SPEAKERS CONTENTS INSERTS
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64–891
2000
[H.A.S.C. No. 106–50]
HEARINGS
ON
NATIONAL DEFENSE AUTHORIZATION ACT
FOR FISCAL YEAR 2001—H.R. 4205
AND
OVERSIGHT OF PREVIOUSLY AUTHORIZED PROGRAMS
BEFORE THE
COMMITTEE ON ARMED SERVICES
HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES
ONE HUNDRED SIXTH CONGRESS
SECOND SESSION
MILITARY PROCUREMENT SUBCOMMITTEE
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MEETING JOINTLY WITH
MILITARY RESEARCH AND DEVELOPMENT SUBCOMMITTEE
ON
TITLE I—PROCUREMENT
TITLE II—RESEARCH, DEVELOPMENT, TEST, AND EVALUATION
HEARING HELD
FEBRUARY 16, 2000
MILITARY PROCUREMENT SUBCOMMITTEE
DUNCAN HUNTER, California, Chairman
FLOYD D. SPENCE, South Carolina
BOB STUMP, Arizona
JAMES V. HANSEN, Utah
JIM SAXTON, New Jersey
JAMES TALENT, Missouri
TERRY EVERETT, Alabama
J.C. WATTS, Jr., Oklahoma
MAC THORNBERRY, Texas
LINDSEY GRAHAM, South Carolina
JIM RYUN, Kansas
JIM GIBBONS, Nevada
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MARY BONO, California
JOSEPH PITTS, Pennsylvania
ROBIN HAYES, North Carolina
NORMAN SISISKY, Virginia
IKE SKELTON, Missouri
JOHN M. SPRATT, Jr., South Carolina
LANE EVANS, Illinois
ROD R. BLAGOJEVICH, Illinois
TOM ALLEN, Maine
JIM TURNER, Texas
ADAM SMITH, Washington
JAMES H. MALONEY, Connecticut
MIKE McINTYRE, North Carolina
CYNTHIA A. McKINNEY, Georgia
ELLEN O. TAUSCHER, California
ROBERT BRADY, Pennsylvania
Steven Thompson, Professional Staff Member
Roger Smith, Professional Staff Member
John Sullivan, Professional Staff Member
J.J. Gertler, Professional Staff Member
Jesse Tolleson, Staff Assistant
MILITARY RESEARCH AND DEVELOPMENT SUBCOMMITTEE
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CURT WELDON, Pennsylvania, Chairman
ROSCOE G. BARTLETT, Maryland
STEVEN KUYKENDALL, California
DONALD SHERWOOD, Pennsylvania
JOHN R. KASICH, Ohio
HERBERT H. BATEMAN, Virginia
JOEL HEFLEY, Colorado
JOHN M. McHUGH, New York
HOWARD ''BUCK'' McKEON, California
JOHN N. HOSTETTLER, Indiana
SAXBY CHAMBLISS, Georgia
VAN HILLEARY, Tennessee
JOE SCARBOROUGH, Florida
WALTER B. JONES, Jr., North Carolina
BOB RILEY, Alabama
OWEN PICKETT, Virginia
GENE TAYLOR, Mississippi
MARTIN T. MEEHAN, Massachusetts
PATRICK J. KENNEDY, Rhode Island
SILVESTRE REYES, Texas
TOM ALLEN, Maine
VIC SNYDER, Arkansas
JIM TURNER, Texas
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LORETTA SANCHEZ, California
CIRO D. RODRIGUEZ, Texas
ROBERT E. ANDREWS, New Jersey
BARON P. HILL, Indiana
JOHN B. LARSON, Connecticut
Stephen Ansley, Professional Staff Member
Brian Green, Professional Staff Member
Robert Lautrup, Professional Staff Member
Jean Reed, Professional Staff Member
William Natter, Professional Staff Member
Erica Striebel, Staff Assistant
(ii)
C O N T E N T S
CHRONOLOGICAL LIST OF HEARINGS
2000
HEARING:
Wednesday, February 16, 2000, Fiscal Year 2001 National Defense Authorization Act—Ballistic Missile Defense Programs
APPENDIX:
Wednesday, February 16, 2000
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WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 16, 2000
FISCAL YEAR 2001 NATIONAL DEFENSE AUTHORIZATION ACT—BALLISTIC MISSILE DEFENSE PROGRAMS
STATEMENTS PRESENTED BY MEMBERS OF CONGRESS
Pickett, Hon. Owen, a Representative from Virginia, Ranking Member, Military Research and Development Subcommittee
Sisisky, Hon. Norman, a Representative from Virginia, Ranking Member, Military Procurement Subcommittee
Weldon, Hon. Curt, a Representative from Pennsylvania, Chairman, Military Research and Development Subcommittee
WITNESSES
Kadish, Lt. Gen. Ronald T., U.S. Air Force, Director, Ballistic Missile Defense Organization, Department of Defense
APPENDIX
PREPARED STATEMENTS:
[The Prepared Statements Submitted for the Record can be viewed in the hard copy.]
Kadish, Lt. Gen. Ronald T.
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Weldon, Hon. Curt
DOCUMENTS SUBMITTED FOR THE RECORD:
[There were no Documents Submitted for the Record.]
QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS SUBMITTED FOR THE RECORD:
[The Questions and Answers are pending.]
Mr. Allen
Mr. Bartlett
Mr. Hunter
Mr. Hostetler
Mr. Kuykendall
Mr. Reyes
Mr. Spratt
Mr. Weldon
FISCAL YEAR 2001 NATIONAL DEFENSE AUTHORIZATION ACT—BALLISTIC MISSILE DEFENSE PROGRAMS
House of Representatives, Committee on Armed Services, Military Procurement Subcommittee, Meeting Jointly with Military Research and Development Subcommittee, Washington, DC, Wednesday, February 16, 2000.
The Subcommittees met jointly, pursuant to notice, at 2:28 p.m., in room 2118, Rayburn House Office Building, Hon. Curt Weldon (Chairman of the Subcommittee on Military Research and Development) presiding.
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OPENING STATEMENT OF HON. CURT WELDON, A REPRESENTATIVE FROM PENNSYLVANIA, CHAIRMAN, MILITARY RESEARCH AND DEVELOPMENT SUBCOMMITTEE
Mr. WELDON. The Subcommittee will come to order. Gentlemen, we apologize for making you wait, but that is the price we pay in this crazy city.
This morning, the Military Research and Development Subcommittee and the Procurement Subcommittee meet jointly in open session to receive testimony on the ballistic missile defense programs of the Department of Defense. I want to welcome my colleague and good friend, Duncan Hunter, who is not here yet but will be, the Chairman of the Military Procurement Subcommittee, as well as our good friends from the other side of the aisle, Owen Pickett, the ranking member of the R&D Subcommittee, and Norman Sisisky, the ranking member of the Procurement Subcommittee.
I might add, this is my first public hearing since Mr. Pickett has announced he is retiring and Mr. Bateman has announced he is retiring. These are two great Americans and two great individuals that are going to be sorely missed by this Committee, by the Full Committee, by the entire Congress. So I join my colleagues in trying to urge you to reverse your decision, Herb and Owen. I do not know whether it will do much good, but at least I thought I would start off the hearing by encouraging you to make a decision and reverse your mind.
Mr. SISISKY. I am not retiring.
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Mr. WELDON. I know you are not retiring. You are going be to with us for a long time, Norm.
We also have Mr. Skelton here, our distinguished ranking member of the Full Committee and another great American, and Mr. Spence is not here, but I am sure he will be.
We welcome today's witness, Lieutenant General Ron Kadish, U.S. Air Force, Director of the Ballistic Missile Defense Organization (BMDO). General, this is your first appearance before our Committee and we are looking forward to your testimony. Thank you for being with us today. Your leadership has been exemplary in the short time you have been heading up BMDO.
We are going to explore today the full range of Ballistic Missile Defense (BMD) issues, and much of what we will hear today will be very positive. I want to stress three overriding points. First, we have long since passed the threat threshold. We have known for a long time that North Korea is developing theater and long-range ballistic missiles. We have known for a couple of years that Iran has been developing missile capabilities of threatening U.S. forces and allies in the Middle East. Iraq and other Middle Eastern nations are developing missile arsenals, as well.
Our own Department of Defense says the same thing. The threat threshold has been crossed. Secretary Cohen believes that Iran will have a missile capable of threatening all of North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) within five to ten years. His conclusion, we need to deploy Theater Missile Defense (TMD) systems and a limited National Missile Defense (NMD) system now.
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I might add that this Committee and this Congress has already gone on record. The President has stated his intention to make a deployment decision on NMD sometime during this year. As we have steadfastly maintained, we already made that decision. The vote on the House floor was overwhelming. A hundred and three Democrats and all but two Republicans voted in favor of deploying NMD last year. So my contention is, there is no more decision to be made. The President can talk about time tables, he can talk about parameters, but the decision to deploy has been made by this Congress unequivocally.
Second, now, after a long period of frustration and delay, we have had a string of great successes in the development of BMD systems. The Theater High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) program conducted two successful hit-to-kill intercept tests. PAC–3 now has three consecutive hits, and in the most recent intercept test just a couple of weeks ago demonstrated its remote launch capability that will expand the footprint it can defend.
The NMD system also conducted a successful intercept last October, and last month conducted a test that demonstrated successfully the integration of virtually the entire NMD system. While we cannot minimize the fact that the January test missed the target, I want to stress my view that this test was more challenging and, in many ways, more successful than the earlier one and it demonstrated substantial technical progress in the NMD program. I am also encouraged that the problem uncovered in the January test is apparently a minor one, not a fundamental problem of science or engineering.
By my simple arithmetic, that is six out of the last seven and one near miss. That is either six accidental successes, as the critics and those on the left would say, or conclusive evidence that hit-to-kill technology can, will, and does work.
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And third, I believe we have to move ahead as rapidly and efficiently as we can with these systems. I am concerned that while the BMDO budget request is better than this administration has ever managed in the past, that key programs are restrained by lack of funding. Lieutenant General Kadish, I would appreciate hearing your views on that and whether you believe any of your programs could move forward more rapidly, without increasing risk, if more funding were available.
I am especially concerned that BMDO's technology funding has been reduced by $100 million from last year's level. That is unacceptable. I understand that your entire innovative Science and Technology (S&T) budget is just $7 million. This level of technology funding, I believe, is clearly inadequate to meet future BMD requirements and is reflective of an overall cut in the S&T accounts Defense-wide of almost $1 billion.
I also want to add that we are very much interested in your personal views and your professional views. As the leader of this agency, General, we respect the job that you have done and we look forward to working with you.
I just want to take a moment before I introduce my good friend and colleague, Owen Pickett, to thank these two Committees. In the last six years, we have plussed up funding for missile defense by over $5 billion. Imagine the predicament of this Administration if this Committee and this Congress had not put $5 billion of money in where people like Les Lyles (former Director of BMDO) and Mal O'Neill said it was necessary. We would not be able to have the President say he is making a decision this year because we would have not had any of that funding in place. Thank goodness Democrats and Republicans alike on this Committee cut through the rhetoric, stood together, and put the funding on the table to allow us to be where we are today.
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[The prepared statement of Mr. Weldon can be found in the Appendix.]
Mr. WELDON. With that, I will turn to my good friend and ranking member, Mr. Pickett, for any comments he would like to make.
