America’s budget woes may have the Obama administration eyeing $400 billion in cuts to the defense budget. But, for now at least, there’s one program that appears relatively safe: the star-crossed missile defense effort.
Congress plans on increasing missile defense spending 1.2 per cent to $8.6 billion for fiscal year 2012. Bloomberg Government tallied the increase up along with 27 years worth of missile defense spending and found the price tag to be roughly $150 billion. That’s roughly the same amount spent on the Apollo space program. The man-on-the-moon level spending comes despite technical challenges and other setbacks faced by missile defense programs over the years.
Smith and Ratnam point to an additional $1.16 billion needed for the Ground-Based Midcourse Defense (GMD) program at Fort Greely, Alaksa as an example of such problems. The idea behind GMD is to knock out a ballistic missile headed to the U.S. using interceptor missiles. As Bloomberg notes, it has failed 7 out of 15 tests.
Leaky pipes, toxic mold and “significant infrastructure reliability issues” now plague one of Greely’s missile fields, according to the most recent defense budget bill passed by Congress. The mold has forced some workers to don hazardous materials suits. As a result, the Missile Defense Agency needs the $1.16 billion in part to build a new missile field.
Ft. Greely has had moisture-related troubles before. In 2006, a quarter of its ballistic missile interceptor silos were flooded by torrential rains, according to documents obtained by the Project on Government Oversight. Interceptors, fortunately, weren’t in the silos at the time.
Nor is it the only controversial missile defense program. There’s also the flying lightsaber (née, Airborne Laser), which former Secretary of Defense Bob Gates tried to nix. Airborne Laser consists of a Boeing 747 with a giant laser strapped to it. It started in the 1960s as a dream of being able to zap incoming missiles out of the air with a laser beam. Making an effective missile-blasting laser jet, however, is even harder than it may sound. Over the years, the program has overspent in the billions and suffered delays. $4 billion and years later, it’s having trouble working quite right. Once considered a potential prototype for a fleet of missile zappers, it serves now only to demonstrate how some other lasers might work in the future. If they ever get the funds.
Bloomberg quotes Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Carl Levin as saying that “Taxpayers are pissed off and we’re pissed off” over problems like those experienced at Greely’s missile field. The continued funding for troubled programs, however, shows not everyone in Congress shares those sentiments.
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