Campaign for the Accountability of American Bases

Reuters
By Jim Wolf
April 7, 2011

The United States is preparing for its first test of a sea-based defense against longer-range missiles of a type that U.S. officials say could soon threaten Europe from Iran.

Much is riding on the event, including confidence in the Obama administration’s tight timeline for defending European allies and deployed U.S. forces against the perceived Iranian threat.

The last two intercept tests of a separate U.S. ground-based missile defense, aimed at protecting U.S. soil, have failed.

The planned sea-based test this month will pit Lockheed Martin Co’s (LMT.N) Aegis shipboard combat system and a Raytheon Co (RTN.N) missile interceptor against their first intermediate-range ballistic missile target, said Richard Lehner, a spokesman for the Pentagon’s Missile Defense Agency.

Previous such sea-based drills have been against shorter-range targets. Intermediate range is defined as 3,000 to 5,500 kilometers (2,000-3,500 miles) — a distance that would put London, Paris and Berlin within range of Iran’s westernmost soil.

The coming test, dubbed FTM-15, is “to demonstrate a capability against a class of ballistic missiles, and is not country-specific,” Lehner said in an emailed reply to queries from Reuters.

The layered, multibillion-dollar U.S. anti-missile effort also focuses on North Korea’s growing arsenal of missiles, which, like Iran’s, could perhaps be tipped with chemical, biological or nuclear warheads. …

Read on: www.reuters.com/article/2011/04/07/missile-usa-idUSN0711126920110407

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Space News
By Turner Brinton
April 1, 2011

Following the second consecutive flight test failure of the Ground-based Midcourse Defense (GMD) system in December, the director of the U.S. Missile Defense Agency (MDA) suspended deliveries of a new kill vehicle that flew on both test flights, a government watchdog agency said March 24.

Overall, the MDA made good progress in delivering missile defense assets in 2010 and improved its transparency and accountability, but the agency’s cost and schedule baselines are often incomplete and sometimes contain conflicting information, according to the U.S. Government Accountability Office report, “Missile Defense: Actions Needed to Improve Transparency and Accountability.”

The failed January 2010 intercept test of the GMD system was the first to use the CE-2 variant of the Exoatmospheric Kill Vehicle developed by Raytheon Missile Systems of Tucson, Ariz. The interceptor failed to hit the target missile, and a failure investigation board faulted both the kill vehicle and the Sea-Based X-band radar. …

Read on: www.spacenews.com/military/110401-mda-suspends-deliveries-gmd-kill-vehicles.html

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Arirang
April 2, 2011

The United States has confirmed that it has been conducting tests on a system to intercept ballistic missiles from North Korea.
The director of the US Missile Defense Agency, Patrick O’Reilly, said at a House Armed Services Committee hearing on Thursday that it has been conducting interceptor missile tests in Alaska and California.
O’Reilly said “this roughly equates to the geometry of a launch out of North Korea and an intercept coming out of Fort Greely, Alaska.”
Meanwhile, the US deputy assistant secretary of defense for nuclear and missile defense policy, Bradley Roberts, said at the hearing that the US has been improving its ground-based midcourse defense system against threats that could emerge from countries such as North Korea and Iran.

www.arirang.co.kr/News/News_View.asp?nseq=114457&code=Ne2&category=2

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Space satellites guide cruise missle attack on Gaddafi

WIRED.CO.UK
By Noah Shachtman
March 22, 2011

When the US military wanted to take out Muammar Gaddafi’s air defense systems, it unleashed a barrage of 122 Tomahawk cruise missiles. But these munitions aren’t like most others in the American arsenal.

Smart, maneuverable, able to see its surroundings and shift to new targets mid-flight, the newest Tomahawks are closer to the unmanned planes flying over Afghanistan than to the weapons they fire. In some ways, the Tomahawk is the drone’s suicidal cousin: a robotic aircraft, packed with explosives, that has no intention of ever coming home.

When officers get ready to shoot off a Tomahawk, “they are basically planning a flight for a little aeroplane,” one Navy official tells Danger Room. “It’s got stubby little wings — but is is an unmanned aerial vehicle.”

The next-gen Tomahawks — known as “Block IVs” — start their flights out just like other missiles, launched from ships or subs. But after 12 seconds of flight, things change. The Tomahawk starts to fly horizontally, skimming above the ocean at a height of less than 15 metres to avoid enemy radar.