STATEMENT OF HON. OWEN PICKETT, A REPRESENTATIVE FROM VIRGINIA, RANKING MEMBER, MILITARY RESEARCH AND DEVELOPMENT SUBCOMMITTEE
Mr. PICKETT. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. The subject of this hearing today is extremely important and I join you in welcoming General Kadish for his first appearance before our Subcommittee.
Let me begin by saying that I am encouraged overall with the Administration budget submission for ballistic missile defense. The increased funding for National Missile Defense research and development in this budget reflects a commitment toward eventual deployment of a limited system. This budget moves us in the direction of a more robust program in recognition of the passage of the National Missile Defense Act of 1999 (Pub. L. 106–38). The inclusion of $200 million more in fiscal year 2001 than originally projected, and more than $2.3 billion in the aggregate for additional spending over the Future Years Defense Plan (FYDP) provides solid evidence of this commitment.
However, the President's deployment decision due later this year should fully and thoroughly consider the following criteria: The nature of the threat, the cost, the technical feasibility, and overall security implications. It is encouraging to see that the Department's plan would allow for upgrades at early warning radar facilities, provide 100 ground-based interceptors, include construction of a radar complex in Alaska, and allow additional funding for testing. The Administration deserves credit for such a comprehensive approach.
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There are, however, some concerns with several aspects of the budget. When I look at the Upper-Tier Strategy, I begin to wonder if the current schedule for the Navy Theater Wide Program is based on technological necessity or if it means that the program will be resource-constrained. The current schedule does not allow for Navy Theater Wide contingency capability until fiscal year 2006. A single-mission capability will not come until fiscal year 2009, or a multi-mission capability until fiscal year 2010. As a result, this budget submission may not include adequate resources to allow us to take advantage of the opportunities afforded by a successful LEAP shot test later this year. Only $1.5 billion is budgeted for Navy Theater Wide over the life of the Future Years Defense Plan, as compared with $3.5 billion for THAAD.
The science and technology portion of the BMDO budget caused me to wonder if we are shortchanging future capability to respond to a changing, improving, and evolving threat. The S&T budget, the very source of innovation in defense spending, has been cut more than $170 billion. I hope we are not sacrificing some long-term technological development advantages to satisfy some short-term goals.
Mr. Chairman, we cannot forget that S&T programs of the 1970s and 1980s produced the stealth and precision munitions of the 1990s. It follows that S&T investments of today will yield technological advantages in the year 2015 and beyond. It has long been my belief that such long-term investment strategies are necessary to provide insurance against a technological surprise from our adversaries. I hope we can find the resources this year to provide adequate S&T funding in this small business.
General Kadish, I hope you will address these concerns and I look forward to your testimony.
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Mr. WELDON. Thank you, Mr. Pickett.
Mr. Sisisky.
STATEMENT OF HON. NORMAN SISISKY, A REPRESENTATIVE FROM VIRGINIA, RANKING MEMBER, MILITARY PROCUREMENT SUBCOMMITTEE
Mr. SISISKY. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I would also like to welcome General Kadish and I also agree with my colleague here about the potential danger of cutting funds for science and technology programs. We joke about it all the time, but this really is rocket science and R&D investments are crucial to retaining a qualitative edge.
Mr. Chairman, last year, the House Armed Services Committee (HASC) as well as the House of Representatives overwhelmingly, as you stated, approved H.R. 4. H.R. 4 was a single-sentence bill declaring it is the U.S. policy to deploy a National Missile Defense. However, the bill did not include a time table or deployment date and I think that was intentional. Technology, not politics, should drive our deployment decision.
I believe the bipartisanship that has characterized this Committee's efforts on National Missile Defense must continue, but we need to remember how that bipartisanship came about. First, there is strong support on both sides of the aisle for a ground-based National Missile Defense system. This is a far cry from President Reagan's nuclear umbrella, but right now, it is the only technology within reach.
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Second, there is recognition that a rogue nation could threaten us as early as 2005 and we should defend ourselves against such threats.
And third, there is agreement that a limited ground-based NMD system is affordable. That means we can do it without undermining our other priorities, such as quality of life, readiness, and meeting conventional weapons requirements. We have succeeded in putting NMD on a bipartisan footing, but we risk losing bipartisanship if we insist in deploying technology before it proves its merit.
Our nation's military is threatened today by in-theater missiles, and in the not-too-distant future, rogue states have every potential to threaten significant portions of the U.S. with Inter-Continental Ballistic Missiles (ICBM)-delivered weapons of mass destruction. The Rumsfeld Commission concluded that the threat to the United States was broader, more mature, and had been evolving more rapidly than the intelligence community predicted. I say, fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.
The bottom line is that we must address this threat, yet we must be careful. We should not rush to judgment about technological development and settle for a sub-standard system. As recently as Monday, Phil Coyle, DOD's Director for Operation, Test, and Evaluation, released a report raising such concerns. The report calls into question our ability to properly test and evaluate a National Missile Defense capability under accelerated conditions and outlines test delays throughout the program's history. With respect to this June scheduled deployment decision, the report says, and I quote, ''Undue pressure has been placed on the program to meet an artificial point in the development process.'' In short, that means the calendar is driving the decision rather than the technology.
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In the spirit of bipartisanship, I think we must heed these concerns. We are a long way from defending ourselves against concentrated attack by a well-armed adversary. This is especially true, for example, if the reentry vehicles are equipped with sophisticated countermeasures, such as decoys and CHAFF. To meet such challenges, we must make wise investments in R&D and we must field the most effective, appropriate, and affordable missile defense that we can, and that means investing in proven technology.
We have already invested so heavily in NMD and many related programs, it almost begs the question whether we have reached the saturation point. So one of my biggest questions is, can additional budget authority be executed on a sound basis, and that is something like the chairman had asked. I hope General Kadish will shed light on this. I know he can help us understand the complexities and the difficulties involved with accelerating the program and I look forward to your testimony today.
Mr. WELDON. Thank you, Mr. Sisisky.
We are graced by the presence of our distinguished Full Committee chairman, Mr. Spence. Would you like to make an opening statement, Mr. Chairman?
The CHAIRMAN. No, thank you.
Mr. WELDON. Thanks for being here.
Mr. Skelton, do you have an opening statement?
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Mr. SKELTON. No.
Mr. WELDON. Thank you for being here.
General, it is all yours. We will, without objection, enter your statement into the record and you feel free to make whatever comments you would like to make.
STATEMENT OF LT. GEN. RONALD T. KADISH, U.S. AIR FORCE, DIRECTOR, BALLISTIC MISSILE DEFENSE ORGANIZATION, DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE
General KADISH. Yes, sir. I am really happy to be here to explain the Ballistic Missile Defense program to you this afternoon and I would like to hit the highlights, if I may, in some detail. I think it will be helpful in answering those questions that you have asked so far.
Mr. Chairman, it is helpful to view the Ballistic Missile Defense program as one program made up of several interdependent elements. As you will see, the interdependence is essential to our success and one of my most important challenges.
Let me describe the whole program that is missile defense. First, National Missile Defense for our homeland. Second, the Upper-Tier systems for theater or regional defense. Those are THAAD and Navy Theater Wide. The Lower-Tier for local or area defense. Those are PAC–3 and Navy Area programs. Our International Programs to share the burden of the expense and the technical issues. Programs to achieve interoperability for layered and defense effectiveness. And technology investment for the future evolving threats.
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The BMDO structure is built on the concept of layered defense. A layered defense-in-depth is preferable to a simple perimeter defense wherever possible. The consequences of allowing a single weapon of mass destruction through a defensive system would be catastrophic. Two layers, for example, each with a theoretical 80 percent effectiveness, would provide a 96 percent confidence of a successful defense. Three such layers would provide over 99 percent confidence.
And as I noted just two weeks ago, the Director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) testified before Congress, and I quote here, ''Over the next 15 years, our cities will face ballistic missile threats from a variety of actors. As alarming as the long-range missile threat is, it should not overshadow the immediacy and seriousness of the threats that U.S. forces, interests, and allies already face from short- and medium-range missiles.''
The Congress, I think, is very well aware of the challenges we faced in the development of ballistic missile defense systems to counter that growing threat in these past years. But I am pleased to report today that last year was a good year. Since March 1999, we have had seven successful intercepts, with six of them using hit-to-kill technology—one National Missile Defense intercept, two THAAD intercepts, three PAC–3 intercepts, and one using focused-warhead technology, the Arrow Israeli program. Our testing program has convinced me that hit-to-kill technologies can work. We have made significant progress here.
But I do not wish to minimize the immense challenges before us. In the months ahead, there are several more tests scheduled in our National and Theater Missile Defense programs that will involved increasing levels of system complexity and integration. Lots of hard work is still ahead.
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Now, I would like to briefly describe the budget request for our program. Our total request for ballistic missile defense for the Future Years Defense Program is $23.5 billion, up from $19.8 billion last year. We request $4.5 billion in fiscal year 2001, an 18 percent increase over last year's $3.8 billion. This includes $3.9 billion for Research, Development, Test, and Evaluation (RDT&E), $444 million for procurement, and $103.5 million for military construction activities. This increase reflects our heightened recognition of the growing threat and the considerable progress we have made in our test and development effort, as I just described.
Mr. Chairman, let me discuss our National Missile Defense program and the changes we have made this year. The initial operational capability, consisting of 20 interceptors, still occurs in fiscal year 2005. In light of the fact that we expect some states to acquire a capability to launch more missiles with simple countermeasures in the 2005 time frame, we will enhance that initial system to what we call an Expanded C–1 architecture, having 100 interceptors. The Expanded C–1 deployment option builds on the revised program announced last year by the Secretary of Defense. The full 100 interceptors can be deployed by fiscal year 2007. Consequently, we have added $1.9 billion to the FYDP to support this change.
In addition, we added funds to our test program to reduce schedule risk. Last summer, we asked General Larry Welch to conduct a second independent review of our program. He did so, and I found his recommendations to be most valuable. We have added some $285 million across the FYDP in response to these specific recommendations.
Now I would like to discuss how our National Missile Defense program is designed to reach the 2005 initial capability. Our greatest challenge continues to be to make sure that all National Missile Defense elements work together as an integrated system so that it can defeat the projected threat to our homeland. A successful test program and the timely execution of system-element schedules will provide the answer to the question of greatest interest to us this year. Are we technically ready to deploy an NMD system?
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We plan to conduct a Deployment Readiness Review, or DRR, in June of this year. Although this starts a key decision process, it is the first of three decision milestones in the program over the next five years. Each decision will be based on the progress of the program at the time and will give authority to proceed on key activities.
This DRR will take place at the Defense Acquisition Executive Level with full participation from all DOD stakeholders. The DRR will not constitute the actual decision to deploy the NMD system. Rather, it will assess the technological progress to support a deployment decision. Deployment is a Presidential decision that may occur sometime this summer or fall. The Administration will assess the current state of the program, the threat, the affordability of the system, and take into account the implications for the overall strategic environment and our arms control objectives. If a decision is made to deploy, we will simultaneously seek approval for our recommend NMD site and the award of the construction contract for that site.
In fiscal year 2001, we will conduct a Defense Acquisition Board review again to assess the status of the program. Based on program performance, we would seek approval to initiate upgrades to the current early warning radars, begin building the X-band ground-based radar and missile site, and start integrating the Battle Management/Command, Control, and Communications system.
