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

Interview

REP. TIERNEY: Okay, the subcommittee will now receive testimony from our second panel of witnesses.

Philip E. Coyle III. Mr. Coyle is a senior adviser to the Center for Defense Information. As the former assistant secretary of Defense, Mr. Coyle was the longest-serving director of the Operational Test and Evaluation in the 20-year history of that Defense office. He oversaw the test and evaluation of over 200 major Defense acquisition systems and reported to the secretary of Defense and to Congress on the adequacy and results of Defense Department testing programs.

He is the associate director emeritus of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, where he started in 1959. He was appointed by President George W. Bush to serve on the 2005 Defense Base Realignment and Closure Commission. Mr. Coyle is an expert on military research, development and testing on operational military matters and on national security policy and defense spending, including defense acquisition reform and defense procurement. He has an extensive background in missile defense, in military space systems, and nuclear weapons.

The honorable Henry F. Cooper. Ambassador Cooper is currently the chairman of the High Frontier organization. He served as the first civilian director of the Strategic Defense Initiative, SDI, from 1990 to 1993. President Reagan appointed Ambassador Cooper as deputy and then chief U.S. negotiator at the Geneva defense and space talks with the former Soviet Union from 1985 to 1989. Ambassador Cooper is also currently chairman emeritus of Applied Research Associates, a visiting fellow at the Heritage Foundation and a private consultant.

Joseph Cirincione. Mr. Cirincione is president of Ploughshares Fund. He was most recently vice president for national security and international policy at the Center for American Progress. He's the author of an article in the most recent issue of Foreign Policy entitled "The Incredible Shrinking Missile Threat" and the recent book "Bomb Scare: The History and Future of Nuclear Weapons." He also teaches at Georgetown University and was, some years ago, a staffer on the predecessor to the subcommittee as well as on the House Armed Services Committee.

We want to thank all of you for being with us today. Obviously your experience and your knowledge of the topic is going to help us address the questions that were raised in the earlier hearing and generally. As you all know from previous experience, our policy is to swear in witnesses, so if you'd please stand and raise your right hand.

(The witnesses are sworn in.)

REP. TIERNEY: Thank you. The record will please reflect that all of the witnesses answered in the affirmative.

You know from past experience as well that your full written statements will be put in the record by unanimous consent. We ask you that you try to keep your oral statements to five minutes in duration, or as close thereto as you can, so there will be plenty of time for questions. We'll be a little bit limited. We know people's sensitivity to time, but we want to be able to have some questions for the panel and get you folks out of here at a decent hour as well.

So if we might, Mr. Coyle, we'd benefit from your testimony, if you would.

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

REP. TIERNEY: Thank you. Thank all three of you for so thoughtful remarks.

Dr. Cooper, let me start with you because I've heard from the other two gentlemen a little bit before.

Do you ascribe to the notion that a country like Iran, if it had the capacity -- say 2015, 2020 -- to send a, one, intercontinental ballistic missile here, would do so without minding the fact that they'd have retaliation against them?

MR. COOPER: You're going to accuse me of skirting the question, but --

REP. TIERNEY: Should I do that now, or after you've done it? (Laughter.)

MR. COOPER: But I don't know how to predict such things, sir, and I'm very uncomfortable with the idea that we would be vulnerable to the likes of -- I can't even say his name -- Ahmadinejad and his whims.

REP. TIERNEY: Well, let me phrase it this way, then. Do any of you -- I know -- again, I'm assuming that the asnwers of some of the gentlemen from previous testimony.

But it seems to me that Mr. Cirincione makes a reasonable argument when he says, look, maybe you ought to take this and devolve it back to the individual branches of the services here and let them deal with their components on that. Otherwise, we might run the risk here of just an endless, bottomless pit of money.

I mean, this program is already the most expensive program that we have, and I've not seen any indication that anybody's ever concerned about measuring how much money we spend on it versus what are the other threats and risks that we have, everything from homeland security all the way to terror abroad or conventional conflicts or whatever.

