National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2006

NATIONAL DEFENSE AUTHORIZATION ACT FOR FISCAL YEAR 2006 -- (Senate - November 04, 2005)

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Mr. REED. Mr. President, we have spent the last several days making difficult decisions about national priorities with respect to spending. We also have to continue to make these difficult decisions within the context of the Defense bill.

The amendment I propose today, along with Senator Levin and my colleagues, would transfer $50 million from the Missile Defense Program to the Cooperative Threat Reduction Program. I believe this amendment properly reallocates scarce resources so we can deal with an immediate threat. That immediate threat is the proliferation of nuclear materials and nuclear weapons.

When President Bush first took office in 2001, he made missile defense one of his highest priorities. Since fiscal year 2002, approximately $45 billion has been spent on missile defense. In fact, this represents a huge amount. If you look back to 1984, when President Reagan began the search for a strategic defense initiative--we have spent, since President Bush took office, half again the amount of money that was spent from 1984 to 2002. This has been a huge program.

It has been named as a priority by the President. In fact, the Missile Defense Agency, as a result, rushed to field a system--any system--in fact, a system that many claim--and it seems to be the case--does not work very well.

So last year, six ground-based interceptors were placed in silos at Fort Greely in Alaska. Two interceptors were placed in silos in Vandenberg Air Force Base. In September 2004, President Bush declared that this missile system was operational. A seventh interceptor was put in place at Fort Greely last month.

Now, one of the critical aspects of declaring a system operational, it seems to me, is successful testing. Unfortunately, this element--successful testing--seems to be absent from the present ground-based system. In fact, it is highly questionable whether this is at all operational.

In missile defense, interceptor tests are critical, and they should involve a real missile intercepting a real target. These tests are the only means to truly assess whether a missile defense system has a chance to work against an enemy missile.

The first intercept flight test of the system was conducted in December 2002, and it was a failure. Over the next 2 years, seven other planned tests that were contemplated were canceled because of technical reasons. In December 2004, 3 months after the missile defense system was declared operational--3 months after we supposedly had a working system--the Missile Defense Agency conducted only the second integrated flight test on this multibillion dollar system. It failed. On February 14, 2005, there was another integrated flight test, and it, too, failed.

After three consecutive failures, Lieutenant General Obering, the Director of the Missile Defense Agency, established an Independent Review Team to examine test failures and recommend steps for improving the test program. The team made some interesting observations. The team's report stated:

With the focus on rapid deployment of the Ground-based Midcourse Defense system, there was not always adequate opportunity to fully ground test the system prior to each flight attempt.

The team also found:

Schedule has been the key challenge that drives daily decision making in the program.

What you have here today has been a rush to failure, a succession of flight test failures, a premature declaration of operational characteristics of the system. No one will argue that the development, in a deliberate way and in a technically feasible way, of a missile defense system is not a good thing for the country, but what has happened over the last several years has been this rush to failure.

In addition to the evaluation team I previously mentioned, General Obering requested RADM Kate Paige to direct a Mission Readiness Task Force to study the review team's recommendations and put the program on a path to success.

This task force made the following recommendation:

There will be a significant increase in ground testing of all systems, components and processes before resuming flight testing. Contractors will be held accountable for their performance. The first flight test will not be an intercept test and the first intercept test will not take place for more than a year.

I commend General Obering and the Missile Defense Agency for implementing these recommendations, for realistically assessing their technical capacity, for realistically beginning to test on the ground before they fly, for doing the things that are both prudent and necessary in this regard. The next interceptor flight test is not scheduled until a year from now, so we will not know until fiscal year 2007 whether the problems that led to the past test failures have been fixed.

Let me evaluate where we are. We presently have nine interceptors in the ground, but we do not know if they will work because we have not had a fully successful flight test. In addition, the administration has requested and Congress has provided most of the money for 30 more interceptors. So we have nine in the ground which we have not adequately tested, and we have also, through the President's request and the majority's concurrence, purchased 30 more of these interceptors. Yet in the President's fiscal year 2006 budget request, he requested long lead funding for an additional 10 operational interceptors. These are in addition to 30 interceptors we are already buying on top of the 9 we have in the ground, all of which have not been adequately tested.

Furthermore, it must be noted there is also the issue of production rate capacity. Production rate capacity for the interceptor is 1 per month, or 12 per year. That means the Defense Department is seeking funding for more missiles than can be built in 1 year.

As we all know, this is an annual authorization process. There is no need to pay for more interceptors than can be built in 1 year, especially when there is no guarantee that any of them will work in operational circumstances.

At this point the responsible thing to do is to slow down funding and reallocate the money to a more pressing threat. That is what this amendment does. This amendment takes $30 million from the long lead procurement for more interceptors and $20 million for funding for initial construction of silos to house these interceptors and increases funding for the Cooperative Threat Reduction Program by $50 million. As we all know, the goal of the Cooperative Threat Reduction Program is to eliminate the threat of unsecured nuclear material from falling into the wrong hands.

A 2001 task force, chaired by former Senator Howard Baker and former White House Counsel Lloyd Cutler, studied nonproliferation programs for almost a year and concluded:

The most urgent unmet national security threat to the U.S. today is the danger that weapons of mass destruction or weapons-usable material in Russia could be stolen and sold to terrorists or hostile nation states and used against American troops abroad or citizens at home.

That was before September 11. Certainly since September 11, this warning is much more ominous and should be much more closely followed.

It is estimated that Russia has approximately 16,000 nuclear weapons stored at 150 to 210 sites. Only about 25 percent of these sites have received any upgrades for security in the past 5 years. At the rate planned in the fiscal year 2006 budget request, it would be around 2011 or 2012 before work at only a portion of the sites would be completed to bring them up to the levels of security and safety that we would feel confident this nuclear material would not be stolen, misplaced, or somehow diverted into the wrong hands.

Because of the agreement between President Putin and President Bush at the February summit in Bratislava, we have a unique opportunity to improve security at an additional 15 sites. The problem, of course, is funding. The cost of securing these 15 sites is $350 million, funding that is not in this budget. This project deserves top priority. This amendment provides some funding--not complete funding--$50 million toward securing nuclear material.

As I have said before, I support the concept and, deployment of a system that has been tested and truly works for national missile defense. I think it is a system we should pursue. But I also believe the Missile Defense Agency is more than adequately funded for its fiscal year 2006 mission, and some money can and should be diverted to more pressing needs without harming this missile defense program.

This amendment does not affect the funding or deployment of the first 30 ground-based interceptors. They will continue to be built and deployed. Again, this is all in a situation in which we haven't had a truly effective, complete flight test of even the first missiles we have acquired.

This amendment does not touch $53 million included in the bill for long lead funding for eight test missiles. It is essential to produce these missiles for testing.

This amendment simply takes into account that only 12 interceptors can be produced in a year so the funding for the 6 that cannot be used should be reallocated to the dire threat of nuclear proliferation so that no one, no terrorist, can obtain nuclear material or a nuclear device because we have been negligent in securing those materials along with other countries, and use those weapons against our soldiers in the field or citizens here at home.

We have an obligation. The most existential threat that faces this country is a terrorist, nonstate actor obtaining a nuclear device, surreptitiously moving into the United States or some other area of vital interest to the United States, and detonating that device. The more we do to resist and thwart that threat, the more we are responding to the true threats that confront this country.

I retain the remainder of my time.

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