Then in fiscal year 2003, we will conduct a second Defense Acquisition Board review to seek approval to procure and deploy the ground-based interceptors as well as the necessary spares and test rounds for the system. All of these decisions will depend on an assessment of our technical and programmatic progress at the time.
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Although I continue to be optimistic about the system's eventual capabilities, we should guard against being either overly optimistic or unduly pessimistic about the deployment readiness of the NMD system. The NMD program is still a high-risk program. The schedule is so compressed that a single setback in one element can delay the entire program. To date, however, we have been able to meet our commitments, but it requires aggressive management and constant attention to do so. We recognize there is a long road ahead.
So far, we have had two intercept flight tests to support the DRR decision process. The October 2, 1999, test demonstrated the ability of the kill vehicle to locate, discriminate, engage, and destroy a reentry vehicle above the atmosphere. As you know, Integrated Flight Test-3 (IFT–3) had a remarkable finish, one which helped convey the technical complexity of colliding directly with a missile warhead traveling in space at a closing velocity of more than 15,000 miles per hour. The ability to do this becomes even more awe-inspiring when one considers the target warhead may be less than five feet long and surrounded by decoys and debris.
We accomplished all of our test objectives on IFT–3. The physical destruction of the target warhead speaks for itself. We now know our interceptor concept works. It worked the very first time we tried, a fact that has helped to build our confidence that we can maintain our aggressive schedule.
Much attention has been given to Integrated Flight Test 4, which occurred on January 18 of this year. IFT–4 was one in the long line of testing events we have planned through 2005, the deployment date. While many have called that flight test a failure, I take exception to that characterization of this very valuable test event.
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Viewed in the context of the mission, IFT–4 failed to hit the target. We missed the reentry vehicle. The miss speaks for itself. However, in the context of testing, IFT–4 was a successful developmental test and proved under stressful conditions that the X-band radar, the Upgraded Early Warning Radar, and the Battle Management/Command, Control, and Communications capability of our proposed architecture works.
The NMD system is one of the most complex systems our country has ever attempted to develop and produce. The interception phase of the NMD mission is clearly the most visible and key to our success, yet we must not lose sight of the fact that successful integration of the highly interdependent system elements is no less critical. The integration and support aspects of our testing events are transparent to most people, but I assure you, we could not do the job without them.
We will continue to test our NMD system based upon strict, proven, scientific methods learned over more than four decades of missile development, deployment, and operations. Our tests are designed to weed out flaws. While we strive for success on every test, we do not expect that we will always have it. Very often, problems occur and elements of our test fail. Yet, we learn a lot from our testing successes and failures before they go into our deployed weapons systems. That is why we test. We must ensure that the NMD system we will eventually deploy will work with a very high level of confidence. Our testing program is designed to do just that.
We have set a criterion for Deployment and Readiness Review (DRR) to have two successful intercepts. To date, we have had one successful out of the first two attempts. Our next attempts are IFT–5 in the April-May time frame of this year, and again in July with IFT–6.
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Now let me talk about our Upper-Tier programs for a minute. They provide us an important theater defense capability. The Army THAAD and the Navy Theater Wide systems are aggressively moving from demonstration into development. THAAD is now fully funded through the FYDP. The Navy Theater Wide is fully funded through fiscal year 2002, with further funding to be reviewed after an important series of upcoming flight tests.
Last year, many in Congress were dissatisfied with the proposed Upper-Tier acquisition strategy. Indeed, a year ago, we were in a very different position regarding our Upper-Tier programs. THAAD had no intercepts and the Navy Theater Wide program was not as well defined as we would like. We were proceeding along a leader-follower path to choose one upper-tier system over the other.
Since then, THAAD has had two successful intercepts, which will allow us to move that program into the engineering and manufacturing development (EMD) phase. Navy Theater Wide is now progressing towards an important series of ground- and sea-based flight tests. In light of these very positive results, we have followed Congressional direction and put in place a strategy that takes advantage of this progress. Our goal today is to deliver both programs as soon as practical.
The Patriot Advanced Capability-3 (PAC–3) and the Navy Area systems are the backbone of our Lower-Tier and will provide local and area defense. We request $2.9 billion across the FYDP for these systems, with three-quarters of this amount going for procurement. This plan reflects how much these systems have matured and our commitment to move smartly from development into production. PAC–3 will initially deploy in fiscal year 2001 and Navy Area in fiscal year 2003 under current schedules.
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Our International Programs will foster important missile defense cooperation, interoperability, and burden sharing. We have made a significant commitment to these programs this year. Most of the funds we requested were for the Medium Extended Air Defense System (MEADS) program, which we are developing cooperatively with Germany and Italy. MEADS has now been fully funded in the Future Years Defense Program by adding $714 million from fiscal year 2001 to 2005. The program has been restructured beyond the three-year risk reduction effort, with the first unit equipped now planned for fiscal year 2012.
The Arrow program with Israel has made much progress, a fact highlighted by last November's successful intercept. Our funding request of $124 million from fiscal year 2001 to 2005 will allow Israel to procure components for a third Arrow battery and help us ensure that Arrow is interoperable with U.S. systems.
Cooperation with Russia remains an important objective. Accordingly, we have fully funded Russian American Observational Satellites (RAMOS) in the Future Years Defense Program at $317 million to support our proposal to the Russians for a revised two-satellite project should the U.S. and Russia agree to proceed.
We also signed a memorandum of understanding with Japan last August to help develop critical interceptor technologies that we expect will enhance our Navy Theater Wide capabilities.
A key element of our technology program is the Space-Based Laser (SBL). This SBL program, which we share with the Air Force, currently is funded at $138 million in fiscal year 2001. BMDO assumes more than half of that total funding. In the near term, SBL work will focus on ground-based efforts to demonstrate component and sub-system technologies.
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In full operation, we envision an interdependent system that works with ground-, sea-, and air-based missile defenses, where boost phase intercepts could thin out missile attacks and reduce the burden on mid-course and terminal phase defenses. As I reported earlier, the more layers of defense, the more likely we are to succeed.
Our fiscal year 2001 request of $206 million for our technology program will go to an applied research and advanced development effort. These programs will enhance the effectiveness of our current and future systems and reduce the cost of our acquisition programs. Although we program over $1 billion over the FYDP for this important area, it has become increasingly difficult to maintain an aggressive technology program in the face of competing demands of our major BMDO efforts. Most of our financial resources are focused on development, production, and deployment of our family of systems for tiered defense. We will continue to examine ways to ensure we focus our future technology funding to face the threat.
As we look forward to the DRR, we have achieved several notable and reassuring successes in our National Missile Defense testing program. We are making substantial progress in our Upper-Tier systems, moving them towards development and production, and we are on the verge of achieving major milestones leading to the deployment of our Lower-Tier systems. Our international commitments are adequately funded and our technology program is focused with the resources we have available.
Mr. Chairman, in my short tenure as Director of BMDO, I am more convinced than ever that effective missile defense is critical to the defense of this nation and its armed forces. The missile threats facing our nation, our armed forces, and our allies are immediate and growing. While I expect significant complex technical and management challenges in our program, we are demonstrating increasing success and I am confident that we are aggressively addressing the right issues at the right time and that we are funding our program accordingly. I look forward to working with you in the coming years to make this a reality. Thank you very much.
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[The prepared statement of General Kadish can be found in the Appendix.]
Mr. WELDON. Thank you, General, for your statement and thank you for your leadership.
General, our goal in this Subcommittee in a very bipartisan way, in fact, with no dissenting votes that I know of in the last six years, has been to pursue the threats that we see emerging, and obviously, what we do in the missile defense area is based on the threats. In fact, we have focused on three major new challenges in the 21st century, with missile proliferation being the first, the use of weapons of mass destruction and terrorism being the second, and cyber terrorism information dominance being the third, and now the administration is getting with it, and even though we have plussed up funding in each of those areas for six years, they are now following suit with what the Congress laid out five years ago.
I want to talk about the threat for a moment, just to lay it on the table. Now, you are not the CIA, but you are aware of the threats as well as anyone, so I am going to ask you some generic questions.
Is it not true that ten years ago, in 1991, the largest loss of military life that we had in that decade was when our young Americans were killed by the Scud missile attack on that barracks in Saudi Arabia?
General KADISH. I believe that to be true.
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Mr. WELDON. Is it not true, General, that really, in a surprise to the intelligence community, on July 24, 1998, when Iran test fired the Shahab-3 missile, that presented a technology challenge that we did not think Iran would have for some time, and they now possess a capable medium-range system?
General KADISH. I believe that to be true.
Mr. WELDON. Is it not true that on August 31 of 1998, North Korea fired a type No-Dong-1 three-stage missile, which also surprised the intelligence community and which the CIA now admits through their strategic analyst, Bob Walpole, could, in fact, hit the United States with a small payload?
General KADISH. I believe that is accurate.
Mr. WELDON. So the point is that we have seen over the past ten years the growth of missile proliferation and the threat to our people and to our troops and our allies to be one of, if not the most severe challenges we face. Therefore, I have this question for you.
This Congress, with my colleagues on this side and this side, have worked together in looking at the facts and we took tremendous criticism. In each of the past five years, we plussed up missile defense funding by an average of $1 billion a year above the President's request, each year, and we did it because, very quietly, Mal O'Neill and Les Lyles told us that the President's budgets were underfunded. Even though publicly they came in and sat where you sat and had to salute and say the kind of things you are saying today, they told us we were not providing enough money for robust testing and for the full examination of potential systems.
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So in adding over $5 billion over the past five years, we are in a position today to have the successes we have had over the past year. Now, this year, the President for the first time requested new money. He fully funds National Missile Defense and he asks for an additional $4 billion over the FYDP.
My question to you is, where would we be today if this Committee and this Congress had not plussed up missile defense funding by $5 billion over the past five years? Would we have had those intercepts that we had over the past year, or do you think we would have still been doing technology work that perhaps we have done two and three years ago?
General KADISH. Mr. Chairman, as I spent a lot of my career in the acquisition business and I know one rule to be true. More money is better from an acquisition standpoint. [Laughter.]
We have certainly taken the dollars, based on my review of the program when I came on board, and spent them as wisely as we could. The programs, based on the funding that we got, are better off for it.
Mr. WELDON. Thank you, General. I do not want to get you in any more trouble than you are already in, so that is a fine answer.
General, I am asking you on the record to provide for this Subcommittee, both Subcommittees, your list of areas where, if we could provide additional money, where you think in your best professional judgment that money could be most wisely spent to allow you to do additional testing.
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[The information referred to can be found in the Appendix.]
Mr. WELDON. Now, the Welch Commission criticized us for not doing enough testing. What was interesting to me is the very people on the Welch Commission were those in the administration who objected when we gave them extra money for more testing over the past five years. We want more testing. We want to make sure these systems work. And so we would ask you to provide for the record a list of those areas where you feel extra money could be most useful.
I want to talk for a moment about international programs. I thank you for what you have done with the RAMOS project. I was never more embarrassed in my life than when a year and a half ago this Administration, without any consultation with the Russians, zeroed out the program of RAMOS and tried to replace it with a series of other initiatives. The Russians read that as mistrust and they read that as undermining a strategic relationship that we claimed was one of working with them.
You have taken the steps to correct that, and again with the help of Democrats and Republicans, not only is RAMOS funded, MEADS is funded, our work with the Japanese has been fully funded, and our work with the Israelis. Finally, we get the funding that this Congress has fought for to fund the third battery for Arrow, a key requirement of Israel's security and defense.
