Panel I of A Hearing of the National Security and Foreign Affairs Subcommittee of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee - Oversight of Missile Defense (Part Three): Questions for the Missile Defense Agency

Interview

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REP. VAN HOLLEN: Thank you, Mr. Chairman and, again, thank you for holding this series of hearings and welcome General.

Just to frame the discussion -- and it already has been, I think, very well framed by my colleagues -- this is not question of whether the United States should be spending any money at all in this area. The question is the amount of money that's being spent, especially given the other threats that are out there.

Now, you said that this represents 2 percent of the defense department budget which, as you know, is a huge budget. If you take the $10 billion, it represents one-third of the entire budget for the Department of Homeland Security. And that's the issue being raised here because, according to most intelligence analysts, while I understand what you've been saying, that you're not an expert on the comparative -- you know, comparing the risks, the intelligence folks who do make it their business to do that have indicated that you're more likely to have a threat, especially in the near-to mid-term, of a nuclear weapon being smuggled into this country.

And the fact of the matter is we're spending very little to defend against what is a more probable and realistic threat at this time, compared to what's being spent to look at what may be a long -- a threat way out there on the horizon. But, I want to focus on the effectiveness issue as well. Because, if we're going to be investing this kind of money, we would hope that it would be an effective system.

You state in your prepared remarks that under the Missile Defense Act of 1999, and I quote, "It became U.S. policy to deploy missile defenses as soon as technologically possible to defend the United States against limited ballistic missile attacks." There's also another portion of that -- of language in that directive that says, and I quote, "And it should be an effective national missile defense system." Now, in a prior hearing, in this committee, we heard from a number of experts and scientist in this area, including Richard Garwin.

And I'm sure you're familiar with Mr. Garwin, he's been focused on this area for a very long time, who said, should a state be so misguided as to attempt to deliver nuclear weapons by an ICBM -- and I assume he said that for the reasons Mr. Welch was talking about because if you're a state launching an ICBM against the United States, for example, we know where it came from, we have overwhelming ability to retaliate -- but if they were to be so misguided as to do that, they could be guaranteed against intercept in midcourse by the use of appropriate countermeasures.

A 1999 NIE judges specifically that Iran or North Korea could have such effective countermeasures by the time of their first ICBM test. Now, you were talking in your remarks about the year 2015. Would you judge that by that time frame that any of these potential threats that you've been focused on, North Korea or Iran, would have very effective countermeasures if they were to, at that time, be able to have this missile capability?

GEN. OBERING: We are anticipating that to be the case.

REP. VAN HOLLEN: Okay. Let me ask you this. Do you believe that the system you've tested to date would be able to defeat the countermeasures -- and this is a total hypothetical. It wasn't a hypothetical at the time of the Soviet Union. It's obviously much less likely now. But I'm just asking you the technology question. Would your system be able to defeat the type of countermeasures that could be deployed by Russia if, hypothetically, it were to launch an ICBM against the United States?

GEN. OBERING: In 2015 -- 2015 or today?

REP. VAN HOLLEN: Today.

GEN. OBERING: Not today. So very complex countermeasures the system would not be able to handle for either the short, medium or long-range system. But the types of countermeasures that we would anticipate a country like Iran or North Korea to be able to employ, we believe it can.

REP. VAN HOLLEN: So you're not testing now against the kind of countermeasures that hypothetically Russia would be able to?

GEN. OBERING: Yes, sir, we are but not in our intercept program. We've had a very robust countermeasures test program, so we've actually flown very complex countermeasures against our sensors and our systems. We've had eight flights over the past several years in which we have collected immense amounts of data. That's how we're deriving our algorithms for our radars and our sensors to be able to counter those in the future.

And in addition, one thing as I mentioned in my opening remarks, we can't lose sight of the fact that we are building a layered system. So what we'd like to do is destroy that missile before it ever is able to deploy or employ a countermeasure. And that's what our boost-phase defenses are for. Once they do that, we have the ability to deal with those more complex countermeasures by virtue of what we're doing with our sensor programs, our algorithms development and our multiple-kill vehicles where we take out all the credible objects that we're able to discriminate.

So in answer to your question, I believe that today we are able to counter the simple countermeasures that we would anticipate from a country like Iran or North Korea. And for the future, we have a robust program laid in to be able to counter those.

REP. VAN HOLLEN: But in the year 2015 that you're talking about, what kind of countermeasures capability would you anticipate from --

GEN. OBERING: I would have to go into a classified session to talk about that.

REP. VAN HOLLEN: But are you suggesting that by the year 2015 you would be able to effectively respond to countermeasures that could be deployed by -- again, this is hypothetical -- by Russian ICBMs?

GEN. OBERING: We should have a pretty good leg up, yes, sir, based on our algorithms, based on our sensors and then based on the follow-on, multiple-kill vehicle programs and then eventually the boost-phase defenses shortly thereafter.

REP. VAN HOLLEN: If I just -- last question, Mr. Chairman.

What would you, to fully deploy the kind of system --

GEN. OBERING: Sir, can I make one clarification?

REP. VAN HOLLEN: Yeah.

GEN. OBERING: It would not be directed at Russia because that presents a different challenge. I'm talking about a country like Iran or North Korea that would have the kind of countermeasures on their fleets. So for example, if you're talking about trying to counter a Russian attack, absolutely not because you're talking about hundreds of missiles and thousands of warheads, and that's not what I'm referring to. I want to make sure that you're talking about the types of countermeasures themselves that would be deployed on a single missile.