GPS waypoints keep the missile on track until it makes landfall. Then, a Tercom (Terrain Contour Matching) system kicks in. too. Using a radar altimeter, the Tomahawk Tercom checks its height, and matches that altitude against a database of satellite and overhead imagery, to make sure the missile is headed in the right direction and at the right height.

Once the Tomahawk’s target is in sight, the missile can dart in for the attack. A Digital Scene-Mapping Area Correlator (“dee-smack” in military jargon) matches a stored picture of the target to the missile’s last sight, to make sure the two match.

Or, the missile can wait a while. The Tomahawk’s controller can give it a new route, telling the Tomahawk to circle around in the air, lingering until an enemy pops up its head. Then comes the strike. …

Read on: www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2011-03/22/drones-suicidal-cousins

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Forbes (Blog)
by Loren Thompson
March 21, 2011

Earlier this month, the cruiser USS Monterey entered the Mediterranean Sea on a new mission. The Monterey was built three decades ago at the Bath Iron Works in Maine, but it is equipped with an improved version of Lockheed Martin’s Aegis combat system that enables it to intercept the kinds of ballistic missiles Iran’s radical Islamic government has been developing. Once on station, it will be the first visible manifestation of the Obama Administration’s commitment to defend local allies against attacks by those missiles. Other warships will follow, and then a newer version of the Aegis system will be deployed ashore in Eastern Europe. The U.S. Navy will thus become the lead service in implementing America’s missile defense strategy — a development few observers could have predicted a decade ago.

The March arrival of the Monterey in the eastern Med is a good time to take stock of how the U.S. missile defense program has changed over time, and consider the way in which changing threats and technologies have transformed the role of the Navy in missile defense from that of a disinterested bystander to a key player. Although critics sometimes question the value of having a globally deployed fleet of warships, missile defense is one area where forward presence and unfettered mobility have proven to be increasingly important. …

Read on: http://blogs.forbes.com/beltway/2011/03/21/missile-defense-becomes-a-navy-mission

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Washington Post
By Craig Whitlock
March 21, 2011

Setting aside decades of acrimony over President Ronald Reagan’s vision of a “Star Wars” missile shield, the United States and Russia have been holding exploratory but serious talks about potential ways to cooperate on missile defense in Europe.

Russian and U.S. officials have met multiple times in Moscow and Washington since January to consider sharing data from sensors that could detect the launch of a ballistic missile from Iran or another hostile country.

Both sides have cautioned that no deal is imminent and that big differences remain. But the issue has been given a boost by back-to-back visits to Russia this month by Vice President Biden and Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates.

“We’ve disagreed before, and Russia still has uncertainties,” Gates said Monday in a speech to Russian naval officers in St. Petersburg. “However, we’ve mutually committed to resolving these difficulties in order to develop a road map toward truly effective anti-ballistic missile collaboration.’’

Such an assessment marks a sharp turnaround from years of bitter contention over missile defense. Although Washington always has portrayed its missile defense plans as purely defensive in nature, Moscow has eyed them as a backdoor plot to neutralize Russia’s massive nuclear arsenal.

Mutual suspicions over missile defense nearly derailed the New START arms-control pact last year. Although the treaty was ultimately ratified, U.S. officials until recently were largely dismissive of the idea that there was room for cooperation with Russia on missile defense.

“There is no meeting of the minds on missile defense,” Gates told a Senate panel in June. “The Russians hate it. . . . They will always hate it, mostly because we’ll build it and they won’t.” …

Read on: www.washingtonpost.com/world/russia_us_warm_up_on_missile_defense/2011/03/21/ABY7ei7_story.html

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RIA Novosti
February 24, 2011

Ukraine is interested in cooperating with NATO in building the European missile defense system, NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen said on Thursday.

“This morning, Ukraine’s Foreign Minister and I discussed our cooperation in building a missile defense system, and I have taken into consideration that Ukraine is interested in such cooperation,” Rasmussen said after talks with Ukraine’s Foreign Minister Kostyantyn Hryshchenko in Kiev.

During the talks the sides discussed the possibility of launching expert consultations aimed at analyzing Ukraine’s possible contribution to the cooperation, the NATO chief said.

Rasmussen said Russia has also been invited to cooperate in the creation of the European missile defense system.

Moscow insists on setting up a joint European missile defense network with NATO, while the alliance favors two separate systems that would exchange information.

http://en.rian.ru/world/20110224/162740707.html

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Media Monitors Network
by Rick Rozoff
February 9, 2011

“The Aegis Combat System is a product of the Strategic Defense Initiative. Last year President Obama pushed for an increase in the system’s Standard Missile-3 interceptors to 436, up from the previous year’s request of 147 of the missiles costing $10-15 million apiece….NATO’s summit in Lisbon last November has delivered almost the entire European continent to a 21st century version of Star Wars.”