Would you object to that notion, Dr. Cooper, of putting it back into the services so they could deal with the components and measure it against what other challenges they think are out there, where they want to spend their money?

MR. COOPER: I think the combination of SDI, which was mostly about research for the first eight years or so, and began to get seriously engaged in the idea of actually building something, was a really good idea, because at the time there was no way within the Department to integrate things.

When the first Gulf War came along and we saw the Patriot activities, I was the one who argued that we should fold in theater defenses into the Missile Defense Agency, then called SDI. And fortunately, in my judgment, Secretary Cheney went along with me. And that was to assure that our theater and strategic defenses were integrated together because of this vision of wanting a global defense.

This is a long way of saying I think there is an important function performed by centralizing the planning, the research and development -- even to the stage of developing prototypes and, to some degree, the initial operating capabilities in the field -- in this integrated way, at which time I think it is an appropriate thing to transition them back to the services. And I believe that's the general intention of the Department.

REP. TIERNEY: Dr. Coyle, you've sat through very patiently the entire first panel, there, for some time. I'd like to just know what your immediate observations are from that discussion.

MR. COYLE: Well, General Obering is an experienced and excellent witness, but I was surprised at how many statements, including new statements, he made that were certainly incomplete, misleading, or even untrue.

There were quite a few of them. I don't quite know where to begin. Perhaps it'd be best if I provided that for the record. But I would just --

REP. TIERNEY: Well, we'd greatly appreciate that, but if something comes to mind, I think that'd be helpful as well.

(Cross talk.)

MR. COYLE: -- I was just surprised that he made a number of statements which I think are, at best, misleading.

Part of the problem is when we talk about tests. General Obering, for example, said we have flown countermeasures against our sensors in tests. He made that point two or three different times. But he's talking about sensor characterization tests, flight characterization tests -- tests that didn't actually involve shooting down a target.

So I don't deny that, indeed, they've tried to gather data about how their sensors would behave against these various countermeasures, but I think it's a little misleading to imply that they've got the matter in hand because of such tests, when they don't actually involve shooting down the target. That's just one example.

REP. TIERNEY: Thank you. And we would appreciate it a great deal -- I don't mean to be giving you homework, any of you, but -- on the other hand, we do, I guess. (Laughter.) But if you have the time and the patience to do that, I think we'd benefit from knowing your analysis of what he said and what we ought to further inquire about so that we could get to the bottom of some of these things.

Ms. McCollum, if you don't mind, I'm going to ask Mr. Cirincione the same question, and then we'll come to you. I think I've exhausted my five minutes.

Mr. Cirincione, please.

MR. CIRINCIONE: Let me just add to what Dr. Coyle has said. A lot of this boils down to what your definition of "test" is. And it -- the Agency uses "test" when they refer to computer simulations, "flight test" where they're putting objects up and observing them, or actual intercept tests. And they merge them all together.

So when you ask them that you've never done a test with a realistic countermeasure, he says, yes, we have. And what he means is they've put some realistic countermeasures up into space and they've imaged them to see what they look like. But he doesn't mean -- you may have drawn that conclusion. Or some might. Not you, Mr. Chairman -- that he meant that we had actually done an intercept test again for a realistic countermeasure. We have not. We have not.

And I share Dr. Coyle's concern --

REP. TIERNEY: You're sure it hasn't been done and classified on you?

MR. CIRINCIONE: We have never done a realistic test against the kind of missile and the kinds of countermeasures we could expect from even an Iran or North Korea. And the reason we haven't done that is that if we did, we would miss.

It's not that we don't have the ability to hit a bullet with a bullet; we do. But we don't have the ability to see that bullet when there are dozens of other phony bullets around it, and that's the problem. If you can't see it, you can't hit it.

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

REP. TIERNEY: Thank you.

