Missile Defense Agency and Skeptics Clash Over SM-3
Missile defense skeptics Theodore A. Postol and George N. Lewis disagree with the Pentagon’s assessment of the effectiveness of the Standard Missile 3 (SM-3) interceptor.
The New York Times cited Postol’s and Lewis’s article that the SM-3′s success rate is lower than the Pentagon claims.
While Postol and Lewis applaud President Barack Obama for scrapping Bush-era plans to deploy missile defense shields to Poland and the Czech Republic, they’re critical of his missile defense plan to counter short- and medium-range missiles with the SM-3.
The authors and the Pentagon agree that the SM-3 interceptor must hit a missile’s attached warhead—and not merely the body of the missile—to destroy the weapon. They diverge on the success rate. The Pentagon maintains that SM-3′s interception rate is 84 percent, while Postol and Lewis say it’s only between 10 to 20 percent.
Missile Defense Agency spokesman Richard Lehner responded to the critics at DODLive.com:
“The allegation that target intercepts were reported as successful when they were not successful is wrong, and the data presented by the authors in the article is flawed, inaccurate and misleading.
“In each successful intercept test the target missile was destroyed by the Aegis BMD/SM-3 system due to the extreme kinetic energy resulting from the ‘hit to kill’ intercept. In each instance, the mission objective of ‘hit to kill’ of the unitary or separating target was achieved.
“Postol and Lewis apparently based their assessment on publicly released photos gleaned from a sensor mounted aboard the SM-3 and postulated what they perceived to be the interceptor’s impact point although they had no access to classified telemetry data showing the complete destruction of the target missiles, or subsequent sensor views of the intercept that were not publicly released so as not to reveal to potential adversaries exactly where the target missile was struck.
“Actually, the publicly released videos, which can be seen at www.mda.mil/news/gallery_aegis.html, and from which the still photos were extracted, show infrared images from both interceptor and airborne sensors demonstrating the complete destruction of the target missiles.”
Tags: SM-3, Standard Missile-3