On January 27 the North Atlantic Treaty Organization took the most decisive step yet toward the implementation of the decades-old project first proposed by the Ronald Reagan administration for a Strategic Defense Initiative, popularly known as Star Wars.

In what will be the culmination of five years of extensive planning by the U.S. and NATO to construct an impenetrable interceptor missile shield to cover the European continent, the military bloc announced on the above date that it had handed over the first-ever theater ballistic missile defence capability to NATO military commanders at the NATO Combined Air Operations Centre in the German city of Uedem, which occurred “after NATO technicians computer-tested a software system linking anti-missile equipment from France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands and the United States.” …

Late last month pro-American Romanian President Traian Basescu, recruited last year by his American counterpart Obama to host Standard Missile-3s on his nation’s soil, said:

“The United States remains our strategic partner and our main ally in the field of security. Today, the main vector of our cooperation is the anti-missile shield. We wish to conclude this year the bilateral negotiations.” [27] In 2005 the Pentagon secured the use of four military bases in Romania, including what is being upgraded into a strategic air base.

Two days before the above quote appeared on the Internet, it was reported that the U.S. Air Force had “augmented the hardware of a missile defense radar facility in Greenland,” NATO ally Denmark’s possession, and that it “has already upgraded early warning radar sites at Beale Air Force Base in California and at Fylingdales Royal Air Force Station in the United Kingdom,” and “intends to update two more of the sites.” [28] An island between the Arctic and Atlantic Oceans is an odd location for tracking imaginary Iranian and North Korean intercontinental ballistic missiles. …

Read in full: http://usa.mediamonitors.net/content/view/full/83058

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Spaceflight Now
By Stephen Clark
February 7, 2011

The Missile Defense Agency says it is merging its $1.7 billion STSS tracking satellite mission with ground- and sea-based interceptor tests, a campaign officials hope will enable the military to launch kill vehicles against missiles before they fly in range of conventional radars.

If proven, the ability to detect and track missiles from space will give commanders another tool to go along with sensors based on land, at sea and in the air. The addition of a space-based detection network, which STSS is designed to demonstrate, could give strategic, regional and theater defense systems more warning of an enemy missile and permit the launch of interceptors against the threat earlier than ever before.

Existing radars and tracking systems, including the mobile sea-based X-band radar platform, can only see missiles and warheads in a limited area, usually in the launch or re-entry phases of flight. STSS is supposed to show officials if satellites can provide a global perspective on missile flights.

“STSS brings unique capabilities to missile defense,” said Doug Young, vice president of missile defense and warning programs at Northrop Grumman Corp., which built the satellites. “It’s the only system capable of tracking ballistic missiles through all phases of flight, starting with boost extending through midcourse and terminal phases.”

Not only can STSS track missiles, it can map a missile’s trajectory and pass the data to sea- or land-based interceptors to destroy the threat. …

Read on: www.spaceflightnow.com/news/n1102/07stss/

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Associated Press
By Vladimir Isachenkov
February 7, 2011

Russia sees the planned U.S. missile defense system as a potential threat to its nuclear forces and may review its participation in a landmark nuclear arms treaty, officials said Monday.

The New START deal, the centerpiece of Barack Obama’s efforts to reset ties with Russia and the most significant arms control pact in nearly two decades, took effect last week. It limits each country to 1,550 strategic warheads, down from the current ceiling of 2,200.

The treaty doesn’t prevent the U.S. from building new missile defense systems, but Russia has warned that it reserves the right to withdraw from the treaty if the United States significantly boosts its missile shield.

Russia’s Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov reaffirmed Monday that a buildup in the U.S. missile defense capability would prompt Moscow re-consider its obligations under the New START treaty.

“If the U.S. increases the qualitative and quantitative potential of its missile defense … a question will arise whether Russia should further abide by the treaty or would have to take other measures to respond to the situation, including military-technical measures,” Ryabkov said, according to Russian news agencies.

Russia was strongly critical of the previous U.S. administration’s plan to deploy missile defense sites in Poland and the Czech Republic and hailed Obama’s decision to scrap it. But the Kremlin has remained concerned about revamped U.S. missile defense plans and continued to see them as potentially dangerous to its security. …

Read more: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20110207/ap_on_re_eu/eu_russia_us_nuclear

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