US general "very confident" on missile defense

Reuters via Yahoo! ^ | 06/22/06 | Jim Wolf

[Brilliant]

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The Air Force general responsible for building a U.S. anti-ballistic missile shield on Friday voiced high confidence it could shoot down any U.S.-bound missile from North Korea, despite critics' doubts.

"From what I've seen from our testing from the last several years ... and what I know about the system and its capabilities, I'm very confident," Lt. Gen. Henry "Trey" Obering told reporters after a speech to a seminar.

Obering, head of the Pentagon's Missile Defense Agency, declined to confirm reports that ground-based U.S. interceptor missiles had been put on alert for a possible effort to shoot down what U.S. officials say could be Pyongyang's first long-range missile firing in eight years.

But he said the array of interceptor missiles, satellites, radar stations and data relays had been moved from a test status to "operational" configuration many times since the end of 2004, when the initial elements were deployed.

A total of 11 interceptors are now in silos as part of a rudimentary, multibillion-dollar shield -- nine at Fort Greely, Alaska, and two at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California.

The Pentagon has shot down mock warheads in five of 10 highly scripted intercept tests of the ground-based system. The United States has spent more than $92 billion on missile defense since then-President Ronald Reagan launched what critics called his "Star Wars" initiative in 1984.

'OUR REALITY NOW'

Obering's stated confidence contrasted with views of the Pentagon's own top weapons evaluator as well as those of many outside experts.

"As reported last year, there is insufficient evidence to support a confident assessment of limited defensive operations," David Duma, the Pentagon's director of operational testing and evaluation, wrote in an annual report to Congress on U.S. weapons dated February 1.

Obering said Duma's staff was coming at it "from a different perspective -- how can you break the system, what are the limits?"

"I'm telling you what is our reality now," he said.

Victoria Sampson of the private Center for Defense Information, which has been critical of the program, defended Duma's assessment.

"The operational testers do come at the problem from a different angle: their focus is to test the program as realistically as possible, while that approach seems to be an anathema to the rest of the Pentagon," she said.

Richard Lehner, a Missile Defense Agency spokesman, said Obering based his confidence on four consecutive successful intercept tests in 2001 and 2002.

"The bulk of the know-how gleaned from those tests is what's deployed today, which is why we have a high confidence in our capability," he said.

Boeing Co. is the prime contractor for the ground-based system, designed to shoot down incoming warheads in the middle of their flight, as they course through space. Other big U.S. missile-defense contractors include Lockheed Martin Corp., Northrop Grumman Corp. and Raytheon Co.

[himno hero]

as i said...
70/075/80/85/90 percent confidence with what assurity?

[Paul Ross]

Sprint was amazing. Zero to mach 8 in one second. Not many gun systems can do that.

Agreed. It was an amazing success story. It worked far better than the Rats could allow to be heard. They had a DOD renegade leftist schill "strategic analyst" (who in fact contributed nothing himself to the development of the system) pose as an expert to smear the system's performance and justification back in '69, and the Senate kept calling him back to further defame the Safeguard System. The Sprint had gotten so accurate that it was colliding with incoming RVs. So they detuned the MSR radar a bit so that it wouldn't be as likely to collide. Kind of silly when you think about. Even if its own W-66 1.kt warhead didn't go off because of evisceration in an impact event, ...it would similarly have killed the incoming RV...and gotten the job done.

Kind of a precursor to our modern approach of hit-to-kill.

The cone-shaped Sprint missile was powered by a two-stage solid-propellant rocket motor. The motor ignited after the missile had been ejected from its silo by gas pressure, and accelerated the Sprint with more than 100 g. Within seconds, the missile reached a speed of Mach 10+, and the extreme thermodynamic heating demanded sophisticated ablative shielding (the nose was already glowing red-hot less than a second after launch). The Sprint was guided to the target by radio-commands from the ground control system, which used high-speed phased-array MSRs to track the incoming ICBM reentry vehicles. The command uplink had to be powerful enough to work through the exhaust plume and the plasma sheathe around the missile body. Sprint's first stage used fluid-injection jet vanes for control, and the second stage had four small moving fins. The missile was armed with a 1 kT W-66 enhanced radiation thermonuclear warhead, which was detonated by ground command. It destroyed the target's warhead not only with the nuclear blast, but mainly with the very high neutron flux. The whole flight time for an intercept was expected to be not more than 15 seconds.

.

The Soviets clearly admired Sprint, as I believe there are just too many close similarities in the design of their SH-08 Gazelle system, which they keep on station and active: