02/02/2010 A U.S. attempt to shoot down a ballistic missile mimicking an attack from Iran failed after a malfunction in a radar built by Raytheon Co, the Defense Department said.
The botched $150 million test over the Pacific Ocean coincided with a Pentagon report that Iran had expanded its ballistic missile capabilities and posed a "significant" threat to U.S. and allied forces in the Middle East region.
In the exercise on Sunday, both the target missile, fired from Kwajalein in the Marshall Islands, and the interceptor, from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California, performed normally, the Missile Defense Agency said. "However, the Sea-Based X-band radar did not perform as expected," the agency said on its website. Officials will investigate the cause of the failure to intercept, it said.
The SBX radar is a major component of the ground-based midcourse defense, the sole U.S. bulwark against long-range missiles that could be tipped with chemical, biological or nuclear warheads. It was the first time the United States had tested its long-range defense against a simulated Iranian attack. Previous drills have imitated a flight path from North Korea.
A review of ballistic missile defense released by the Pentagon on Monday said “Iran had developed and acquired ballistic missiles capable of striking targets from the Middle East to Eastern Europe.”
For that reason, the United States has expanded land- and sea-based missile defense systems in and around the Gulf, according to U.S. officials.
The deployments include expanded land-based Patriot defensive missile installations in Kuwait, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain, as well as Navy ships with missile defense systems in and around the Mediterranean, they said.
David Altwegg, the Missile Defense Agency's executive director, said the layered, multibillion-dollar missile defense continued to be dogged by insufficient attention to detail by the Pentagon's top contractors. But he said it was too early to assess blame for the miss.
"We have problems with all our primes," Altwegg told a Pentagon budget briefing. He said it would probably take months to pin down exactly what went wrong. "Across the enterprise ... quality is a disappointment," he said.
Speaking at the Reuters Aerospace and Defense Summit in Washington in December, Army Lieutenant General Patrick O'Reilly, head of the Missile Defense Agency, had said the flight test was to break new ground. He described it then as "more of a head-on shot like you would use defending against an Iranian shot into the United States." It was the first time such a scenario was being tested, he said.
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