US, Israel aborted anti-missile plan

[KashifAsrar]

US, Israel aborted anti-missile plan


William J Broad



Ten years ago, in a preview of the current Middle East crisis, Hezbollah guerrillas fired hundreds of Katyusha rockets into Israel. The attacks prompted President Bill Clinton and the Israeli prime minister, Shimon Peres, to agree to develop a futuristic laser meant to destroy the rockets in flight.
But last September, after spending more than $300 million, the United States and Israel quietly shelved the experimental weapon, mainly because of its bulkiness, high costs and poor anticipated results on the battlefield.
“Frankly, its performance was not great,” said Penrose C Albright, a former Pentagon official who helped initiate the project. “Under certain conditions you can make it work. But under salvo or cloudy conditions, you’ve got problems. In northern Israel, about 30 percent of the time, you’ve got a cloud deck.”
He and other military experts say the aborted project is a case study in the challenges of building antimissile weapons and the consequences of failure. Today, northern Israel remains defenseless against the Katyushas and other small rockets.
The project to build an anti-Katyusha shield, called the tactical high energy laser, was approved by the United States and Israel in April 1996. The next month, a California contractor, TRW, won an $89 million contract to design, build and test the laser in just 22 months. Aided by Israel and the United States Army, TRW worked hard at the White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico to make the novel idea come to life.
Skeptics on Capitol Hill faulted the effort from the start, calling it seductive but doomed because of the wouldbe weapon’s size, complexity and vulnerability to enemy attack. “It was a sitting duck,” recalled Subrata Ghoshroy, who studied the project in 1996 for the House International Relations Committee and now analyzes military issues at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The rupture of its fuel tanks, he said, would have produced clouds of corrosive acid, endangering defenders as well as nearby civilians.
Roughly the size of six city buses, the prototype weapon was made up of modules that held a command center, radar and a telescope for tracking targets, the chemical laser itself, tanks to feed it tons of fuel and a rotating mirror to bounce its beam toward speeding targets.
As often happens in the federal development of death rays, parts failed and costs soared. A March 1999 report by the General Accounting Office found that valves leaked, releasing toxic fluids, and that the laser’s test schedule was slipping.
“Technical problems and their associated program delays,” the Congressional investigators said, “demonstrate the complex nature of developing laser weapons.”
In June 2000, more than two years behind schedule, the laser flashed to life at White Sands and succeeded in destroying an armed Katyusha in flight. Soon, it shot down two dozen more rockets, though military officials say its testers never challenged its sensors and laser beam with more than two Katyushas at a time. Pentagon officials praised the effort as the first with the potential to turn flashing beams of concentrated light into a weapon suitable for antimissile defense. Contractors hailed the laser’s ability to defeat salvo launchings. But the system was ultimately judged as too costly, feeble and unwieldy for battlefield use.
Yiftah S Shapir, a military analyst at the Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies at Tel Aviv University, said one guerrilla with a rocket launcher could fire 40 Katyushas in less than a minute, easily overwhelming most any defense.
He added that shooting the laser just once would have cost roughly $3,000, and that “protecting the whole border of Israel would have required a few dozen of these systems,” their cost running to billions of dollars. David Siegel, a spokesman for the Israeli Embassy in Washington, said, “The program was terminated because of its prohibitive costs.” Some politicians have criticised the decision. Yuval Steinitz, a Likud member and former chairman of the Foreign and Defense Committee of the Israeli Parliament, called the move shortsighted. “It was a serious mistake for Israel not to give top priority to efforts to create rocket and short-missile defenses.’’.
Albright, the former Pentagon official, now an analyst at Civitas Group, a defense consulting and investment firm in Washington, said the decade-long effort to develop the laser weapon had an unhappy moral. NYT NEWS SERVICE