I want to ask you a question about the Russian issue of the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty, because Russia today is making a lot of headlines around the world about what our movement toward NMD actually means. My own feeling personally is that Russia is playing to what they really think is the belief of this Administration, a belief that for seven years has focused on arms control and not missile defense systems. I am convinced that the Russians really think that is what our real intent is and they are trying to buy time until a new administration comes in.
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In terms of Russia itself, is it true that Russia is still deploying new missile defense systems, such as they already have the SA–10 and the SA–12, the ANTE–2500, and are they not continuing to work on missile defense as a key priority in their nation?
General KADISH. To the best of our knowledge, I believe that they have the only working national missile defense in accordance with the treaty today.
Mr. WELDON. So they also have the world's only operational ABM system, the GALOS system, which my understanding is they have upgraded three times.
General KADISH. I believe that to be correct, yes.
Mr. WELDON. So the interesting thing is that while those in the arms control community are saying that we are, in fact, trying to back Russia into a corner, Russia itself is continuing to pursue missile defense in a very aggressive manner. But I think there are some things that we can do to help show Russia that we do not consider them to be the threat, because this system, as my colleagues have pointed out, is not what Ronald Reagan envisioned. This is not designed to provide an umbrella, but rather a limited defense.
Is it not true, General, that if Russia desired to overcome what we are talking about with NMD, it would not take very much effort on their part?
General KADISH. I believe that to be the case. We are focused on what we call the rogue threat, which is very limited in scope but one that we could defeat.
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Mr. WELDON. So it is designed specifically for the rogue threat, the North Korean threat, the Iranian threat, the Iraqi threat?
General KADISH. That is correct.
Mr. WELDON. And that needs to be pointed out, because Russia has never been the reason for this initiative. Now, we took a group over, along with Donald Rumsfeld and Jim Woolsey to Moscow and told the Russians that. I think there is an opportunity for us to work with the Russians, and I want to end my first round of questioning, and I do not expect you to give me a solid answer, but I did raise this question with you yesterday.
As you know, in trying to find a way to again build confidence with the Russians, not just with programs like RAMOS but also looking for other opportunities, I proposed in November to the Russians that we begin discussions on the possible cooperation of a limited boost phase intercept in the Russian Far East specifically aimed at North Korea's threat, which is both a threat to the U.S. and to Russia. Now, this idea was first proposed by two opponents of NMD, Ted Postel, an Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) professor, and Richard Garwin, who is a member of the Rumsfeld Commission.
I would ask you, General, if you would this year look at the feasibility of the U.S. beginning discussions with Russia on a boost phase intercept program using Russian technology that we know is available and seeing whether or not that would be a feasible option for us in terms of building confidence while we pursue National Missile Defense.
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[The information referred to can be found in the Appendix.]
General KADISH. Yes, sir, we could take that on. In fact, we have been discussing with individuals all types of ways of enhancing our missile defense capability and this could be one of them.
Mr. WELDON. Thank you, General.
Mr. Hunter.
Mr. HUNTER. Thank you, Curt, and my apologies for not being here earlier. I am out trying to get the defense top line boosted a little bit.
But General, let me just ask you a general question in three areas, Navy Theater Wide, National Missile Defense, and THAAD. In terms of testing, if you had an unlimited budget, what additions in testing would you be giving, would you be setting up?
General KADISH. In each one of those programs, what I would prefer to do, if I had the ability to be unconstrained fiscally, is to put additional testing in areas to reduce overall risk, in other words, alternate paths to accomplish the same idea.
For instance, I would like to test on National Missile Defense more than one way to intercept the incoming warhead with a different kill vehicle, for instance, more and different booster technologies, and invest, in fact, in some testing of newer technologies that we could not afford to do right now.
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On the THAAD side of the house, I think that the program we have today is very robustly funded in terms of testing. We learned our lesson the hard way on THAAD. In fact, we have put enough resources, I believe, to solve a lot of those problems, so I would be hard-pressed to tell you what I would do in that area other than to put redundancy in, to make sure that if we have failures, we could recover quickly.
On the Navy Theater Wide, I think more money would help us accelerate that test program better than it is today, but I could say that about almost any test program.
Mr. HUNTER. What kind of dollars would you look at in the two areas where you think we have less-than-robust testing or could use some more testing?
General KADISH. If I could take that for the record, I would like to be precise on that, to make sure that I could answer that.
Mr. HUNTER. Could you provide that for us?
General KADISH. Yes, sir.
[The information referred to can be found in the Appendix.]
Mr. HUNTER. Thank you very much, and thank you, Curt, for calling this hearing. It is an excellent hearing.
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Mr. WELDON. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Mr. Pickett.
Mr. PICKETT. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
General Kadish, one of the things that I think concerns some of the Members on this Committee has to do with whether or not the scientific and technology data that is being developed by the different programs, the National Missile Defense, the Theater Missile Defense programs, and the Area Defense programs, is being interchanged in a way so that these programs do not have to duplicate work that the other is doing. Are you satisfied that there is a free and productive interchange of data to ensure that these programs are not duplicating the work of each other?
General KADISH. The answer to that question is yes and no. I hate to say it that way, but I am confident that we do not have any obvious misapplication of effort because of duplication, or even not so obvious. What I am not very happy with and I feel like we need a lot more work and we are pursuing is a more formal and more disciplined approach to shared data that gets over proprietary information among the companies involved as well as the normal cultural barriers you have among different services and entities within the Department of Defense. So that is one of the areas I have a lot of concern in and I am going to be working very hard to make sure it turns out right.
Mr. PICKETT. A little more specifically, each of these systems relies upon a radar system or configuration. Are you satisfied that the planned radar needs of these respective systems are adequate and will, in fact, achieve the results that will enable these three different types of systems to be successful?
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General KADISH. Right now, each and every program has an adequate plan to achieve their objectives. And, in fact, we are going a little bit beyond each and every program. If you look at the THAAD radar, for instance, that we have today and are planning on using, it is the same radar in terms of hardware configuration in many respects that is in our National Missile Defense activities.
We have early and emerging programs on Navy programs to use X-Band radars that currently do not have to share that same technology, but it is in the early stages of planning right now.
One area that I am particularly concerned about and we have taken action to handle is the development of algorithms and the actual makings inside the radar that make these things work and to actually discriminate the reentry vehicles from other debris. We call those things algorithms, the specific equations. We are going to centralize that under a project we call Hercules that make it a national effort as opposed to individual company efforts so that we can share that very precious technology that only a very small number of people in the country know how to do.
So we are making a number of individual efforts to make this come together, and, in fact, I have started a discussion with the Navy specifically on the radar, with their radar road map, to make sure that it dovetails as much as it can with the BMDO efforts on radars, as well. That is emerging. It is not complete yet, but we are on the initial stages of that.
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So on balance, we have done a lot, but there is a lot more to go. I could be more specific if you would like for the record or even come and discuss it more with you.
Mr. PICKETT. I think that is very helpful and I appreciate it. Thank you very much. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
[The information referred to can be found in the Appendix.]
Mr. WELDON. Thank you, Mr. Pickett.
Mr. Sisisky.
Mr. SISISKY. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
You heard my opening statement. I was commenting, really, on what a lot of Members are telling me and, of course, some articles that I read, but basically, I talk about the Office of Operational Test and Evaluation and I would like to have a comment to you. Are undue pressures being placed upon you for deployment, and really, are we technically advanced enough within the next year to deploy, in your opinion?
General KADISH. Well, right now, the NMD program as well as a lot of our other programs, being in the acquisition business for a number of years, puts pressure on me every day, and I will not deny that, in the sense that we have a program that we need to deliver. We know what we need to do and we are off doing it, but we are always on the ragged edge, if you will, of the technology development and the efforts required to make that happen. When you say undue pressure, I do not believe that to be the case. It is normal pressure in my business and we respond to it that way.
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In the case of—let me be a little bit more specific. We had scheduled the Flight Test 3 in National Missile Defense last June. That was the one we accomplished on the second of October. The program manager and I and other folks are managing this program such that we delayed and took action to delay that flight until we were ready to do it, and that is the natural progression of a development program. There are puts and takes. There are tough decisions to make every day.
If we were under undue pressure, we would have done that in June, when it was scheduled, as opposed to making the tough decisions we are charged to make, and we made those tough decisions and we will continue to make those tough decisions.
You have to realize that it was not until April of 1998, I believe, that we awarded the contract to Boeing to do this, and in less than 18 months, we had our first flight test to attempt intercept and was successful. We have had two intercept attempts and we have gotten one of those first time out, as I said in my opening statement. So this program has a deadline. We are managing that deadline and we are accomplishing what we need to accomplish to lay out the plan that we have before us.
Now, let me say something about high risk. When I say high risk, what high risk really means is that if we have a failure or an anomaly that we do not understand, we may not make that schedule on time. As we show in many Department of Defense programs, we eventually get there, but we are working towards an aggressive schedule and we are meeting our milestones as near as we can do it with some anomalies here and there, like the last test did not have an intercept.
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So in the end, we have a very aggressive schedule that we are meeting. If we meet the plan that we have laid out for us and we have agreed across a wide range of activities to accomplish, we will be ready to deploy this system. I will not promise that we will not have problems along the way.
This year, in terms of the DRR, the schedule for that has been set for many months. It is in June. That is not unusual, to have a scheduled event in our development of programs in the DOD, a schedule-driven event to review the progress of the program at that time. So it is not unusual to do that, and you could, in fact, hold events even if you are not being very successful in order to decide what to do.
So the DRR being schedule-driven does not bother me at all in terms of pressure on the program. It is just another event to deal with, and as I described, this program has a series of events subsequent to the DRR to make increasingly more decisions on investing in the program and our progress and we will treat those the same and we will have more test data across the board.
I think, though, that as we reach this June, even based on the failure to intercept that we had last time, I am confident that we will have enough data to make a decision on what to do at that time, and right now, I think our next flight test should not be delayed more than 30 days based on what I know today of the failure anomaly we have, and if we have that data, we should be able to provide our leadership with the data they need to factor into the decision. That is what I see today.
Mr. SISISKY. So if I hear you correctly, if you find another anomaly or anything, the schedule in June, you can make that, is that correct, no matter what slippage that you have in the testing? Is that what you are telling me? I am not trying to put words in your mouth
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General KADISH. No. I am trying to be very precise here because it is an important question. Right now, today, we need to have a second intercept to meet our criteria. We have one more flight test to do that before June. But we also have another flight test in July. So if we could eventually meet that criteria with other flight tests, even if we have an anomaly.
Now, specifically for Flight Test 5, the problem we had the last time that resulted in the failed intercept, we believe can be fixed in time to do that, within 30 days of our scheduled date, sometime in May. If that still holds true as we go through our very rigorous decision process on this, we could meet the June date with another flight test. If we have a different solution that comes out of our failure analysis, we may not. We just do not know right now. But today, it is on track for May, in that time frame and in time for a June decision.
Mr. SISISKY. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Mr. WELDON. Thank you, Mr. Sisisky.
Mr. Chairman, Mr. Spence, do you have some questions you would like to ask?
The CHAIRMAN. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Let me just try one.
General, some of our European allies object to us having a National Missile Defense system. Why do they object, number one, and number two, what is our answer to them?