Dr. Cooper, how much would you advise that Congress should spend over the next 20 years in missile defense?

MR. COOPER: Sir, I haven't really considered that problem. I don't consider the amount of money that's being spent out of bounds. I might quibble with how it's being spent, but not the amount. It is not inconsistent with the amount of money that we were spending on my watch when it was mostly -- a lot of it was R&D, in any case, if you take into account inflation. I think it was four and a half billion is what I recall in 1991-92.

REP. TIERNEY: Do you support the allocation of national security resources, money, primarily according to sort of what the threat likelihoods are? Do you think we ought to make an assessment of what the likelihood of the threats are and then decide how to spend our money on that basis?

MR. COOPER: I do believe that we should have threat-based design and development.

REP. TIERNEY: Would you agree that the bigger threat to the United States at this point in time is actually asymmetric threat, some terrorist sending something over in a container on a ship or being offshore on a small boat and lobbing something in from there, as opposed to --

MR. COOPER: As I indicated in my testimony, I'm very worried about that, and that's how I spend most of my time these days is worrying about nuclear smuggling out of the former Soviet Union. That said, I think the other is a serious problem. And the problem is you can't turn a switch. I mean, the complaint that people have about the Missile Defense Agency, in some sense, and the programs is how long this is taking and how much money it's costing. And it's a difficult problem. And no one, I think, disputes that fact.

REP. TIERNEY: I guess that's --

MR. COOPER: But I believe we need to be working on it.

REP. TIERNEY: I guess that's part of it. But I think the larger part of it is people are disputing the fact that we're buying before we're testing. I haven't heard anybody really come out and say, "I don't want to spend the money on research and development." Maybe that's out there, but I hear some concern. I think Mr. Coyle makes a point on that, is that there's a lot of procurement going on. Maybe you'd like to expand on that, Dr. Coyle.

MR. COYLE: For all other U.S. military systems, we don't go into so-called full-rate production or large quantities of production until the system is shown to be operationally effective. It's a good policy. It helps the Congress know, you know, when it's time, when it's ready, when a system is ready. I think the same policy ought to apply to missile defense procurement, but so far it hasn't.

REP. TIERNEY: Under that policy, with respect to the intercontinental ballistic missile defense, the mid-course defense, what procurement that's going on now would not be being made if we followed that policy?

MR. COYLE: Well, we wouldn't be buying the hundreds of interceptors that are proposed to be bought. In my testimony, based on my research, I counted 635 new interceptors proposed to be bought between now and 2013. General Obering said it's going to be twice that, that the JROC has recommended something like 1,200 new interceptors to be bought in that period. I wouldn't go forward with that.

REP. TIERNEY: Why not?

MR. COYLE: Because those interceptors have yet to demonstrate their capability to deal with realistic threats under realistic operational conditions.

REP. TIERNEY: And I think we talked about this a little bit the last time, but when we're talking about demonstrating their capabilities, we're not talking about a one-off test where they hit it. I mean, each thing that you're testing, you probably need more than one successful test in order to get some level of comfortability that you have some confidence in the system. Is that correct?

MR. COYLE: Yes, but I don't think it's affordable to do what they would call statistically based testing where you do hundreds -- I don't think that's something that you would want to spend money on. But you find out in realistic operational tests very quickly whether or not you've got a problem. If the first two or three that you do under these new conditions don't work, you don't have to do hundreds of tests to get statistical confidence about that. If the first two or three don't work, you know you've got a problem.

REP. TIERNEY: Did you hear anything in this morning's testimony that would change your mind about the statements you made in earlier testimony that it could take another 50 years before the operational realistic testing on this program is done?

MR. COYLE: No, I didn't. And, in fact, I read the responses that the Missile Defense Agency wrote to my comment about that, and they didn't refute it. They just talked about something else.

REP. TIERNEY: (Laughs.) Okay.

MR. CIRINCIONE: Mr. Chairman, could I just add something to the calculation?