REP. VAN HOLLEN: Okay. Well, then based on that assessment, what kind of missile deployment are you basing your calculation with respect to Iranian or North Korean missile capabilities in terms of numbers? Because the point you're making, and I understand, is that, you know, if you're talking about one missile you may have that ability. So based on your estimate here, what kind of fleet of missiles, in terms of your hypotheticals, are you using for this assessment?

GEN. OBERING: Well, actually, we get that from the intel community of what they think and assess their abilities would be. And we factor that into our force structure that we recommend to the department. So right now, that consists of about 44 missiles in the United States, 10 in Europe, so a total of 54 of the long-range missiles.

We would have by 2013, we would have approximately 133 of our sea-based interceptors. We would have approximately 100 of our THADD interceptors with four fire units capable of deployment. And then shortly following that, we'd begin to ramp-up with a long-range, sea- based missile that we call SM-3 Block IIA. And those numbers have yet to be determined in terms of what that would be.

REP. VAN HOLLEN: Just again -- and we're going to hear some more testimony after you -- but there are obviously serious questions that have been raised about whether the testing program that you've undertaken really tests under realistic-type scenarios with respect to the countermeasures. And I understand your testimony here, but I think that --

GEN. OBERING: Well, I can address that if you'd like.

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REP. SHAYS: Thank you.

General Obering, you know, I am pretty stunned by the fact that given that you're in charge of this program that you wouldn't have been given the opportunity just to make a presentation if it took five, 10, 15 or 20 minutes. I would have thought you would have been given that opportunity. And I can't imagine why this committee would be reluctant to do that. You're in charge of the program. We've had a number of hearings where all we've heard from primarily have been critics with one witness that we're allowed to introduce as a counter. And the only reason we introduced a counter in support of the program is we want there to be a counter. If they had only people favoring it, we would have had a counter the other way.

But it strikes me, one, that you have a lot more to say and you would have had a lot more to introduce that should have been made part of the record. And I deeply regret it. I can't even tell you how deeply I regret it. It makes me feel that this committee does not want to really know how this system works. They just want to score points.

REP. TIERNEY: Mr. Shays, you'll have ample time to ask your questions. So maybe instead of lecturing, you can --

REP. SHAYS: No, no, I don't have ample time.

REP. TIERNEY: We're going to have a number of rounds here --

REP. SHAYS: No, no, I'm just going to make a point to you.

REP. TIERNEY: You've made your point.

REP. SHAYS: No, whether -- you interrupted me, and I'll claim back my time. I have deep respect for you, Mr. Chairman, but when it comes to this, I think this is a fraud. I think this is an absolute joke.

You should have been given as much time as you needed. And had I been chairing this committee and it was the other way around, I would be doing that. It's no sense to bring in someone of such expertise and tell him he has five minutes and then we'll give you an extra two or three minutes and make him rush through a presentation that he was not able to finish. It's just a fraud.

I found myself not being supportive of this program when we started out because I didn't think you could hit a bullet on a bullet. I didn't think you could do some of the technology. And it's really a surprising thing to me, frankly, that it is unfolding the way it has. I have been one that says it should not be deployed until it works. I have to tell you, though, when Iraq was sending Scud missiles into Israel, I thought oh, my God, you know. The Patriot didn't work all that great, but it did serve some function. Does this system have any capability in a much-shorter-range theater? And if Israel had the kind of technology today, would those Scud missiles have penetrated the way they had penetrated?

GEN. OBERING: Sir, what I can do is talk about the latest fight in Iraqi Freedom. There were several missiles launched against coalition forces. They were all totally destroyed. Those that were going into defended areas were totally destroyed by the Patriot systems that we had deployed. That included the PAC-3, by the way.

At least one of those trajectories, we now know, would have impacted a very heavily populated area in the coalition-force arena. And so the money we're spending is for the short-range defense as well as the medium and the long-range defenses.

And may I say that, you know, obviously other nations than the United States are making the cost-benefit analysis to go do this because we are, frankly, being inundated by several countries to help them to build missile defenses very rapidly. As I said in my opening statement, there are actually 18 nations around the globe that we're working with to help them build a missile defense as well.

REP. SHAYS: Explain to me the support of NATO because I'm surprised. I thought some of our NATO allies were pretty critical of this system, so I don't know how to interpret your comment that there is support among NATO for a missile defense system.

GEN. OBERING: Sir, in the Bucharest summit communique that was released in April, there was a statement in there. I think it was paragraph 37. And what they did is they basically welcomed the United States long-range defense proposals.

That's the proposal to put 10 interceptors in Poland and a radar in the Czech Republic to provide -- to begin to provide long-range protection for our deployed forces in that region, along with our NATO allies. And they also went -- they took a step further and they tasked their own infrastructure to come back at the 2009 summit with options for how they build shorter-range defenses -- missile defenses to integrate with the longer-range systems. And we are helping that process.

In fact, we have a -- we had a demonstration in January of how we could take the command and control system that we have deployed for the U.S. components, and what NATO is building -- NATO is building a theater missile defense program today that's called an Active Layered Theater Missile Defense program. And the NATO Air Command and Control System is the command and control system for that. We're showing how we can integrate those two together by taking radar track data, mission data, that kind of -- those types of information and running that on the NATO system, then taking the NATO data and running it on our system.

REP. SHAYS: Is it conceivable that, contrary to the wishes of, say, the leader in North Korea or the powers that be in Iran that someone could direct a missile in the United States without their leadership knowing about it?

GEN. OBERING: Sir, that would have to do with the command and control of the weapons in the country. It's something that I am not an expert in, but it certainly is within the realm of the feasible that that could be done without the knowledge of a government depending on how loosely or how tight those controls are.

REP. SHAYS: Thank you.

Thank you, General.

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