Can the US shoot down North Korean missiles?
by Jamie McIntyre | Mar 6, 2017, 12:01 AM
After North Korea test-fired its latest medium-range ballistic missile last month, the Pentagon responded with a bold boast: If the missile had targeted the United States, Japan, South Korea or any other ally, the U.S. would have blasted it out of the sky.
"We maintain abilities to be able to respond quickly and intercept missiles from North Korea if they do pose a threat to us or our allies," said Navy Capt. Jeff Davis, a Pentagon spokesman.
That is no idle threat, insists Chris Johnson, spokesman for the Missile Defense Agency.
"We are absolutely confident in the system," Johnson said. "Based on our history of testing, we are confident that the system would be able to defend the United States."
Yet critics continue to question the capability and reliability of America's multi-layered missile shield, even as the Pentagon insists the once-rudimentary system of radars and interceptors has come of age, after some $180 billion and nearly two decades of development. North Korea, meanwhile, seemss eager to test our limits, firing off another four intermediate-range missiles this weekend.
The U.S. breaks missile defense down into three phases: boost (on the way up), midcourse (in space) and terminal (on the way down).
If a North Korean missile were on a trajectory toward Japan, the first shot at it would likely be from a U.S. Navy destroyer, equipped with the Aegis system, designed to counter short and intermediate range missiles.
For years, detractors argued that destroying an incoming missile was virtually impossible, akin to trying to hit a "bullet with a bullet."
But last month, off the coast of Hawaii, the USS John Paul Jones successfully shot down a target missile similar in range to both Iranian and North Korean ballistic missiles deployed today.
The test was the result of collaboration by the U.S. and Japan and employed an upgraded Raytheon-built Standard interceptor missile known as an SM-3 Block IIA, and showed the maturation of sea-based missile defenses, which are designed to defeat missiles in the "midcourse" phase.
If South Korea were to be targeted by the North, the U.S. would likely employ "terminal" defenses, which is why it has been so anxious to move a Terminal High-Altitude Area Defense anti-missile battery to the Korean peninsula.
While the U.S. insists the Lockheed Martin-built THAAD is a purely defensive system, China objects to the deployment, in part because it uses a powerful missile-tracking radar that can "see" far into Chinese territory.
South Korean officials have acquired land for the deployment of the THAAD system, and say it could be operational by late summer.
If North Korea were to make good on its threat to develop a missile with the range to strike the U.S. mainland, commanders would rely on the most expensive, and controversial, layer of the missile shield, which consists of 36 interceptor missiles at Fort Greely, Alaska, and Vandenberg Air Force Base, California, along with radars and sensors linked to command-and-control systems.
The last test of this complex system, which is billed as being able to identify and destroy an incoming warhead in space, was in 2014.
It was reported as a successful "hit," but the three previous tests were misses, raising questions whether in real-world crisis it could be depended on to perform as advertised.
"The flight-testing record isn't where we'd like it to be," Vice Adm. James Syring, director of the Missile Defense Agency, said last year. "But the failures that we've had have been very simple ... We're not talking about the science and the algorithm and the hard part of hit-to-kill systems here."
One way to increase the odds of success if the U.S. faced real incoming North Korean missiles with a possible nuclear warhead would be to fire not one, but a half-dozen interceptors.
Still, there are skeptics who think shooting down long-range missiles in space remains a pipe dream left over from former President Ronald Reagan's original "Star Wars" Strategic Defense Initiative.
"We are no closer to an effective weapon that can reliably shoot down a long-range missile than we were when Reagan announced his dream," Joe Cirincione, president of the arms control group Ploughshares, said last month.
"We've been foolishly pursuing the illusion of missile defenses, looking for some magical solution to the threat of nuclear weapons," Cirincione said at a debate sponsored by the Center for Strategic and International Studies. "We have zero evidence that this system could actually work."
That might have been true once, but not anymore, according to test results published by the Missile Defense Agency.
Since 2001, the agency says 75 of 92 hit-to-kill intercept attempts have been successful across all programs, including a perfect 13-for-13 record for THAAD.
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