a full and comprehensive picture as to what missile defense can do. Seeing how MDA is striving to expand missile defense into Europe, one would wonder if its time would be better spent improving its current programs. And a clear-eyed assessment of what missile defense’s capabilities are is needed as we move toward a new administration so that we do not confuse what missile defense supporters wish it could do with what it actually can do.


Source (American): The Center for Defense Information (CDI)