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General KADISH. Well, sir, I think that question would be better posed to a policy expert. I am more into the acquisition business. I can give you an opinion on this, but fundamentally, I think that, at least from my perspective, we need to do a better job of explaining not only to the European allies and allies in general, but also the American public, the difference between what we tried to do in the so-called Star Wars era and what we are trying to do today in trying to make this system work, and I think that difference would help them understand the realities that we are facing.
The other issue that I observe is that the acceptance of the threat may not be the same and that if people see the threat the same way, the conclusions are obvious about whether we should have a defense or not, in my view.
The CHAIRMAN. I am visited by a lot of our friends from Europe and they raise this objection, that they feel like they are left out if we go ahead and develop this system and it might endanger them somehow. I try to tell them that we have threats from China and Iraq and Iran, all kinds of places, and they are just focusing on Russia. We have to be able to defend ourselves. They still do not seem to get it.
But if we, in developing our National Missile Defense system, if a part of it would be Navy Theater Wide, would not that answer some of their questions because that part of our system would be based around and also provide protection for them, as well as not only the National Missile Defense, but the Theater Missile Defense part of it, too, which would very much concern them and would provide protection for them, too, just like we are working with Israel and Italy and Germany now?
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General KADISH. Yes, sir, I think you are correct. Although our theater defenses could be applicable to the defense, especially in the NATO area or even our National Missile Defense if it is stationed in other than the Continental United States (CONUS) could help, but those are policy decisions that are important, but those are technically feasible, yes, sir.
The CHAIRMAN. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Mr. WELDON. We are going by the arrival at the hearing, and according to my sheet, Ms. Tauscher is next.
Mr. SPRATT. Mr. Chairman, I was here when the meeting—I will defer to the lady, but I was here when the meeting started. I was here before the meeting started.
Mr. WELDON. You are not on the sheet, but Mr. Spratt, if the gentlelady does not object, I will let you go ahead.
Mr. SPRATT. I defer to the lady, but I would like to come at least after her testimony.
Mr. WELDON. Would the gentlelady object if I let Mr. Spratt go next?
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Ms. TAUSCHER. Age before beauty.
Mr. WELDON. Thank you. I did not hear that, but whatever it was, it sounded funny. Age before beauty. Mr. Spratt, it is all yours. [Laughter.]
Mr. SPRATT. Well, I am a bit of a Southern gentleman. This makes me feel a little uneasy, but I appreciate the opportunity to put some questions, General Kadish.
General Kadish, I have read the Welch report and I have enormous respect for Larry Welch and for the other general officers, flag officers who were part of that panel, a very, very competent Committee and I do not think they had any axes to grind. I have read the core report and I have listened to your testimony today and there seems to be more than the normal degree of hedging, apprehension of risk, than one normally encounters with a system like this that is so close to a deployment date. Would you agree with that?
General KADISH. Yes, sir. It is a tough job.
Mr. SPRATT. A high-risk program?
General KADISH. High-risk program.
Mr. SPRATT. Welch notes, among other things, and we picked this up from Boeing, that the modeling and simulation software that is being developed by Boeing, the lead system integrator called the LSIDSS software, the Lead System Integrator Distributed Simulation System, has been delayed. It is one of those things that is not on schedule, and hence, it will not be delivered in time to be of optimal use to you. My understanding is that this simulation capability is really critical to evaluating many aspects of the deployment decision because you simply cannot live-fire test in all the endless variety of scenarios that the system might be stressed and used.
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What does it mean towards a fully considered deployment system if you do not have the kind of information you expected to have from this Distributed Simulation System?
General KADISH. Certainly, we are disappointed that the delay in that development, very complex software development program, is the way it is, and it will affect our planned ability to offer to especially the operational testers a tool that they could use to do that evaluation this summer.
I would say two things, however, in mitigation of that particular problem. The first one is that we have used other tools, although not as sophisticated or as what I would call technically convenient as the LIDS development, it could provide us an answer that would be adequate, in our view, although a little bit more difficult to come up with, for what we needed to for DRR. Now, we have to reach agreement with that with the right people in the process, but that is what we believe today.
In addition, as I pointed out before, the operational effectiveness of the system needs to be continually evaluated at every step of the way. So LIDS eventually will fulfill that role when we perfect it, and we go to the Defense Acquisition Review decision in 2001 and 2003 and the times in between on our way to 2005, we should be doing more sophisticated and more intense analysis using that tool at those times in a phased approach.
So I believe with those two factors, we should be able to handle that problem.
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Mr. SPRATT. Given the milestones you set for yourself before you really are at the point of no return, would you agree with General Welch's observation that what you are doing in June is more of a technology feasibility review than a deployment feasibility review, a decision whether it is ready to go forward with the technology as opposed to one that is irrevocably committing you to deployment?
General KADISH. The way we have the program planned is that it is a step that gives us confidence that we should proceed, and in that sense, it is a feasibility review because the only thing that we are doing differently next summer is starting the site constructions that lead us to make—those are the longest lead dates—
Mr. SPRATT. You have got to start pouring concrete in Alaska if you are going to build the X-Band Radar.
General KADISH. Right, and the X-Band Radar. If we had a different, or were able to technically do that in a shorter time frame, then we could delay the deployment decision as we know it today a little bit longer. But as I said before, we have phased decisions that give us authority to proceed on ever-increasing parts of the program. It just so happens that we need to have a deployment readiness review this summer so we can be in a position to start the following year with our construction of the site, and that is just a fact of life that we have to deal with. So from that standpoint—
Mr. SPRATT. One of the things that General Welch noted is that, and his whole panel, was that the booster you are using now is, I do not know if it is an order of magnitude, but it is substantially less thrust than the booster you will have on the final Exoatmospheric Kill Vehicle (EKV) and that the increased thrust on the booster for the operational EKV will be such that you will not know what the impact on the EKV may be on its guts, its internal structure, until you have actually fired it a couple of times. Is it conceivable that you will after, at that point, which is IFT–7, redesign the EKV?
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General KADISH. That is correct. We can redesign it almost any time. In fact, we have plans to redesign it.
Mr. SPRATT. But if this thrust is—I mean, they raised serious alarm and concern that the enormous thrust of this operational booster could really wreak havoc with your EKV.
General KADISH. We are paying attention to that, sir, and that is part of our program to evaluate. But—
Mr. SPRATT. You are addressing that now rather than waiting to find out in the field?
General KADISH. We are doing that as early as we can, and as I also pointed out, that it will not be until 2003 until we make a production decision on the EKV and the booster. So this is the time that we intend to bring out those issues.
Mr. SPRATT. Just a couple of final points. The Fylingdales is a problem, apparently, with the British Isles. If you do not have Fylingdales, do you have early warning?
General KADISH. We have a problem with early warning coverage—
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Mr. SPRATT. You have got Defense Support Program (DSP).
General KADISH. Yes, but that is—there is a difference in filing dales between—
Mr. SPRATT. Not early warning, but early tracking.
General KADISH.—early warning and the X-Band Radar, yes, and we are not proposing to put an X-Band Radar in the Expanded C–1 configuration. We do not seem to have a problem in the early warning phase with filing dales at this point in time.
Mr. SPRATT. And finally, do you have a system that meets your capability one requirements without Space Based Infrared System-Low (SBIRS-Low), and is it not a fact that SBIRS-Low really does not start deployment, if it stays on schedule, until about 2006 and will not be completed until about 2009 or so?
General KADISH. That is correct. We have—
Mr. SPRATT. So even if you get this in the field, you still will not have the sensors and the space that really give it the capacity you require.
General KADISH. That is not exactly right.
Mr. SPRATT. Okay.
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General KADISH. What we have is there are two SBIRS programs, SBIRS-High and SBIRS-Low, referring to their orbit placement. We need SBIRS-Low for our follow-on NMD configurations, what we call C–2 and C–3, and right now, the program in 2010 would be meeting that requirement.
What we have to have for C–1, the one we expanded C–1 deployment that we currently have on our plan, is SBIRS-High. Now, the advantage we have right today is that SBIRS-High and the Defense Support Program, it has already been in orbit and operating for many years, operate in tandem and we can use either one. SBIRS-High gives us a little bit better performance—
Mr. SPRATT. Initial acquisition.
General KADISH.—than DSP, but we could use DSP. In fact, we are using DSP for our tests today. So that even though SBIRS-High is a little bit late, and I do not think will be fully online until somewhere in 2005, late 2006 time frame, about a half a year after our deployment, we have adequate coverage with the space sensors for our program.
Mr. SPRATT. My point is, you could rush to the deployment of the EKV and the booster only to get there well ahead of the time that the sensors that are an essential part of the architecture are deployed.
General KADISH. My point, though, is the sensors are already there, Congressman.
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Mr. SPRATT. Well, the acquisition sensor is, but SBIRS-Low would not be.
General KADISH. But we do not need SBIRS-Low for C–1 configuration. We only need SBIRS-High and DSP.
Mr. SPRATT. Thank you very much.
Mr. WELDON. I thank the gentleman. We will have a second round, so if Members want to go over, I would just ask you to hold your questions so everyone can get one round in.
Ms. Tauscher.
Ms. TAUSCHER. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Thank you for coming, General Kadish.
The most recent flight test, IFT–4, the near miss, the media reports talked about a cooling system leak. In layman's terms, can you kind of explain to us what happened and how you think you might have fixed it?
General KADISH. We had a plumbing problem, quite frankly. We have been under intensive failure analysis in the last weeks since the flight test and what we see today is that we have either some sort of a leak or a constriction in the plumbing lines that put cooling gas across our detectors that caused a delay in cooling them down in accordance with the specification.
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So although we will change our design in the future to handle those types of anomalies, we believe that we should not have a major impact to our upcoming test as a result of it. We believe we could fix it in time. So it fundamentally turns out to be either a constriction or some sort of a leak that caused the problem.
Ms. TAUSCHER. So that should be good news. I mean, that is like kind of having your windshield wiper fluid not working, not your transmission.
General KADISH. Right. It is good news that we do not have a major design ahead of us that will have a major delay. It is bad news that we do not have quality control enough to fix that sort of thing.
Ms. TAUSCHER. My second question is, how would the program be affected overall, including the DRR, if IFT–5 were to experience a miss, and just to follow up, how long could IFT–5 be delayed if you felt that was necessary and not have the overall deployment delayed?
General KADISH. If IFT–5 was a miss, I guess I would have to find out why it was a miss. But certainly, our criteria says we have to have two intercepts to proceed because that is prudent to do. But what I would propose, that should the leadership continue to want to hold the DRR to schedule, we would present what we knew at the time and make that part of the decision process.
I would point out, however, that just as we think that it is only a few weeks' delay for the test at this point in time in our evaluation on IFT–5, we have IFT–6 scheduled for July. So we would have to make a judgment whether or not we could make IFT–6 as a part of our continuing test program, and should we have a success on IFT–6 because we were able to fix the problem, we would meet our criteria in the time frame before the overall decision, not for the DRR, but for the overall decision.
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Ms. TAUSCHER. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Mr. WELDON. Thank you, Ms. Tauscher.
Next, we have Mr. Bartlett.
Mr. BARTLETT. Thank you very much. In his opening remarks, Chairman Weldon expressed his appreciation that the Administration's budget was now including full funding for our International Partnership programs, the RAMOS program with Russia, the Arrow program with Israel, and the MEADS program with Germany and Italy.
