$40-billion missile defense system proves unreliable - Los Angeles Times
▻http://www.latimes.com/nation/la-na-missile-defense-20140615-story.html
Longue description des échecs répétés du programme de défense anti-missile.
The Ground-based Midcourse Defense system, or GMD, was supposed to protect Americans against a chilling new threat from “rogue states” such as North Korea and Iran. But a decade after it was declared operational, and after $40 billion in spending, the missile shield cannot be relied on, even in carefully scripted tests that are much less challenging than an actual attack would be, a Los Angeles Times investigation has found.
The Missile Defense Agency has conducted 16 tests of the system’s ability to intercept a mock enemy warhead. It has failed in eight of them, government records show.
Despite years of tinkering and vows to fix technical shortcomings, the system’s performance has gotten worse, not better, since testing began in 1999. Of the eight tests held since GMD became operational in 2004, five have been failures. The last successful intercept was on Dec. 5, 2008. Another test is planned at Vandenberg, on the Santa Barbara County coast, later this month.
The GMD system was rushed into the field after President George W. Bush, in 2002, ordered a crash effort to deploy “an initial set of missile defense capabilities.” The hurried deployment has compromised its effectiveness in myriad ways.
“The system is not reliable,” said a recently retired senior military official who served under Presidents Obama and Bush. "We took a system that was still in development — it was a prototype — and it was declared to be ’operational’ for political reasons.
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Philip E. Coyle III, who oversaw several early test flights as the Pentagon’s director of operational testing and evaluation from 1994 to 2001, said that even the system’s eight successful interceptions should be viewed skeptically because of the staged conditions.
“The tests are scripted for success,” said Coyle, who has also served as a science advisor in the Obama White House. “What’s amazing to me is that they still fail.”
Engineers who have worked with the system acknowledge that because each kill vehicle is unique, even a successful test might not predict the performance of interceptors launched in combat.
On attend donc avec impatience le prochain test, la semaine prochaine…