Report Card

During Tuesday's Senate Armed Services Committee hearing on ballistic missile defense, Missile Defense Agency Director Army Lt. Gen. Patrick O'Reilly explained why the MDA's Ground-based Midcourse Defense System failed to shoot down a targeted ballistic missile, FTG-06, during a January 2010 test:

But there are two -- I can say, sir, that there were two failure modes. The first was, the sea-based X-band radar stopped transmitting at a certain point in time, and we understand why now. And second of all, we had a new version of the GMD kill vehicle. It was the first time being flown -- longest any kill vehicle's been flown. And we also encountered in a problem that we've been able to identify on that design and our intent is -- is to make those corrections and test again this year.

Following O'Reilly's explanation, Sen. Roger Wicker (R-MS) asked Operational Test and Evaluation Director Michael Gilmore if another Aegis BMD failure in the next year could impact the "full implementation and assessment of phase one, and the phased adaptive approach for the defense of Europe?"

His response:

When there is a test failure, there is less knowledge gained, and it will take longer to gain the amount of knowledge that we wanted to gain. So in the case of the failure of FTG-06, I think that General O'Reilly is still assessing what the -- what the changes will have to be that are implemented in the IMTP. And that will be -- you know, that would be something that you would decide within the next six months or so, I think.

But there's the potential for, you know, tests to get bumped down the road in order to collect in the next test the information that would have been collected in this test. So the implication is that there would be less knowledge known at any given point in time."

With regard to the phased adaptive approach and whether its technologically feasible, yes, in my view, it's certainly technologically feasible. It will take time to test it, just like it takes time to test all of these complex systems. This is -- these are particularly complex systems. But all defense systems are complex, and we have a history of learning as we go along and some of the programs taking longer to test and pan out than we had originally hoped. But I have no reason to expect that testing of the phased adaptive approach and the SM through the various versions of the SM-3 interceptor will be particularly unique in the testing history of this program or other programs.