I would like to add my thanks generally and specifically for MEADS. I am really pleased that the Administration has finally included full funding for this program. Our partners, Germany and Italy, were beginning to doubt that we could keep our word. Your commitment to fully fund this program will go a long way to reestablish our credibility throughout the world for these International Partnership programs and I am appreciative. Thank you very much.
The architecture that we are anticipating for intermediate-range ballistic missile defense is the THAAD program, which I gather is focused on intercepting the missile after apogee, still exo-atmospheric, and if we do not do it then, we still have an endo-atmospheric opportunity later on, and that the AEGIS program is envisioned as providing an opportunity to take it out even before apogee, exo-atmospheric but in early flight before apogee, which is better, of course, because the further away it is from us when we take it out, depending on what it is, the better off we are.
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There are, as you certainly know, sir, those who think that we have got it all wrong, that the AEGIS-based Navy program is so far ahead that what we ought to be doing is putting most of our eggs in that basket, that we are missing a great opportunity to get a system out there years sooner and billions of dollars cheaper and how could we be so wrong-headed. I am sure you are familiar with that. How do you answer the people who make that accusation?
General KADISH. Well, let me start this way. When I moved into this position, I did not know as much about missile defense as I thought I did. I was not in that career field, if you will. I am an Air Force acquisition and pilot. But I had a very professional interest in missile defense.
When I came on board and did my preparation to take this position, one thing became very clear to me that I alluded to in my remarks, and that is an effective defense is a layered defense, whether it is layered with different systems in terms of geography in space or whether it is layered in the number of shots you take at a particular incoming warhead. And for the past 40 or 50 years, we have not been able to devise a non-nuclear effective missile defense in any way, shape, or form anywhere in the world.
Now we are on the verge of doing that, and as I look at trying to make any one system perfect, it is extremely hard to do, and I would argue that we need a layered defense and deploy a layered defense, whether it is national or theater or regional, to solve that problem.
Now, it is also true that I found out that the farther forward you get an incoming theater missile or national missile threat, the better it is because you either take more shots or you have more opportunities through that layered defense to intercept and destroy the target.
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So if you look at the contribution of our various theater defenses, you have got PAC–3 that is land-based, Navy Area that is sea-based, that is very mobile, that we could start putting together a Lower-Tier catcher's mitt, if you will, missile defense. You add THAAD, as you described, the exo- and after-apogee type of activity that takes some incoming stress off the layered defense. And then when you add Theater Wide in the mid-course and in the ascent phase, you have a multiple set of weapons that could increase your certainty of being a successful defense. So it is worthwhile to invest in all those programs, in my view, and deploy them as soon as practical to get that layered defense.
Mr. BARTLETT. I think they buy your argument we need a layered defense, but their argument as I understand it is that if you simply used another platform, that the Navy system could be land-based, as well. You know, put it on the land rather than on a ship and then it is a land-based system. Their argument is that we should not be putting all this money into THAAD, that the AEGIS system is way ahead, that we would be there years sooner and billions of dollars less if we just went with that system. What is your specific response to that accusation?
General KADISH. Well, we have not tested a Naval maritime missile to date in that regime, and, in fact, we have two THAAD intercepts at this point in time. So we are just about three years off in terms of the development and maturity of both of those systems. THAAD is ahead at this point in time in its maturity. So to say that we could do it faster based on demonstrated results, I do not think is credible.
Mr. BARTLETT. Thank you. These are not my questions. I am the devil's advocate here. These questions need to be asked because they are asked of me a number of times, and so I wanted to get your response to it. I think what we are doing is the right thing to do. I just wanted to get this on the record and thank you very much.
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Mr. WELDON. Thank you, Mr. Bartlett.
Mr. Reyes.
Mr. REYES. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I want to also thank you for convening this very important hearing. I think it has been very useful.
As you know, the issue of ballistic missile defense and our ability to deploy a viable system in a timely and cost-effective manner is of crucial importance to the defense of our country. And as we all know, an increasingly large number of small and what are characteristically called rogue states are buying or developing the capabilities to deploy theater ballistic missiles with chemical, biological, or even nuclear payloads.
During a recent visit to Korea, I spoke with General Schwartz, as I had before with General Tillely, and they both stated that theater missile defense should remain one of our highest priorities for protection of our forces. From talking to other commanders, I know that that is a very general concern across the board.
However, in the case of Korea, there are numerous reports that the North Koreans have tested, deployed, and are now selling extended-range ballistic missiles. Until we field a system like PAC–3, our servicemen and women remain extremely vulnerable to the threat of attack from these ballistic missiles. This is a very serious matter and one which we, as members of the Armed Services Committee, have a responsibility to address.
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So I would like to ask General Kadish a couple of questions about the threat from theater ballistic missiles, but before I do, I also want to thank you, as my colleague, Mr. Bartlett, did for fully funding MEADS. That is tremendously important to our men and women in uniform and a real concern to me personally and to other Members of the Committee.
But General, given the knowledge of the threat and our vulnerabilities, in your opinion, does the President's budget adequately fund PAC–3?
General KADISH. The budget is a balance in PAC–3 between the development position of the program. We are just in the midst of the testing program right now, and to bring that to closure and wrapping up in the production. The transition to production, from development into production on any DOD program is very difficult and fraught with a lot of uncertainty in many cases because of the designs that you are building at the same time you are testing.
I can tell you that even though we have that balance in the budget in the transitioning of PAC–3 from development into production, in my view, I am not satisfied that we are building inventories as quickly as we should. But in order to put together a production program over the long run that gets the capability and inventory out in the field as quickly as we can, we have to go through a few steps in the next year or so, and I fully intended as we developed this budget to work hard on cost reduction and facilitatization and other activities in PAC–3 that is built on the test program that we have currently and take a real hard look this summer as the Department went through the 2002 POM bill to make that production profile more aggressive. But we have not reached that step yet, so that is yet to be done and high on my list for this summer.
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Mr. REYES. The obvious follow-up would be, is there anything that either the Department of Defense or this Committee can do to assist you in accelerating or deploying a system for the protection of our troops like this?
General KADISH. There are some things that we need to do that we will need your help on. I would like to take that for the record and be very precise with you, if you do not mind.
Mr. REYES. Very good. Thank you, General.
[The information referred to can be found in the Appendix.]
Mr. REYES. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Mr. WELDON. Thank you, Mr. Reyes.
Mr. Allen.
Mr. ALLEN. I thank the chairman for yielding me this time.
General Kadish, I guess it is no secret I am concerned about the schedule, as are others. The Welch panel report in November of 1999 critiqued the calendar milestones that are still heavily emphasized rather than performance milestones, and the OT&E report, Mr. Coyle criticized the NMD program as schedule-driven rather than event-driven. But Secretary Cohen has indicated that the decision on deployment will still be made on the calendar in June.
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In the last 20 months, this program has suffered, as I understand, about a 20-month slip in schedule, something like that, and yet the deployment decision is still scheduled for June. This Congress last year passed H.R. 4, urging that the system be implemented, deployed as soon as technologically feasible without reference to some of the factors mentioned in your testimony, the affordability of the system, the threat, and the implications for the overall strategic environment and our arms control objective.
You were testifying a moment ago that you felt that you were under pressure but that it was not undue pressure, and my question really is, can you elaborate on that? It certainly looks as if, with all the pressure to maintain a June deployment decision, in spite of the fact that there have been these delays and there is pressure from the Secretary of Defense, there is pressure from the Congress, is that not undue pressure?
General KADISH. I guess it would be in the eye of the beholder. That is what we are charged to do in our day-to-day business. I will freely admit that this is a difficult program and it has great visibility. I would prefer not to do a test program on the front page of every newspaper in the country. I mean, I am not used to doing those types of things in our programs. On the other hand, that is a fact of life and we have to deal with it.
I am confident, however, that we have a program that we understand and are increasingly coming to understand better every day in our day-to-day operation that we believe we are on track to execute. I will not, however, tell you that if we have a major disaster tomorrow, that we will not have a schedule impact, because that could happen to us at any point. And, oh, by the way, that is the same with any other major development program in the Department. It is the nature of the beast.
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But we were asked because of the threat at this point in time to come up with a rather accelerated development program for National Missile Defense and I think even General Welch when he reviewed this program, and, oh, by the way, I have other independent people looking at it all the time, helping us with this, say it is a reasonable approach to the problem that we have, and as long as we make progress against that plan without being totally out of bounds with realism, I believe we are okay.
And after many years in this business, I am a realist in our ability to execute things, or at least try to be, and I can tell you right now, I am comfortable that we are on track to the best of our ability. We have a problem with LIDS. We are about four or five months late on our overall test program. We see every day plusses and minuses of the schedule. But on balance, we are on track to do what we have planned to do and where we have anomalies, we are working to put resources in to fix them.
Mr. ALLEN. Let me follow up. Chairman Spence, when he was here, asked a question about our European allies. The French President Jacques Chirac was quoted in the New York Times in December saying this. If you look at world history ever since men began waging war, you will see that there is a permanent race between sword and shield. The sword always wins. The more improvements that are made to the shield, the more improvements are made to the sword. We think that with these systems, U.S. National Missile Defense, we are just going to spur sword makers to intensify their efforts.
Now, Robert Walpole, the National Intelligence Officer for Strategic and Nuclear Programs, testified before a Senate Committee on February 9 that, and I quote, ''countries developing ballistic missiles would also develop various responses to U.S. theater and national defenses, such as a variety of countermeasures, decoys, and so forth.''
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My question to you is this. Would the deployment of a National Missile Defense to meet what you call an expanded C–1 threat accelerate the appearance of a C–3 threat? Are we, in effect, by deploying this system now, likely to accelerate the development of countermeasures by others?
General KADISH. I am not sure about acceleration, but if you look at even, and I would take this more into a classified room, but I think if you look at our history of developing countermeasures ourselves, those are not easy things to do. On the other hand, we have structured our National Missile Defense program as well as our Theater Defense programs to be evolutionary in nature, such that if you get into this countermeasure, counter-countermeasure spiral, if you will, we have the ability to handle that developing threat.
Whether it would accelerate those types of ideas would be a function of whether those threat countries have the resources, the will, and the ability, technical ability, to pull that off, and that remains to be seen.
Mr. ALLEN. Thank you. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Mr. WELDON. Thank you, Mr. Allen.
Mr. Thornberry.
Mr. THORNBERRY. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
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General, continuing on the subject of operating a test program on the front page of all the newspapers, there is some concern up here that because of the high visibility given to each test, it makes it very difficult to have a proper testing program, because after all, what you are supposed to be doing in testing is pushing the limits, figuring out where your failure points are, and getting some failures. If you never have a failure in a test, you are not doing your job right.
There, as you may know, is even a bill floating around saying we have to test at least to something that has the capabilities, I think, of a type No-Dong-2, to kind of put a minimum floor there.
To what extent do you feel the pressure to do all you can to make sure the tests come out successfully even if it is not the kind of technological test that you would ideally set up?
General KADISH. Not very much. What we have, and we struggle with this every day in terms of our development program, but our test programs are evolutionary in nature. If you look at the first test we did in NMD, it was a fly-by to characterize our seeker, and as we go through IFT–3 our first test event, we basically structured that test so that we tested only the kill vehicle to ensure that design worked, because that was the highest risk in the program. As we moved to the last test, we start putting more elements in line.
So as we go through the next 18 tests in this program through 2005, we are going to make them increasingly more difficult to ensure that when we end up at the end point, we have an operationally useful system that is stressed properly in the test program.