REP. TIERNEY: Sure, if you like.

MR. CIRINCIONE: You have to remember that we're testing these. We're demonstrating these very differently than we have any even anti- missile systems of the past. The first time we deployed an anti- ballistic missile defense system, the Sprint Safeguard system in North Dakota, we had 111 tests of those interceptors before we deployed them. And these were real tests, shooting them. And we found some problems and we corrected them. And by the time we fielded that system, at least they were technologically capable.

We're not coming close to that level of testing with this system. As I recommended last time, I don't believe we should be deploying anything until we have a realistic test to see if we can intercept a missile that is deploying decoys that look the same as the warhead. And if we can't do that, I just don't see the point of deploying a system.

You have my chart up there on the screen. What I did after our last testimony was do year-by-year calculations with my staff, and we found out that over the last, I guess, 15 years there, we've got a steady decline in the number of long-range and intermediate-range and medium-range ballistic missiles being deployed, but we're spending three times the amount on anti-missile programs than we were during any period of the Cold War, even accounting for -- so, in other words, we used to spend about $4 billion a year. Now we're up to somewhere around $12 billion, if everything's included. Even accounting for inflation, it's still twice as much. It just doesn't make sense.

REP. TIERNEY: So we're spending more on that than we are on the short range and medium range?

MR. CIRINCIONE: This is our total missile budget now. So we're spending more now on anti-missile defense than we were during any year of the Cold War, not just -- by double or three times the amount during any period of the Cold War, even while the threat has drastically been reduced.

REP. TIERNEY: Doctor, go ahead.

MR. COOPER: Yeah, I'm pleased to take credit for some of that shrinkage. I spent five years in Geneva in talks with the Soviet Union, and that's the reason you're seeing that decay in long-range missiles. That doesn't give me a great deal of comfort if I'm worried about North Korea and Iran. And let me say, I haven't forgotten about Russia and China either.

REP. TIERNEY: Except we're not targeting the MDA program against them.

MR. COOPER: Well, I understand that, but that doesn't give me a lot of comfort.

REP. TIERNEY: No, no. I understand that.

MR. COOPER: I am concerned still about the accidental and unauthorized launch that I designed the system against 10 years ago. So -- and I was thinking about Russian and Chinese missiles then. So I am for more effective capability than we're designing today, in part for that reason.

REP. TIERNEY: Thank you.

Ms. McCollum, do you have any other questions?

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

REP. TIERNEY: Thank you.

You know, I think those kind of questions, Mr. Shays, do help us at least focus on what we ought to focus, or redirect the resources in some sense, which is, I guess, the underlying focus of these hearings to a large extent is, you know, we don't have unlimited resources and we do have some measure of which risks and threats are more prevalent and others. And I'm not sure we've been doing a great job at the Department of Defense so far in aligning the resources that we have with the more prominent risks and accelerate them to the point that we should.

I'm just about done here. I don't know, Mr. Shays, if you have any other questions. I mean, there's a million more questions we could ask, but we'd be keeping here all day.

But I know Mr. Coyle has homework that he's taken on voluntarily. If either of you gentlemen wish to submit anything, we'd certainly be more than happy to receive it and read it, because you had that whole first hearing that went on you may want to respond to.

Dr. Cooper, before you leave, you've had less time in front of us than the other two have. Is there anything you'd like to add or contribute?

MR. COOPER: No. I appreciate the opportunity to be here and I'm happy to be responsive in any way you wish as a follow on.

REP. TIERNEY: Well, thank you, sir, for that.

Mr. Coyle, anything you'd like to add?

MR. COYLE: No, thank you, Mr. Chairman.

REP. TIERNEY: Thank you.

Mr. Cirincione.

MR. CIRINCIONE: It's a pleasure to be back in front of my old committee. God's speed.

REP. TIERNEY: Thank you all very, very much. Appreciate it.

Thank you, Mr. Shays.

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