Hearing of the National Security and Foreign Affairs Subcommittee of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee: What are the Prospects? Costs? Oversight of Missile Defense (Part Two)
Statement
Hearing of the National Security and Foreign Affairs Subcommittee of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee: What are the Prospects? Costs? Oversight of Missile Defense (Part Two)
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REP. STEPHEN F. LYNCH (D-MA): Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I appreciate that. I want to thank you for holding this hearing and the ranking member as well.
And I want to thank our panelists for lending their perspective on this.
It just so happens that this weekend, after visiting Iraq, I had a chance to stop in Brussels and talk to the NATO folks. And this issue came up. Let me just say that I came away from my meeting with our ambassador and also other folks at NATO with the sense that this was going ahead, that this process of locating missile defense units in Czechoslovakia and in Poland was going forward.
And while I spoke on behalf of this committee to say that we had great reservations and that we were not on the same page with that idea from the administration, it is alarming that at least there are some in the administration who are just proceeding full speed ahead with this.
I'd like to ask you, Mr. Coyle, I thought your testimony was very helpful. All of the testimony was helpful. But the testing protocols that have been used in the past, I noticed that you noted that since 2000, there had been 13 tests and six were not -- well, basically, six were failures; seven were successful.
But more alarmingly, since 2003, the more recent tests, five tests since then, only two have succeeded and three have not. And yet here we are going forward with a program that could be hundreds of billions of dollars. And as you've noted in all the testimony, there seem to be valid countermeasures that would make this expenditure a nullity.
What would you see as being -- if we were going forward with trying to vet this system, what would the next step be for us? Fr the members of this committee if we wanted to get a sense of the workability of this system, what would be the next step, based on your own assumptions, not the assumptions of the administration, but your own assumptions?
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