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Now, in the process of doing that, our tests are structured to accomplish those incremental objectives, and to the degree that that is perceived in dumbing down tests or making them more complicated is a debate that I would rather not even get into because it is a scientific way of approaching it, and we have a lot of people looking over our shoulder to make sure that the tests are, in fact, valid across the board, and that is in our best interests, because as developers, we want to make sure that the products we are going to produce are effective, and it does us no good to throw softballs to the point where those things are ineffective, and that is not my charge to do that.
Mr. THORNBERRY. Let me ask you, in response to Ms. Tauscher, you mentioned a quality control problem. There is also a perception by some Members, at least, that quality control has been a problem in this program for some time, that we have the technologies that are developed, but somehow there are hitches along the way that we ought to be able to catch.
To the extent there is a quality control problem, is it a money problem? Do you have the tools you need to deal with the contractors to set the standards you need to set? What is at the root of quality control problems, to the extent they exist in this program?
General KADISH. I think all of us in the Department are concerned about what I would call quality failures. I mean, and you do not have to pick on ballistic missile defense to find that as maybe a systemic problem across a lot of our programs.
I tried to make a very precise distinction between mistakes and systemic problems in quality control, and that is very hard to sort out sometimes. And the complexity that we have in our National Missile Defense program, for instance, is so large that the probability of a mistake is high. Now, if you want to classify that as quality, that is a philosophical debate. So the remedies you use for mistakes are different than if you try to go after a systemic problem of process control, if you will, and that is distinct from the design in the quality control.
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I believe we have all the tools that we need to handle these particular problems, all the way from contractual remedies all the way to the personal attention of the most senior management, and I am comfortable with that right now. I am always disappointed when we make a mistake, but on the other hand, we know how to move on from those and that is what we plan to do.
Mr. THORNBERRY. Finally, why was the Airborne Laser (ABL) program cut so much for 2001?
General KADISH. The Airborne Laser program is not in my portfolio.
Mr. THORNBERRY. It is a joint with the Air Force, is that not right?
General KADISH. There are no dollars from my budget that go into it. That is an Air Force—
Mr. THORNBERRY. Strictly?
General KADISH.—service program. However, the ABL is part of our BMD architecture, so I pay attention to it from that standpoint. But I can only tell you, being on the periphery of that decision, it was a Department of Defense and Air Force decision, as the Secretary pointed out.
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Mr. THORNBERRY. Does it affect your program and are you disappointed that it was cut in half or so?
General KADISH. It affects our architecture, yes, and to the degree that any program is delayed, I am disappointed because of the charge I have to deliver missile defense.
Mr. THORNBERRY. Thank you.
Mr. WELDON. Thank you, Mr. Thornberry.
Mr. Hostetler.
Mr. HOSTETLER. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
General, I would like to ask you a couple of questions about the IFT–4. The component that failed in IFT–4 and ultimately resulted in the miss of the Rear-entry Vehicle (RV), was that a component that was actually being scrutinized specifically for that test? Had not that component proved effective and worked in IFT–3, in previous tests?
General KADISH. All elements of the system that had the failure worked adequately in IFT–3. So we know it works.
Mr. HOSTETLER. Right. And you pointed to and discussion has been made about quality control and the impact of quality control, poor or otherwise, on the process of creating a system such as this. Could not the same quality control issue be the case in 2015, whenever a system is fielded and a failure takes place, and in the actual use, real-time use of a missile defense system, the same thing could happen if you have poor quality control and the EKV miss an RV in a real application, real-life application?
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General KADISH. In a generic sense, quality is at the top of your list as an inquirer.
Mr. HOSTETLER. Right.
General KADISH. We can never—quality is a journey, it is not a specific event, and it has to improve all the time. I can assure you that in the normal processes that we have in developing this program, that after the test program is over, we will continue to develop this system with more tests and any anomalies will be fixed in the field. We do that with every one of our systems today.
The second point I would make is that the quality control process and production that we use should be good enough to prevent these types of issues and that in operation, just as we do with B–1s, B–2s, AEGIS cruisers, when there is anomaly found, we are going to fix them so that we have the highest probability of success when we launch those weapons in anger.
The other thing I would point out is that in the design of the system, we account for less than perfect reliability, so that in the way the weapons are used and in the way we architect the system, we can account for unreliable systems that fail as a normal—I will not say as a normal course of events, but as a happenstance that we just have plain material failure.
Mr. HOSTETLER. So that the component that failed was not necessarily part of what was being scrutinized. It had been successful before. There was a quality control issue and—
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General KADISH. I would prefer to call it a materiel failure.
Mr. HOSTETLER. Materiel, very good. I am not an attorney. I am an engineer. But even in engineering, words have meanings, and there is a lot of discussion about technical failures. In your testimony, you said, viewed in a mission context, IFT was a failure. We missed the RV. However, in the context of testing, IFT was a successful development test that proved under very stressful conditions the X-Band and Upgraded Early Warning Radar and the Battle Management/Command, Control and Communications (BM/C3) capability of our proposed architecture.
So technically, as a result of the first statement, you could say that this was a failure, but how would you characterize the test technologically?
General KADISH. It was a great step forward to build our confidence in the system. We really wanted to know whether the X-Band Radar prototype that we have at Kwajalein could acquire the target complex and discriminate properly. It did that. It did it when it was supposed to do it. In fact, it beat its performance requirements. We really wanted to know what we would get out of the Early Warning Radar at Beale that participated in the test and we got that.
We also tested the Battle Management/Control and Communications systems that we would use. Those are very complex automatic systems that transmit messages very rapidly over satellite communications long distances. Those all worked in the time span that we had.
So when you line up all the things that we really needed to accomplish, it worked very well, because in the final analysis, what we are trying to do with this system is take a 120-pound, 54-inch-long vehicle and boost it into a position going at a very high rate of speed so that when it opens up its sensor, it sees the target and goes and kills it by hit-to-kill. So all these other inline elements, the radars, the battle management, the communications systems, the booster, are designed to get that vehicle in a very precise position and that is what we did.
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Even with this failure, we were able to get that vehicle in exactly the position so it could see the target complex and actually got within 100 meters to 150 meters of the RV. That is no small accomplishment.
Mr. HOSTETLER. Mr. Chairman, as you know, as being the author of the bill, the law that is in effect now talks to the policy of the United States to deploy as soon as is technologically possible. There could always be the possibility of a technical failure, but this issue is so important that as long as we all understand that technologically we are meeting these milestones, that is what is of utmost importance.
If I could just ask one more very brief question, because in your response to Chairman Weldon's question about the Russian anti-ballistic missile system, you referred to it, and it is probably on the record as a national missile defense system. I would tend to agree with you because of the number of people that are actually covered by this umbrella of national missile defense system that is ABM Treaty-compatible. Do you still feel that it is a national missile defense system? I am asking if you want to correct it on the record.
General KADISH. I probably misspoke when I said that. It is treaty-compliant, defending the Moscow area.
Mr. HOSTETLER. But it covers a lot of their population, does it not?
General KADISH. We would have to get classified.
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Mr. HOSTETLER. Very good. Thank you. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Mr. WELDON. Thank you, Mr. Hostetler. We will start our second round now.
General, I have two key themes I want to go through here in a rather quick period of time. First of all, I am convinced that in the debate with the Russians over their concern on national missile defense and the ABM Treaty that the arms control crowd in our country drives as much of the Russian concerns as the actual systems themselves do. Now, why would I ever say that?
Last February around this time, in my office, one of the leading Russian technology experts, Dr. Yevgeny Velakov [ph.], who chairs and heads The I.V. Kurchotov Institute, one of the premiere Russian think tanks in Moscow that developed the whole Russian nuclear program, the Soviet nuclear program, came in to see me. He came in to see me because he had just co-authored an op-ed with me entitled ''From Mutually Assured Destruction to Mutually Assured Protection.'' He agrees with us. He said we should move toward cooperation in missile defense.
He said, ''But Curt, you have to understand. This is the problem,'' and he picked this magazine up. He had brought it in with him. I said, ''What do you mean, General? Why is this the problem?'' And he opened this Time magazine up dated February 22 and he pointed to an insert that is two pages wide called, ''Star Wars: The Sequel.'' And he said, ''When our people see your country deploying missile defense, they look at what your media says about what your intentions are,'' and up here in the corner in a story supposedly about defending our people is this chart that I had blown up.
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This chart says, ''Destroying Russia.'' Arms control advocates map the Pentagon's top-secret plan for waging war, 1,200 warheads at 800 targets, and down at the bottom it says, ''Killing zones: The vast spread of radiation would wipe out more than 20 million. Exposure to 600 REMs in 24 hours would cause certain death within weeks.'' Yevgeny Velakov said, ''This is what our people think your intention is.'' This was put out by the very arms control crowd that argues against missile defense because it would destabilize our relationship. This chart is put out by the Natural Resources Defense Council.
My question to you, General. Are you aware of a top-secret Pentagon plan such as this to destroy Russia? Is that a part of our missile defense strategy?
General KADISH. Sir, I am focused on missile defense.
Mr. WELDON. Okay. As a part of our missile defense strategy, is there a top-secret Pentagon plan to destroy Russia?
General KADISH. Not to my knowledge.
Mr. WELDON. Not to your knowledge. My second question, is the rhetoric that has been raised over deployment—and that is what it is, it is rhetoric, and we have heard a couple of our colleagues focus on that. Now, let us talk seriously for a moment, General. We all understand, we cannot deploy a system until 2005, in your estimation, at a minimum, is that right?
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General KADISH. That is right.
Mr. WELDON. So we cannot deploy a system until 2005.
General KADISH. Under our current plan, that is correct.
Mr. WELDON. Under our current plan. Now, we made a decision last year in the Congress by an overwhelming vote, with 103 Democrats, 102 voted against us, and all but 2 Republicans to make a decision to deploy. And, in fact, in the debate, I laid into the record a question and said to my colleagues, if you support the President and agree he should wait a year, then vote against the bill, because the President had issued a letter in opposition to our bill the morning the bill came up for a vote. But if you disagree with the President and if you support our plan to make the deployment decision now, then vote for the bill.
Three-hundred-and-seventeen members voted against the President. No doubt about it. No add-on amendments to give people cover so they could vote for it. It was a straight up or down vote. If you support the President, vote no because he disagreed with the bill. If you agree with us, you vote yes, and we want a clear vote in a veto-proof margin.
Now, for the President to say he is going to wait a year to make a deployment decision, I have a problem with that rhetoric. My question to you is, if you cannot meet the milestones this year that you have laid out, does it not simply mean, since we have covered the threats the President has outlined, the threat—Secretary Cohen himself has said on the record, we have already crossed the threshold in terms of threat. The President himself has already identified the cost. That was his second criteria. The third criteria was technology, and you are convinced we are on the right track with technology. The only other thing the President referred to was response by our allies and Russia.
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So if we have crossed those thresholds, even if we have a problem this year, does that not simply mean that we may miss the 2005 time frame and that may slip by a period of months? Is that not the real answer in terms of deployment?
General KADISH. That is correct. If we are unable to meet our criteria, the only option is to delay the schedule in order to accommodate that.
Mr. WELDON. But it does not mean—
General KADISH. But it does not mean that we would not continue.
Mr. WELDON. That is exactly the point. And for those people who are supportive of the President to say that somehow he is going to make this big decision this year, I say that is rhetoric. If the President wants to quit the Presidency, like his wife, and run for Congress so he can introduce his own bill to interpret, let him do it. But he is not going to introduce my bill and say he is making a deployment decision this year. We have made that decision.
Now, it may not mean that we can have that date of 2005. That is your call, and I have confidence in you. And it may mean that we may not have the time table that we have laid out. But this rhetoric about a deployment decision this year, in my opinion, is nothing more than political rhetoric, at best.
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One final point. What comes after hit-to-kill? Hit-to-kill, we are working on and we think we have solved that problem. What is the follow-on to hit-to-kill to give us the capability that we need and are we pursuing it?
General KADISH. The follow on to hit-to-kill is better hit-to-kill and then the speed of light through what I would call laser technology at this point in time. I do not believe there is another—and that I think our SBL efforts and our Airborne Laser efforts kind of point in that direction.
Mr. WELDON. Are we funded, in your opinion, with enough dollars in terms of our airborne and laser programs in general?
General KADISH. The space-based laser is following the plan we laid out for it, so I believe that is adequately funded between us and the Air Force, and we just discussed the ABL in terms of the difficult challenges we have there. But as I said to start out, more money is always better, but it is a balancing issue that people have to make tough decisions with.
Mr. WELDON. And at our request, you have said you will give us a list of where, if you had extra money, you would like it to be.
General KADISH. For the record, I will give you the list.
[The information referred to can be found in the Appendix.]
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Mr. WELDON. And this Committee has had a practice of not putting any money into anything other than what the leadership of BMDO thinks is viable, and that has been our practice for the last six years.
Mr. Reyes.
Mr. REYES. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and I continue to believe that this is a very bipartisan Committee regardless, that we all meet the challenge here.
One of the things that I wanted to ask you, General, is regarding THAAD. As we talked about the potential threats out there to our troops and to our country, can you comment for me on what the implications would be of accelerating the actual deployment of the THAAD system?
General KADISH. Over the last six months, since we had our last intercept with THAAD, we have been working hard with the Army, all elements of the Army, to define a system that we could have confidence in the risk, fold in the lessons learned that we have for the demonstration phase, and take advantage of the fact that we want to make that system better based on our understanding of it. That resulted in a 2007 first unit equipped under our current plan with what we call the Configuration 1 capability.
We could, with more money, have accelerated that about six months earlier, but we decided to balance out the other elements of the budget and keep it at that level. So there are opportunities in the way we structured this, if we should have success in very rapid order on THAAD, that in future years, we can accelerate it sooner, and I will be looking for those opportunities and also making sure that they are structured in the program, and just let me give you an example of that.
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If our first four flight tests end up being major successes, then we would take a different path in the development program than if they were not. It is that type of thing.
So the first order is that we have a balanced program to meet 2007. There are opportunities to accelerate that we will take based on the performance of the program and we are planning those into the system right now.
Mr. REYES. So just to reiterate, if the technical aspects hold up, then additional funding can accelerate the deployment of THAAD?
General KADISH. That is correct. The only problem we have, it is the same problem with any system that we develop, is that your opportunity to accelerate is usually in the first two years of any program, based on how many designers and how much effort you put into it. But balancing that out with ''too many cooks spoil the broth'' type of an approach is always a difficult part of this. But in THAAD, we are in a unique situation right now in that we are early on and we think we have the right balance.
Mr. REYES. And just based on your knowledge of the program, what is a best-case scenario and a minimum-case scenario of acceleration, in months?
General KADISH. It can go anywhere from six to 12 months at what I would call modest levels of success and modest levels of funding to a year to a year and a half with much more funding and much more success.
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Mr. REYES. Very good. Thank you. That is all I had, Mr. Chairman.
Mr. WELDON. Thank you, Mr. Reyes, and thank you for your leadership on the THAAD program.
Mr. Bartlett.
Mr. BARTLETT. Thank you very much.
General, could you tell us your level of confidence that the elements of your system are Electromagnetic Pulse-hardened (EMP-hardened) and that the integrated systems are, in fact, EMP-hardened, and then could you tell us the basis for your level of confidence that this is true, that they are hardened?
General KADISH. Are you talking about nuclear effects hardening?
Mr. BARTLETT. Yes, sir, electromagnetic pulse from a nuclear detonation.
General KADISH. Based on the best analysis we have today against the rogue nation threat as I would define it, we have great confidence that we have the proper hardening in our system for all elements. There is a raging debate, however, in the technical community and internal to the programs over what we do beyond that and what we should do now versus later and evolving threats, and that is not resolved yet. So we are working that very hard right now because that is a very expensive thing to do.
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Mr. BARTLETT. To EMP-harden?
General KADISH. That is correct.
Mr. BARTLETT. What you are saying is that you are not sure that you are EMP-hardened, is that correct?
General KADISH. I believe—right now, I am sure that the design we have is the best of our analytical capability today, will meet the requirement. Now, there are debates, however, where we go beyond the initial requirement and whether we should do that now or later, and that is the decision. But today, I believe we are in pretty good shape.
Mr. BARTLETT. If there was a detonation of a nuclear weapon in the area of your system, the system would survive that and be able to function after that EMP lay-down?
General KADISH. That is correct.
Mr. BARTLETT. Now, do we know that because of simulations or do we know that because of some computer program? My concern, sir, is that the Joint Chiefs' present position on EMP-hardening uses a computer simulation program that cannot account for the only real-life experience we have, which I think is the 1972 Starfish explosion over Johnston Island which shut down street lights in Hawaii 800 miles away.
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Now, I am having a lot of difficulty in having confidence in a computer simulation program that cannot account for the only real-life experience that we have. Do you share my concern about this computer program?
General KADISH. I am not sure about the specific one you refer to, but I am concerned about this issue regardless because the scientific evidence and the difficulties we have here are not clear. If you would like, I would very much like to take the answer for record and be very precise to your question.
Mr. BARTLETT. I would appreciate that very much.
[The information referred to can be found in the Appendix.]
Mr. BARTLETT. Let me ask you, sir, is it not true that the Russian ballistic missile defense system uses a nuclear detonation to take out the incoming missile?
General KADISH. To the best of my knowledge, yes.
Mr. BARTLETT. Are you aware, sir, of a big international concern that this is the kind of a ballistic missile defense system they have? Have you heard a lot of international criticism?
General KADISH. No, sir.
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Mr. BARTLETT. Do you think that if we deployed a system like that to take out intercontinental ballistic missiles that had warheads that were intended to kill our children and our grandchildren, that we would be criticized for using a nuclear detonation to take out these warheads? The Russians are not criticized. Do you think we would be?
General KADISH. I would feel the pain, sir. [Laughter.]
Mr. BARTLETT. From what source, sir? From what source would you feel the pain?
General KADISH. The criticisms that we already have on the program are difficult for us to respond to already, and the major criticism we have is that hit-to-kill does not work, and that is our kill mechanism. It is not nuclear.
Mr. BARTLETT. I understand that. It is just brute force.
General KADISH. It is kinetic energy.
Mr. BARTLETT. That is all.
General KADISH. You hit something at very high speed and you disintegrate it. In order to do that, you have to be very accurate, you have to be very technologically competent to make that happen over long distances and in the time frames that we are talking about. So the criticism we get every day about not being able to do it is just part of the—
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Mr. BARTLETT. Sir, if we had had a nuclear detonation in each of these tests, they would have all been astounding successes. They were all quite close enough for that nuclear fireball to take out the incoming missile, were they not?
General KADISH. The first one would have been a tremendous success. We would have a lot of excess energy in that.
Mr. BARTLETT. But the point I am trying to make is that in the final analysis, there is no way we can fail because we are getting so good with hit-to-kill that if we decide that we would like a higher level of confidence and included a nuclear detonation, we now would be much superior to what the Russians now have, because I do not think that they could hit-to-kill. I think that they are dependent on this nuclear fireball to take out the incoming missile, is that not your understanding?
General KADISH. Well, to the degree you do not have the technology to be accurate, as we are proving with our systems, then you only have one recourse and that is an explosive force.
Mr. BARTLETT. So ultimately, as a fallback position, there is no way we can fail to deploy a system which will protect our people if we have the will to do it?
General KADISH. We are on track to do that right now, yes, sir.
Mr. BARTLETT. Thank you.
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Mr. WELDON. Thank you, Mr. Bartlett.
General, either for the record or now, could you give us an assessment of what, if anything, we could be doing to more fully engage our labs in support of the work that you are undertaking. This is a question raised by Mr. Hunter. It is a valid question, and we have our Department of Energy (DOE) labs who have tremendous capabilities, and in the past, he and to some extent I have been concerned that we are not doing enough with them. So I do not expect you to answer that now, but could you, for the record, tell us what, if any, additional things the labs could do to support your effort and your goals?
General KADISH. I would be happy to, Mr. Chairman.
[The information referred to can be found in the Appendix.]
Mr. WELDON. Second question, science and technology, are you satisfied with the funding level for science and technology?
General KADISH. No.
Mr. WELDON. Would you give us a list of what you would like to see if there were money available?
General KADISH. Yes, sir.
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Mr. WELDON. Do you have a total dollar figure that you would say that account should perhaps be at as opposed to what it is?
General KADISH. I could give you a range of dollar figures. I would prefer to do it for the record.
Mr. WELDON. That is very important to us and we think it is critically important that we address that shortfall with extra budget dollars.
[The information referred to can be found in the Appendix.]
Mr. WELDON. The report raised by Phil Coyle has been addressed several times here. I am going to put two quotes into the record. These are both from Phil Coyle himself from that report, and if you want to respond, you may.
The first is, ''The revised program has alleviated some of the long-term risk by deferring and staging the decision process.'' Any comment?
General KADISH. That is exactly true.
Mr. WELDON. The second quote by Dr. Phil Coyle, ''The program manager is doing an excellent job in trying to efficiently and effectively manage the preparation for the DRR and ultimately deployment.''
General KADISH. I would endorse that.
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Mr. WELDON. Is it not true that the bulk of the Coyle report you had well in advance and had already taken steps to implement many of the suggestions in there before the report was even issued?
General KADISH. We did not have an advance copy of the report, but the issues were known to us and we struggle with them every day to do the right thing. So the issues, as far as I am concerned, are on the table and we are doing what we can to alleviate those risks. But there are always risks in these programs, Mr. Chairman, and that is our business, is managing this to a successful conclusion. The problem we have is that those risks become real sometimes and it causes us problems.
Mr. WELDON. General Kadish, at the start of this hearing, did you not tell us that your background in the service was in the procurement and acquisition area?
General KADISH. Yes, sir.
Mr. WELDON. Are there many programs that you can think of a large nature and of a technical challenge like this one where we have not had problems and perhaps failures along the way, any aircraft platforms, any missile programs? Can you think of any that had no problems at all?
General KADISH. Sir, I cannot think of any right now, and I would challenge an historian to go back and find one that did not have significant challenges. Otherwise, they are not worthwhile.
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Mr. WELDON. Thank you, General.
Mr. Reyes, any additional questions?
Mr. REYES. No.
Mr. WELDON. Mr. Bartlett.
Mr. BARTLETT. No.
Mr. WELDON. General, if we had to grade you on your first appearance before Congress, I would give you an A. Thank you.
This hearing is now adjourned.
[Whereupon, at 4:31 p.m., the Subcommittees were adjourned.]
A P P E N D I X
February 16, 2000
[The Appendix is pending.]